Now THIS is Really Why We Garden.

• Tons of gourds. These grew volunteer from the compost.
• Peppers: 4 1/2 lbs. A nice mix of  jalapeño, ancho and banana peppers.
• Tomatillos: 3 lbs. This was my first year planting tomatillos. I made a tasty batch salsa verde with them.
• Eggplant: 6 1/2 lbs.
• Beets: 30 lbs.
• Radishes: 18 lbs.
• Carrots: 80 lbs. Yes–80 lbs! Weighed after I trimmed off the green tops.
• Leeks: 21 leeks or 10 lbs.
• Swiss chard: 2 bushels. This gave me 18 qts of chard plus I got 4 qts of beet greens from the beets.
• zucchini: 6 lbs. The production really tapered off when the weather turned cold and rainy.
• 2 pie pumpkins
• 2 carving pumpkins
• 5 blue Hubbard squash
• 15 butternut squash

What is it all worth?

I checked grocery store prices to see what all this would have cost me if I’d had to buy it. Just the harvest I took in this week added up to $316.65.  (I’m not counting the gourds, since we don’t eat them and I gave most of them away. What’s in the picture is about 1/2 what we got. I would have made a bundle if I’d sold them for 50¢ each like the grocery store does.) Actually the value is much more than that, since some of the prices were sale prices. Also, my food is grown organically and processed soon after picking. If I were to pay organic prices, today’s harvest would cost $450-$500.

By my count, the canned and dried tomatoes products that I’ve put up during the summer would cost me about $170-$200 in the store. The herbs alone that I’ve dried would be $100 or more in the store (and of course, wouldn’t be nearly as fresh as mine are.) And then there’s the asparagus and raspberries earlier this year. This spring we brought in about 50 lbs of asparagus. Even at sale prices that’s $150 worth of our favorite of all vegetables. This was a good year for raspberries. I got 5 gallons off the bushes plus I had friends who picked a couple gallons for themselves. Raspberries are obscenely expensive in the store–about $3 a pint. What I picked would have cost over $100 at the grocery store.

So…my best estimate is that this year’s garden produced about 800 lbs of food, worth about $1000 or more. I’d say that’s a pretty good return on our time and money. Wouldn’t you agree?

The best part is, I know this food is chemical free and picked at the peak of flavor and nutrition and safely put up for us to use all year long.

Update

October 25: All the roots crops are packed into peat moss and stored along with the squash and pumpkins in the cold basement for winter storage. So yesterday I went out to start cleaning up the garden–bringing in trellises and tomato cages and getting everything ready to rototill. And I was met with a surprise: my tomatillos have survived several nights of frost. Not just survived, but continued to grow and ripen. So many of the fruits that I left on the vines because they were immature have ripened. I also forgot to bring in the perennial Swiss chard because it was growing in my perennial vegetable bed.

So now I can add some more to my year-end tally:

• about 3/4 bushel of Swiss chard, yielding 6 baggies of frozen greens.
• another 3 lbs of tomatillos
• another 3 lbs of carrots
• another pumpkin. It’s not ripe (which is how we missed it,) but it has started to turn orange, so I think it will ripen over the next few weeks.
• a bunch of lettuce

That’s another $26 that I can add to the total value of this year’s garden. And I’m still not done bringing in lettuce. I still have some broccoli and cabbage growing, but I’m not sure if they’ll mature before the hard frosts kill them off. Same with beets. I have about 1 1/2 rows of beets, but they are still immature.

We’ll see how much they grow before winter finally takes them.

We are just a few days away from November and are still eating fresh vegetables: tomatoes (picked green and continuing to ripen indoors), cucumbers and zucchini. And of course we have all our root crops and squash in the basement waiting for us. Right now the only thing I will have to buy at the store is potatoes and, in a couple months, onions. Bottom line: we brought in enough veggies this year to eat 4-5 servings of vegetables every day for the next eight months–till next year’s garden starts producing.