After thinking about the economics of gardening and what the impact would be on a household budget I decided to post a message on a gardening forum to ask if anyone else had done this type of analysis. Little did I know that I was opening a can of worms (pun intended). What I found out is that there are a lot of people that just didn’t get the point of trying to figure out the economics of a backyard organic garden and some that seemingly felt I was somehow getting ready to slaughter a sacred cow — the back yard garden.

The troubling thing to me were the responses such as:

• “You can’t weigh the economics of gardening”
• “Gardening is good for the soul and I can’t put a price tag on that”
• “I don’t think I’d want to know what I spend this year, but ten years from now I may look back and consider that it was certainly a good investment”
• “This being a drought year I don’t want to track my expenses”
• “Just because something doesn’t save much or any money, particularly at first, doesn’t mean it’s going to drive you to bankruptcy”
• “I can, freeze , dehydrate, eat, give away, sell…I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to value the pint and quart jars or frozen pints and quart baggies of veggies and fruit that we put up, and then we eat all winter long”

Sadly, I suspect that these responses could be symptomatic of a larger societal ill, which is that many American families shy away from analyzing the finances behind what they are doing in the household.

My hypothesis is  that my gardening hobby positively benefits the household finances. As I track the harvest and the expenses that went into it, I’m hoping that I can prove that hypothesis to be true.