This month I am posting in two parts on being frugal farmers, a significant facet of self-reliance. I am also posting on how we do it all, the schedule, on the website Medium under the heading of Independence Gardening. The following link takes you inside their paywall to my article, so you can read it free. https://medium.com/@frank.heiberger/independence-gardening-planning-for-bounty-f82587fa64ef?sk=6738b036e0709f51c137ae3cbeb2ec93
One question I expect popped into your mind is are we really saving money, when we’re spending so much on building and maintaining our micro-farm, and on the equipment and supplies to preserve the output. The short answer is, probably yes. If not already ahead after just three seasons, we are at least at breakeven.
We did not plant a garden in the first year because we took possession of our neglected house in July of 2016. I spent that summer and fall clearing the yard and getting the house ready to live in. Like the pioneer farmers of old clearing growing space, I was cutting down trees and ripping out brush, which had become entwined with the chain link fence. A prior owner wanted to mow on both sides of the fence and so installed it eighteen inches inside the property line, giving the illusion the lot was three feet thinner than it is. A pair of ailing elderberry vines grew through the fence on the south side of the house. On the north side, where I would locate the growing beds, weeds and junk trees choked it from back to front.
Move in condition of garden area 
Front view day we first viewed the house
To remove the southern portion, I had to cut the elderberries back severely, although they needed it. That seventy-foot section of fencing full of vines was quite heavy to drag the hundred and twenty feet to the back of the property, I can tell you. The scavenger wasn’t thrown off grabbing it for metal though. It was gone by morning.
The northern portion was a good hundred feet long. I managed to rip out the first forty feet before finding where the flora had too tight a grip on it. I’m not Conan, but I’m not a little guy either. I couldn’t get it to budge. I left it for winter to knock the plants down. On an incredibly mild February day (70+ degrees), I discovered the problem. The bottom six inches of fencing had sagged and become mired in the ground over the decades it had been there. It was several minutes of digging and brute force tugging at it before I got it loose. And maybe some swearing. And likely some cursing the people who neglected the property.
Of course, having to wait for winter meant I was cutting down the trees in the eighteen inches between our fence and the neighbor’s privacy fence, all the while watching which way they fell or swung because they were into the wires for our electrical power and cable. The old phone wires are there too, but Ma Bell is a legacy company for us. I have not had a hard wired phone for two decades.
By the start of the 2017 season, I had removed most of the weeds, the running-amok day lilies, and the trees, allowing us to start the garden with six ground level beds and ten feet of very short vertical space. I ordered some garden mix from a local garden supply company to fill in the few inches of soil stuck to the sod I’d removed and relocated to the bare areas I’d created in ripping out the weeds. With the eight-by-four beds now full of rich, black soil, my friends were joking they looked like alien graves.
Filled beds or alien graves??? 
First season vertical garden 
First season, July from the west 
First season, July, from the east 
Season one herb bed
That left the fence posts. Having them pulled by a service would mean spending a lot of money. So we left them for another day. Then Beth saw a hack online. For $40, we bought a two-ton car jack. You dig away any debris around the cement holding the post, then position the jack on a board, which is on a pair of cinder blocks, so that it reaches the pole but does not hinder pulling the concrete out, and soak it for several minutes with your garden hose. Put a big pipe wrench on the jack to grip the post and crank the jack. Lo and behold, the first post popped right out and I lugged it to the back, where a scavenger took it concrete and all.
That was the front post on the south side where the elderberries had been. We left the others to use as the posts for a Concord grape arbor. The elderberries are being relocated to garden north (see last month’s postings for what I mean by garden north). The posts on the north side of the house would be a different story.
We understand the house was built in the 1950s by a doctor, who had a few, shall we say, unique ideas about how a house should be built. Perhaps this is why the basement bathroom was not done correctly and the fence was inside the property line. From my years with a Chicago law firm, I became aware of a few quirky physicians in this area. Malpractice insurance rates here drove their practice up into Wisconsin. (Seriously, it wasn’t them. It was the insurance.) Anyway, it means I have an idea of who might have built this house.
So it was only half a surprise when the fence posts on the north side gave us trouble. We pulled one, but only with the aid of our neighbor’s strapping, young son. The post had been secured with at least an entire ninety-pound bag of concrete plus a few large stones thrown in for good measure. We tried to pull two more with no success. They are too heavy for the hack. I will either have to rent a proper post puller in the spring or cut them off below ground level (which is probably what I will do).
The scavenger didn’t want that post until a neighbor took a power tool to the cement and broke it off for me in exchange for some of the sidewalk chunks I had left from replacing a sinking portion of the sidewalk and installing a walkway to the back. (Jackhammers are fun tools, btw.)
The back four of these posts became the base for our vertical garden back in 2017. I bought large electrical conduit, several connectors, and basic green-poly-coated fencing. I used a string to get a rough level line across conduit sticking upright from inside the fence posts to cut them off evenly with my pipe cutter. (I own most of these tools already.) I used the connectors as well as bolts to attach horizontal conduit bars across the leveled uprights. Locktite metal adhesive and JB Weld marine weld hold them together. The metal fencing hangs vertically from the cross pieces to create a sturdy, wire net for the plants. I painted the conduit and posts with two thick coats of Hunter green Rustoleum to match the fencing. It’s not an eyesore.
It cost under $100 and will last for many seasons to come.
We installed the raised garden beds over the course of three years to spread out the expense. We have eleven of them, eight-foot by four-foot and eight inches high. The vertical bed is fifteen inches wide and thirty feet long. Clearly, absent having dug a hole for a pool, we needed to bring in soil to fill them. I’ll do the math for you; each bed contains a full yard of garden soil (27 cubic feet) twenty-four cubic feet in the bed plus filling in the soil lost in removing the sod. The vertical bed required a little over a yard. We needed twelve yards of soil. I bought three the first year and five in each of the subsequent years, and this fall I added three yards of compost. Because bulk material settles over time despite loosening it in the spring while digging in the cover crop.
