Finances of gardening

Gardening, like most hobbies, can be very costly, or very thrifty, depending on how you go about it. At its core, gardening is cheap, even profitable. Technically, all you need to make an effort at gardening is seeds, sun and soil. The sun and soil come free, and seeds are pretty easy to come by.

This aspect of gardening (that, and the fact that we have an American tradition of supplementing our food supply from our backyard) has made it an immensely popular past time. But any widespread activity that is essentially free is an opportunity for the business-minded to make a quick buck.

Enter a whole raft of products, from the useful to the useless, from the cheap to the exorbitant. Chemical forms of pest control are one famous example-- post WWII, the factories producing chemicals for warfare needed somewhere else to sell their poison, and they found that somewhere else in the American farm.

But there are also the composting systems,the tilling systems, the irrigation systems, the fertilizing systems, the weeding systems, not to mention an increasingly expensive "new and improved" version of the plants themselves.

I was a little concerned when I started the garden that I would be forced into buying lot of stuff. I went into my gardening effort with a mini-greenhouse, some herb seeds, and two bags of potting soil, which Kim bought for me on Christmas 2006.

My first purchase was a $4 shovel from Walmart. This was my sole gardening tool until late June of this year.

I did blow quite a bit of money on seeds and seedlings at local outlets. I would estimate a total of maybe $30 went to these items over the course of 2 months.

In June, Kim set aside a little gardening money for me, and I went big-- an extra hose, so I didn't have to bucket brigade my watering efforts, a multi-functional hose spray attachment, a spade, a handheld tiller, and a small handheld weeder. I also got my first non-compost plant food, an organic mineral mix. This set me back another $35 or so.

Just yesterday, Kim and I went yard saling, and an aggressive saleswoman pushed a box of gardening supplies on me for four dollars. I'm glad she did, as I now have some Perlite, peat moss, a soil testing kit, a very nice handheld weeder, a plant feeder from Miracle Gro (the kind that allows you to mix your dry additives with water from the hose), and a bunch of pots of various sizes.

This illustrates the fact that, if you bide your time and keep your eyes open, you can scoop up supplies for next to nothing.

So, my total cost is $73, one year in. I'm not sure whether I'll get $73 worth of food out of the ground this year, but I've already gotten enough to bring that number down somewhat. And of course, if you factor in all of the other benefits I've gotten from gardening, it's been a slam-dunk profit maker.

If you're the kind of person who likes to have all the latest toys and gadgets, you can make gardening as expensive an activity as you'd like. But if you're looking for a rewarding, healthy, and enjoyable way to spend your free time, there's no cheaper alternative than sticking some seeds in the ground and seeing what happens.