$150
Push lawn mower for lawn paths
$80
Bag for lawn mower (never used)
$40
Gas-powered lawn mower for garden
$215
Garden books
$100
Garden-magazine subscriptions
$150
Peat moss and other miscellaneous soil additives
$125
Removal of two trees
$600
Not counting thousands of dollars of my labor thrown in for free, or yearly expenditures on seeds and seedlings, I ended up with the shocking figure of $16,565. When Anne and I started the project, we put what seemed to be a generous limit of $10,000 on it, and true to the Rule of Thirty-two (any home project will take three times as long to complete and cost twice as much as planned), we ended up overbudget by 65 percent.
Of course, in doing my tomato valuation, I couldn’t charge this all off against one year of gardening (only filthy-rich corporations with good tax lawyers could get away with that). Instead I amortized the cost of the garden over twenty years, by which time I would either be gardening somewhere else, not gardening, or rebuilding this garden. So to get the annual portion of the construction costs, I divided $16,565 by twenty years, yielding $828 per year. To this I added any additional expenses I incurred this year. As I have some expenses every year, I did not amortize them but charged them fully against this year’s “profits”:
New electric fence charger and supplies
$300
Mulch
$150
Adjustable garden rake
$15
Seeds and seed potatoes
$120
Hedge trimmer
$80
Replacement gravel
$20
Green-manure seed mix
$50
TOTAL
$735
Holy smokes! I spent another $735 on the garden this year without even realizing it! These costs plus this year’s share of the one-time construction costs totaled $1,563. Now, since I was interested in the price of my tomato, I did not count everything that came out of the garden equally. I’m not even sure how one would do that. Instead I subtracted from the $1,563 the true market value (using the higher local farm-stand prices, not supermarket prices) of all the produce I harvested excluding Brandywine tomatoes. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that this year was a terrible year for gardening (for me, anyway). We had record-setting high temperatures in July and August that decimated the lettuces and tomatoes, and I hadn’t grown corn this year, further reducing my total yield. I don’t usually weigh my vegetables (except potatoes, for some reason) as I bring them in from the garden, but judging by how many meals we got from our crops and how many jars of pickles we made, I was pretty well able to reconstruct the amount. But to be safe, I erred on the high side. Here is our yield:
Potatoes
$45
Lettuce and mesclun
$48
Squash
$15
Cucumbers
$15
Basil and other herbs
$35
Sweet peppers
$3
Sugar snap peas
$30
Green beans
$25
Cherry tomatoes
$20
Leeks
$48
Dona tomatoes
$10
Strawberries
$50
Representing $344 worth of produce, excluding Brandywine tomatoes. Now, $344 isn’t exactly peanuts, but “gentleman farmer”? “Self-sufficient?” Who am I kidding? Three hundred forty-four dollars’ worth seems like barely enough food to nourish the groundhog, let alone a family of four. In my meager defense, let me point out again that it was a very poor year (although, mysteriously, the local farm reported a great season); in other years we might be higher, but for this year we were stuck with $344. The other thing this reveals is that food is cheap. I actually grew a fair amount of food; it just wasn’t worth much. For example, my local green market is selling a ten-pound bag of white potatoes for $1.50—just 15¢ a pound. A person could probably eat well from that buck-fifty bag for several days. (For this exercise I valued my Yukon Gold and fingerling potatoes at $1.50 per pound.) Every time I’m done picking sugar snap peas or rise from my stoop, aching, from picking green beans, I marvel that I can buy this stuff in the green market for a dollar a pound. How can anyone possibly grow green beans for a dollar a pound? I can’t even pick them for a dollar a pound, it takes so long. It’s a miracle that any farmer stays in business, but God bless them.
