Michael Nolan is an author, food advocate and public speaker.
From the garden to the sewing machine, kitchen to the wood shop, Michael is taking Thoreau's words to heart as he strives every day to "live deep".
Inspired by a long running desire of mine to know exactly how much food I can produce in a season and how much that food is worth in the marketplace, I started a spreadsheet at the beginning of Spring 2011. I wanted to have tangible evidence to show to the scientific and figures-minded that gardening is worth the effort from a financial standpoint even if the health benefits weren’t present.
The purpose of the spreadsheet is to keep up with what I harvest, how much I harvest and how much it is worth. For the sake of accuracy, John & I purchased a basic digital kitchen scale to weigh all produce. For values, we use local prices for comparable items taking into consideration our all-natural, local, organic and pesticide-free growing methods. While prices will vary at different times of the year, we use prices found at the time that the item(s) are picked.
So as not to bury myself in research for this ongoing exercise, we are lumping all herbs into a single category for weighing and valuing purposes, with the average cost for fresh herbs locally being $.99/quarter ounce. All other items are valued at the time of the first picking.
Initial Results
Since the beginning of the season we have harvested just a few items including purple top turnip greens, Georgia collards, straight neck yellow squash and a variety of fresh herbs. As of today the tally is just over $27 worth of fresh produce that our homestead gardens have yielded and it is still very early in the season. Expect that number to jump tremendously in the next few weeks as our fresh heirloom tomato crop begins to produce pound after pound of tasty, fresh and expensive heirlooms, as well as cucumbers, squash, beans, okra, peppers and more.
Excited to hear about your project. We need more healthy, local sustainable food advocates. There are too often articles about “The $50 tomato” or something like that. I teach/demonstrate small-scale,sustainable gardening. People often ask me if gardening saves money as well. We have some of the same goals!
Look forward to your progress updates..