A recent issue of Birds& Blooms magazine stated that a survey conducted by a major seed company said that you could grow $2500 worth of vegetables from $100 spent on seeds and fertilizer. Another item in the same issue asserted that the author of a book on gardening said that he estimated that he saved $100 a week for the eight months out of the year that he grows vegetables. When I read this I was reminded of the following lines from an old song by The Who:
It all looks fine to the naked eye
But it don't really happen that way at all.
Now I'm not going to tell you that I've conducted any studies that refute these assertions but, come on! Who buys $100 a week worth of vegetables and herbs? I bet my wife and I don't spend half that in the months when we don't have something ready to harvest in the garden, even when we buy things at farmers' markets, which are usually more expensive than the supermarket. To save $100 a week by vegetable gardening you would have to regularly buy enough vegetables in a week to cost $100 plus the money you spent for water, garden soil and amendments, seeds, plants, garden implements, insect control and everything else that you need to harvest that $100 worth of vegetables per week. As far as the other assertion, getting $2500 worth of vegetables out of a $100 investment in materials, I have to believe that would be under absolutely ideal conditions and probably in a greenhouse.
I've been growing my own vegetables for over forty years in two very different climate and soil zones and I sure haven't had results like those claimed in Birds and Blooms, and as a master gardener who deals with novices and other master gardeners on a regular basis, I don't know of anyone else who has had results like that. There are a tremendous number of variables at play when it comes to gardening and a lot of hidden costs. Every area of the country has different soil and climate conditions. The number of hours of sunlight available per day has a tremendous effect, especially on vegetables. The weather can vary tremendously from year to year and that affects things like the type and number of insects that attack the garden as well as the chances of developing a virus or other plant disease. The choice of varieties also comes into play. So the bottom line is that, if you start out as a novice gardener and expect to have the kind of results that I read about in Birds & Blooms, I think you are likely to be disappointed, and that's a shame.
I think when people start out with expectations of having great success at something and their result don't match their expectations, a lot of folks are just going to give up and not keep trying. I know that happens with novice gardeners because I have talked to some who have had that experience. That's the problem I have with articles and factoids like the two I mentioned above. I think it would be a lot better to start out with more reasonable expectations and smaller goals. So I tell novice gardeners to just start out with a few tomato plants of a variety that's known to do well in their area, and then build on the success they have with those. That's not as impressive as jumping right in and supplying all of your family's veggie needs from your garden right out of the gate, but it is much more likely to result in some degree of success.
I see a lot of parallels between gardening and retirement. Before my wife and I retired we looked at the lives of those folks we knew who were retired and thought that they really had it made. We (mostly I, I guess) also read a lot of articles and books about retirement. Some of them were kind of gloom and doom articles that counseled the soon-to-be-retired to save wads of money before taking the plunge. We didn't want to hear that so we tended to believe the books and articles that painted a rosy picture of retirees living large, spending their days playing golf, traveling and puttering around on their retirement hobby farms.
Then we retired and ran headlong into reality. It turned out that our expectations were unreasonable and that made us kind of disappointed with retirement in the beginning. We tried to do too much and made some financial decisions that put us into a one step forward, two steps back position for awhile. As a result I had to go back to work several times in the early retirement years. We didn't allow ourselves to give up on retirement though. We tried to learn from our mistakes and keep our plans as flexible as we could. We made the decision to cut back on things that didn't matter a lot to us and to spend our fixed income on the things that do matter to us. We adjusted our expectations to something more reasonable than those we had had when we planned our retirement. Just as in gardening, things improved over time and now we are enjoying retirement and, while we aren't living large, we are content with our life these days.
It seems to me that having reasonable expectations is one of the major keys to anything in life. It's great to have ambitious goals as long as you don't expect to achieve them overnight. If you do a little research and understand the work required to achieve your goals and then set a reasonable schedule to achieve them, you are much more likely to follow through to the end, especially if you assume up front that you are going to run into things you hadn't anticipated. Expect your results to be less than those claimed in any book or article you read, at least in the beginning of your endeavor, and stay flexible, and you'll get to where you want to be eventually.
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