If you haven’t purchased materials in bulk, you need to. The cost is a fraction of the dozens of bags you would need to have delivered from the big box stores. Incidentally, the big box stores also deliver bulk materials, though for a higher price than you’ll find going local. I searched online and found a family run supply house a few miles away. Their garden mix (2 parts top soil to 1 part compost) was a little more than half the cost of what a big box store wanted just for unenriched top soil. The delivery price was half, and subsequent deliveries in the same season are discounted.
Over three years, I paid $111 the first year, $185 in the second year, and this year paid $279 total for soil delivered in April and compost in December. Altogether, we spent $575 on good quality soil and supported a local business. I also had about three yards from digging a trench for a walkway to the back, which has gone into new beds for strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and asparagus. Plus a big pile at the very back for potatoes.
Holy crap! You shout. $575 just for dirt!
Yes, and it was a necessary expense to become self-sufficient in organically grown vegetables. Could we have reduced the cost by not creating raised beds? Of course, we could have, though raised beds require less weeding, drain better, warm up sooner in the spring, and make maintaining the lawn between them much easier. We get better results for less effort, which is a huge benefit when you’re trying to produce as much as we do.
You may have noted I said organically grown, not organic. There is a difference. To be certified as organic, produce must be grown in pure, naturally enriched soil with pure, organic methods; no manufactured fertilizers or pesticides. There is some wiggle room on allowable contaminants, but naturally enriched soil means having no artificial fertilizers or pesticides tainting the soil, meaning the compost used needs to be made from clean, organically grown plants. Because I don’t know all of what went into the compost portion of my garden mix, I could not get my produce certified as organic. (Which is a big, expensive deal for commercial growers.) In a few years, when I’ve worked in enough of my own, properly created compost, I will claim to be growing organic produce. For the moment, I am organically growing produce.
To be thorough in costing, the wood for each bed was about $30, including the vertical bed, for about $360. So at this point we have spent, $100 (vertical growing frame) + $575 + $360 + additional wood for the berry beds = approximately $1100 in materials over the course of three years. That comes to roughly $367 per year to date.
What does that mean in terms of savings in reality? Have we saved any money? Per the USDA, the average American household spent about $766.50 on fruits and vegetables. Of course, we don’t yet grow many fruits. Packer, a produce industry publication computed average spending for fresh vegetables only at $259 in 2015. Quora put it at $234 in 2012. In 2018, per ValuePenquin, the figure was $236. But wait, there’s more. We also can and freeze our produce to last an entire year. Americans spend an additional $130 on processed vegetables per year according to Quora. Together, the average cost per household is $366.
That’s break-even on some very low sounding numbers. Next year the cost per year for materials will drop to $275 per year. In 2020, we will be saving money for certain based on these figures. However, these are not the figures for organic vegetables, nor are they specific to us.
So what about us specifically; our two person household? How much would we be spending on organic produce for an entire year? Taking average prices from the USDA National Retail Report – Specialty Crops of December 27, 2019, our desired outcomes for about two-thirds of what we grow (the rest wasn’t listed) comes to approximately $2,110 per year. Naturally, this estimate is inflated because these are year-end (out-of-season) prices. But if in-season prices are just 25% of these, the figure is still over $500.
I will recalculate these numbers over the course of 2020, using the lowest in-season prices, to figure how much we save in 2020 for all 77 items we currently have planned (including herbs).
Wait a minute, you say, what about the cost of seeds? My response is (or soon will be) what cost? We produce our own seeds. There are a few varieties, new additions, which I need to purchase. The cost of these is minimal, generally under $20 a year. Eventually, there will be no seed cost in some years. Seed starting trays and medium likewise run less than $20 a year.
Yeah, but you spent a lot on canning supplies and two canners, I hear you say. Our pressure canner cost about $75 and will last for many seasons. Our water bath canner is on its second year and was about $30. Mason jars are not one-and-done items. The jars and bands last for seasons. The lids cannot be reused, because you will never get another safe seal out of them. The cost is minimal though. For the sake of argument, assuming a ridiculously short ten-year useful life out of everything, the cost is perhaps $25 per year. Realistically, the cost per year should fall below $10 per year over the life of the jars, etc.
This year we are putting in a dedicated seed garden rather than leaving one or two plants after harvesting all of the others. This will allow us to begin generating seed for biennials such as carrots and beets. I expect the additional cost to be $90 to $100 for the wood and two yards of garden mix. Adding this to the twelve other beds will bring the cost of building the beds to $1200.
So how much have we spent?
Good question. We already had some of the materials and I’ve added more, such as tomato cages for $0.37 each on super closeout. We bought a wheelbarrow for $35 to haul the materials to the beds. We’ve purchased some low fencing and stakes and a few other items without keeping track of the expense. Of course, we bought seeds to get started, usually on preseason sale at a big-box store for 30% to 40% off, plus at closeout sales. In my experience, these seeds are no less productive than the pricey seeds from full-color catalogs. For specialty seeds, such as our dragon beans and carrots, we have gone to the catalog and online shops to start. I can only give you a best guess, which I believe is $1500 total for everything, including canning supplies and equipment.
So at this point, we’ve spent about $500 per year (including the seed garden to come), which is equivalent to my above estimate of how much we would have spent buying enough fresh, organic produce for an entire year. Next year, it becomes pure savings.
The Little Farm in Town 