The 2016 Garden Wrap Up: How Much a Garden Didn't Grow

2016 Cumulative Totals

Expenditures: (-$232.88)

Total ounces of harvest: 1280.5
Total pound of harvest: 80.03125
Total value of harvest: $310.11

Total net saved: $77.23

Ladies and gentlemen, that stunk.

I mean, I had a better garden year the first year we moved into this house, and the garden was a 6' x 8' patch the previous owners dug up, and I still got something like 8 quarts of tomato juice and a few quarts of pickles out of it.

This year, I got bupkis.  And I worked my tail off.  I mean, if I hadn't put the gym membership on hold while I gardened for six months, this wouldn't have been worth it financially at all.  (If you are keeping score, I did cut $150 off my total yearly gym fees this way.)

It was all that stupid oak tree.  I think.  I hope.  My theory is that my garden just didn't get enough sun, so I'd get healthy plants that grew until the tree started to shade the garden, and then they just sort of stopped.  So, that tree is gone, and we'll see what happens.

I'm also going to go back to using a rototiller this year and dressing the garden with manure.  My heart breaks at not being able to make a go of my modified lasagna gardening with the eco-friendly broadfork, but I think maybe my soil is too full of clay to let that happen.

What did work well this year?  Well, I brought in $32.12 worth of greens, mostly from a batch that I planted last February and I'm still getting harvests from.  Greens (kale, in this case), are very shade-friendly, so you do the math on that one.

I also harvested over 5 pounds of blueberries for a retail value of $30.78, which I think is pretty good for three bushes.  The blueberries also sit in the one remaining sunny spot (pre-tree removal) in the yard.

Cucumbers and zucchini were relatively good, but I didn't really get to make pickles.  That said, there was a very solid 6-8 weeks there where I ate a plate of cucumbers for lunch every day and had something zucchini-related for dinner most nights.

So next year is the big test.  I may be exaggerating a big, but with the new, expanded, sunnier garden, I swear I'm going to plant 75 tomato plants.  I told Mr. FC&G that we were going to spend the month of August buying nothing at the grocery but pop, cookies, and canning lids; everything else is coming out of the garden, and I'm going to can around the clock.  We are going to have one of those garden years where I finally get to make those Facebook posts in May that say, "Oh, the new tomatoes are in, so we'd better hurry up and finish eating the canning from last year."

Hey, if the Cubs could win the series, I could hit one out of the park too.