Can you save with a veggie garden?

By MP Dunleavey

Suddenly it's hip to be hoeing and sowing whatever patch of dirt you can lay your hands on. Even yours truly is starting a vegetable garden this year.

But this spring, as I pulled weeds from the hard, cold Catskill earth -- and contemplated the long road from seeds to sautéed spinach -- I began to wonder why.

Gardening for love, yes. Gardening because you're the first lady and it makes a public point, OK. Gardening to save money?

Let's examine what you can really expect to gain, besides endless zucchini, from the investment of time, money and energy it takes to sustain even a small kitchen garden.

A 'growing' trend

Either the Great Recession is making people frantic or there really is something to this gardening thing, because people are digging it.

As the growing season got under way this year, seed sales went through the roof. The giant Burpee seed company reported a 30% increase in sales of vegetable and fruit seeds from the first quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009.

Fedco Seeds, a midsize cooperatively run company in Waterville, Maine, saw a 25% increase in orders this year "on top of a 20% increase last year," says Joanna Linden, a 20-year veteran of the company.

• Talk back: Are you planning a garden?

According to a survey by the National Gardeners Association, 2009 likely will see a nearly 20% jump in the number of home gardens.

Even on the Women in Red message board -- which is usually preoccupied with debt and spending issues -- several discussions about gardening have sprouted.

What's going on?

Roger Doiron, the founder of Kitchen Gardeners International in Portland, Maine, a network of 17,000 smaller gardeners, believes that "several planets have aligned" to create this trend. Motivations to garden include:

• Desires to go green. There is a growing movement to "eat locally," as people realize that when food travels 1,500 miles from field to table, it takes a toll on the environment. (And those rock-hard tomatoes are nasty.)

• Health worries. "When people talk about preventing heart disease, diabetes and cancer, the message is always 'eat better,'" Linden says. "People are waking up: You have to eat real food."

• Cost concerns. Food prices have dropped since the spikes of 2008, but for most of us, the struggle to control the family grocery bill continues.

"Home gardening can be part of the solution," says Doiron, who also founded Eat the View, an online campaign that had pushed for the White House garden and is now lobbying for more kitchen gardens in high places.

"Now middle-income families are realizing they can provide this wonderful selection of fresh produce on a working family's budget," he says.

Slugs ate my first garden

That sounds enticing, but I'm trying hard to save right now, so I want to make sure my spending is worth it.

Last year's pilot garden was far from a blue-ribbon success:

• The cherry tomatoes and arugula grew well.

• The radishes, green beans and bell peppers didn't.

• The herbs were so-so.

• The kale grew like gangbusters -- and the slugs got most of it.

I got the seeds and the three tomato plants from a generous friend, so I didn't spend much there.

Topsoil, however, was expensive. I spent about $70 on soil, rocks for drainage and some fancy, organic, fish-based fertilizer.

Then again, after everything was planted, it didn't consume as much time as I'd thought. The crops were easy, there weren't many weeds, and our garden was tiny, about 10 feet by 6 feet.

Bottom line: Our "crop yield" was probably worth $15 to $20, a loss of about $50. The only gain was the experience and some fun (if you like dirt, gardening is a real pleasure).

So why create another, bigger garden this year? First of all, let's admit that it's a fad, and I can be a fashion follower.

But also, I was secretly surprised that everything I planted last year didn't just dry up and blow away. We ate actual fruits of our labor (what the slugs left for us). I wondered whether I could get a bigger, healthier crop this year and at least break even.

Reports from real gardeners and Women in Red members make it clear that the startup costs and the learning curve tend to be your biggest investments. But with each season, you can become more efficient and even save money.

Continued: Now, that's a yield

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