Four egg cartons full of dirt are sitting on our kitchen windowsill right now, and every morning Tyler checks them before he's had his coffee. I planted the seeds last Sunday. A couple of the basil seeds came up yesterday, and he reported it to me like breaking news.
This is year two of our porch garden and the first year I'm starting from seed. Last summer was the test run, and before this year's version takes over the porch, I wanted to write down what the test cost and what it actually grew.
Why buckets
Our side of the duplex has a small fenced backyard, and it would be easy to dig up a corner of it for a garden. But Mr. Dale, our landlord, likes his grass. When I asked him about it last April, he thought for a while and said, "I'd rather you didn't." Coming from Mr. Dale, that's a no. Moose probably would have dug it up by June anyway.
What we do have is a little concrete front porch, about eight feet by six, that gets sun from late morning until about 5. That's enough for tomatoes. So we went with five-gallon buckets. They sit on the porch, they don't bother anybody's grass, and they'll come with us when we move.
What we planted, and what it cost
We started small, with three buckets in early May: one cherry tomato, one regular slicing tomato, and one bucket split between basil and parsley. Tyler drilled five holes in the bottom of each for drainage. The bakery at the Walmart in town gave us two empty frosting buckets for free when I asked. They took some scrubbing. The third we bought new.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Three buckets (two free, one new) | $4.48 |
| Potting mix, two big bags | $17.94 |
| Two tomato plants | $6.94 |
| Basil and parsley plants | $6.44 |
| Two tomato cages | $5.94 |
| Tomato fertilizer | $5.48 |
| Total | $47.22 |
Most of that was the potting mix. You can't fill a bucket with dirt from the yard, even if the landlord would let you dig it, because it packs down like brick.
What it produced by July
I kept a tally on the fridge calendar and priced everything at what the same thing cost at the Walmart in town that week.
The cherry tomato started producing the last week of June. By July 31, we'd picked about six pints. At $2.48 a pint, that's $14.88. The slicer was slower. By the end of July it had given us nine tomatoes, a little under five pounds, worth about $9 at $1.88 a pound.
The herbs were the surprise. We cut basil all summer for pasta, sandwiches and one batch of pesto, and parsley for everything else. A little clamshell of fresh basil is $2.48, and I figure we used about ten of those by the end of July, plus four bunches' worth of parsley at 98 cents. That's $28.72, with the honest note that we'd never have bought that much basil. We used it because it was there.
Add it up and the porch grew $52.60 of food by the end of July, against $47.22 spent. We broke even in July, barely. Everything after that was extra. The plants kept going into October, and I quit keeping track at around $40 more.
This year's plan
The buckets, cages and about half the potting mix carry over, so year one was the expensive year. This spring we're going up to seven buckets: three tomatoes, one bell pepper and three of herbs, with chives and dill added. The bakery gave us four more frosting buckets. Two more bags of potting mix were $18.94, seed packets were $5.42 for five kinds, and one more cage was $3.27. That's $27.63 so far.
Starting from seed is the big change. A tomato plant from the garden center at Walmart was $3.47 last year. A packet of tomato seeds is under $2 and holds more seeds than our porch could ever fit.
The seedlings go out on the porch around the first of May, after the last frost, which is about seven weeks from now. Until then, the windowsill belongs to them, and Tyler can keep checking.