Back to my expensive tomatoes. Three hundred forty-four dollars (the value of this year’s yield) subtracted from $1,563 left a cost of $1,219 for my stash of Brandywines. How many did I get this year? At the risk of making too many excuses, I’ll point out that the heat just shut down my tomato plants in August. It is a known fact that heat before blossom set will shut down tomatoes, but I’d always thought that August heat was good for tomatoes. When I asked Doris at the farm if their tomato crop was as meager as mine, she looked at me as if I were crazy. They’d had a great tomato year, but they grow Big Boy and Roma tomatoes; perhaps these varieties withstand heat better than my purebred heirlooms. Or maybe the fact that they mulch heavily kept the roots cooler and the plants more productive. Or maybe they’re just better farmers than I am. After all, they’ve been doing it for generations.
I know, I’m stalling. So just how many tomatoes did I get this year? Exactly nineteen. The groundhog got almost as many. They were large and delicious, these nineteen Brandywines, and that number does represent a tomato a day for almost three weeks. Still, it doesn’t seem like much. It isn’t much.
Time, finally, to do the depressing math: $1,219 divided by nineteen equals—gulp—$64 per tomato.
Holy cow.
This was sobering. I never realized how much growing my own food was costing me. I went to Anne with the numbers.
“You won’t believe this,” I said. “Remember that joke I made about the expensive tomato?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, distracted, as she leafed through the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Twenty dollars turned out to be a tad low. That was a sixty-four-dollar tomato.”
“Maybe that one you stuffed with crabmeat? That was good,” she said, not looking up.
“You don’t understand. I’m not talking dinner-menu prices. Every Brandywine tomato we picked this year literally cost us sixty-four dollars to grow.”
Now I had her attention. She put the journal down and stared at me for what seemed an eternity.
“And just how do you know that?” she finally inquired hesitantly, not sure she really wanted to know.
I laid the spreadsheet in front of her. She studied it for a minute.
“We spent all this on the garden?”
“Maybe more. I’m sure I forgot some things.”
She pushed away the paper as if it were contagious and flipped a page in her journal. “Well, we see this,” she said, borrowing a phrase she often uses with patients. Meaning, in this case, that she was over the shock and ready to move on. And inviting me to join her. Truthfully I wished I hadn’t done this exercise in accounting. Some things you’re better off not knowing. I’ve said that the garden had become a family member, but at the moment it felt, not like the beloved grandmother you care for, but like the embarrassing uncle you avoid at weddings, loud and extravagant beyond his means, always in trouble, always in debt.
We see this. I, too, wanted to move on, but there was still one unspoken question troubling me, one that spanned months, years, ages. A question I both had to ask and was afraid to ask.
“Was it worth it?”
Anne deliberately closed the journal, placed both hands on the cover, and looked up at me.
And smiled.
Childbirth. Da Vinci. Potatoes.
I want death to
find me planting my cabbages.
—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592)
I am sitting here, in late September, at my kitchen table, cradling a ripe, heart-size Brandywine tomato in the palm of my hand. A scarce few minutes ago, it was on the vine, a living, growing organism. Now it has brought the warmth of the September noon sun into my chilly kitchen, warming my hand, almost pulsing with life. In a few moments it will be lunch, but I am in no rush to slice into this lovely fruit, the last tomato of the season.
I will miss the fresh tomatoes, the crickety sounds of summer, the lobster rolls eaten on the porch. But I am also relieved that summer is over. Gardening is often thought to be a genteel, relaxing hobby, an activity for the women of the garden club as they dally about in their straw hats, fitting lotioned hands into goatskin gloves, sipping tea under the shade of a magnolia. I am not a member of that club. For me, gardening more often resembles blood sport, a never-ending battle with the weather, insects, deer, groundhogs, weeds, edgy gardeners, incompetent contractors, and the limitations of my own middle-aged body. And it turns out to be a very expensive sport.
So why do I persist? I can offer a few reasons.
First and foremost, I do it for the food. Some years ago, for better or worse, I crossed the line from gardener to family farmer, but truthfully, as long as I’ve gardened I’ve been motivated by the food. There really is nothing like a fresh August tomato. The leeks I grow taste more or less like the leeks from the supermarket; ditto the peppers and rhubarb. But a homegrown, vine-ripened tomato is probably more different from the store version than any other crop you can grow. I start salivating in June for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich made from a freshly picked, sun-warmed tomato. (Unfortunately I usually have to wait until August.) The food from your garden really does taste better. If you have a garden, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t have a garden, find a few square feet and grow even just one or two tomato plants. And make it worthwhile: Grow an heirloom variety such as Brandywine or Cherokee. If you’re going to grow Supersonic or Big Boy, you might as well buy them from the farm stand. If you have more room, grow leafy lettuces and greens, including some arugula. And sugar snap peas. You may be astounded by what you taste.
But of course, I don’t garden only for the food. If that were the case, I’d have done away with beds and paths a long time ago and switched to a small tractor in a field. And now, one can buy baby spinach and fresh mesclun mix at the grocery store year-round. Our green market even sells fingerling potatoes. There’s clearly another imperative or two at work here.
Gardening is, by its very nature, an expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. No matter how bad this year was, there’s always next year. Experience doesn’t count. Just because the carrots have been knobby, misshapen, and somewhat bitter four years in a row doesn’t mean they’re going to be knobby and misshapen next year. No, sir, next year you will (1) work in twice as much compost and peat; (2) plant a new, improved variety; or (3) get lucky. Or even better, you can forget carrots and plant something exotic like blue cauliflower in that bed. Because every year starts with a clean slate, and the phenomenon I call garden amnesia ensures eternal hope. Even the cursed purslane weeds, being annuals, will die off during the winter, so as long as I didn’t let any purslane flowers form and go to seed, I will at least be starting off with purslane-free beds. And next year I’ll cultivate every week, instead of letting it go for two months. A mere ten minutes a week is all it will take, and …
Blessedly, the voice of experience, the voice that should be crying, “Oh, puh-lease!” never pipes up in the garden. And I, for one, hope it never does. It is not wanted there.
I also find myself fascinated with the cycle of birth and resurrection in the garden. It surely is no accident that the Old Testament places the origins of humanity in a garden. Who can deny that his or her heart quickens at the sight of the first seedlings of spring peeking out from under the soil? First, there is the sense of wonder (and relief) each time a seed sprouts, a feeling of, “Wow, I did it! I guess I didn’t plant the seeds too deep/shallow/close together/far apart/dry/wet/early/late.” Then, to watch the miraculous: one tiny seed becoming, with the addition of nothing but dirt and water, a twenty-foot cucumber vine, bushels of tomatoes, thirty-pound watermelons; seeds no larger than a speck of dust—a speck of dust!—turning into tender, bright green lettuces. It doesn’t matter how many years of biology I’ve studied or how many genomes scientists decode: to me it’s still a miracle—incomprehensible, fantastic, and immensely rewarding. A human sperm and egg becoming a fifty-year-old gardener, now that I can somehow understand. But how these seeds become tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce, it’s all too fantastic and strange to fathom.
The perennials provide as much joy and surprise as the seedlings. Because of garden amnesia, every winter I hold the thin strands of what is undoubtedly dead clematis between my fingers and wonder what to plant in its place. And every spring, lo and behold, after everything else is green and vibrant and my clematis is still brown and dead, a day comes when I notice a couple of green shoots at the base, and a few weeks later the resurrection is complete and the plant is in full bloom, sporting glorious, broad, star-shaped flowers that wave in the slightest breeze.
And I tell Anne it’s not dead after all, and Anne says, “You say that every year,” and I say, “But this year it really looked dead.” This, too, is part of the cycle of life and rebirth and hope and comfort in the garden.
One of my garden routines is to keep a garden journal, really just a few hastily written notes about each year’s successes and failures, and reminders for next year. But the most significant piece of information I keep is the last frost date of each spring. This is a significant date, for most seedlings can only be put outdoors after all danger of frost is passed. I use this historical data to estimate the average last frost date for my garden, rather than rely on the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s more general estimate for the county. Of course both the CE’s date and mine are averages, not guarantees.
I still get a kick every year out of Katie’s reaction when I tell her we have to plant some certain seed one week before the last frost date (“Dad, that’s ridiculous. That’s like saying, ‘Take the popcorn out just before the last kernel pops’”), and I do get a small death-defying thrill (although the daring is tempered a bit by the fact that it’s the seedlings’ lives at stake, not mine) out of getting a jump on the season by gambling that the last frost will occur earlier than the cooperative extension’s forecast. If I put the plants I’ve raised from seed outdoors before the “official” date, and there is no more frost, I am rewarded with earlier crops; if I’ve guessed wrong, I lose all the plants and have to (shudder) resort to buying replacements from the garden center. A silly game? Maybe. So other people habitually play lotto; I annually gamble with my grow-light-raised seedlings. I think I do it because it keeps me closer to the cycle, the cycle of rebirth and renewal. And because I’m dying for fresh lettuce.
I am also, I have to admit, a sucker for slick copy writing and beautiful photographs, experience notwithstanding. When the Burpee catalog’s editorial board sits down to entice the American consumer with this year’s “largest, sweetest [fill in the blank] ever, with jasmine-scented rose-colored flesh,” they must have my picture on the wall with the caption “This is your target.” They surely have my demographic, my income, my gullibility, down to a tee. I suppose it’s not much of a challenge. Whatever they can come up with, not only will I buy it, but I’ll pay extra for it. Garden books showing the world’s great gardens similarly seduce me with dreams of re-creating that very same Victorian grandeur in my rocky, clayey backyard. What I forget—every time—is that great Victorian gardens came equipped with great Victorian garden ers, full-time staff with nothing else to do but clip and trim all week and start over again the next week. Because I have repeatedly failed to learn this lesson, I am (to cite just one example of many) saddled with a rampag
ing stand of creeping thyme in what used to be a patio area because I saw a lovely bluestone patio with creeping thyme growing between the stones in a “great gardens” book and thought, I just have to have that in my garden. That looks so cool. And indeed it did, for a few months, until the thyme, not satisfied with remaining a half inch high in the cracks, started to branch out—literally. The great garden’s gardener must cut the stuff back every two weeks, a detail the author neglected to mention, and a schedule to which I am not able to adhere. At first I managed to clip it twice a season or so, then once a season; then I decided—well, not really decided, it just kind of happened—to let it go au naturel, and the former patio is now a very strange-looking patch of thyme, which, if you scrape underneath, reveals its bluestone origins like an archaeological dig. It does smell great when you mow it, however.
A common bumper sticker reads “A bad day fishing beats a good day at work.” Yes, I’ve had some rocky times, but I suppose on most days, when the weeds are somewhat under control, the groundhogs tamed, and my neck isn’t throbbing, I feel the same way about gardening. I remember an early-April morning some years ago, a day that I took off from work to plant potatoes. (May I suggest that this is a fine way to spend a day away from work.) It was the perfect day for a spring planting, maybe the first warm day of spring after a bitter, hard winter. It being a weekday, the neighborhood was empty and silent, no cars or voices. I spent the morning working compost and peat moss into the black soil, fluffy and warm and smelling deliciously of the earth. I luxuriated in the feel of the warm earth in my hands, a warmth and a smell that seemed to go right into my bones. I raked the soil smooth and cut trenches with a hoe as surprised earthworms scattered. I held one as it squiggled in the unfamiliar texture of my cupped hand. What a marvelous, mysterious symbiosis nature has created. The earthworms pass the soil through their digestive tracts, leaving a product more enriched and nutritious than what came in. At the same time, they break up and aerate the soil, their tiny tunnels creating an ideal environment for vegetables. This worm was long and fat; he was apparently finding my soil, now loaded with horse manure and peat, to his liking. I wondered where he had come from, how he’d gotten there. Did he burrow in underground from the backyard, occasionally poking his head up to see if he was under a stone path or a bed? Or perhaps he just took the sod webworms’ Highway 61, that blasted grass that runs up the center of the garden. Either way, he had to somehow crawl from the grass to the potato bed. Did he climb over the five-inch cedar, or burrow underneath? And now that he was here, would he stay? Was this now his bed for life? How long would he live? Would he procreate?
The $64 Tomato Page 20
