Lettuce: a garden inquiry.

[half_double]

Okie-dokie folkies. Here's the deal. I'm writing an article for Do It Green! Minnesota. What the editor has presented to me is a side-by-side-by-side comparison on the monetary and environmental costs of 3 heads of lettuce: 1 conventionally grown in CA and shipped to MN for sale in the local megamart; 1 organically grown and available locally,

Comments

[blue_sky_48220]

Oy. It would be hard to calculate the cost of a single head of lettuce, I would imagine. And, I have found that most back-yard growers tend to grow leaf lettuce, as opposed to head lettuce. (I know I do

[blue_sky_48220]

Yeah, one more thing: I didn't grow a whole lot of lettuce. Lettuce is readily available at the farmer's market, and it's dirt cheap. I used the space in my garden for other crops that tend to cost a little more, or vegetables that come in more exotic varieties, like peppers and eggplants. I probably could have grown a whole lot more, though, with little extra expense.

[gunn]

I also do not grow head lettuce, and the amount it costs in water depends on how much it rains (and if you've invested in a rain barrel for these purposes), and whether you fertilize depends on your preference and the soil quality. Seeds are cheap, and the length of time for them to reach maturity is short- I can't imagine buying seedlings for lettuces. I was up to my eyeballs in lettuce for the beginning of the summer, and could have re-sown seeds from the same package if I wanted to be up to my eyeballs in lettuce for the rest of the summer.

[aedifica]

There was a piece on public radio this spring/summer, I think on Weekend Edition, talking about the cost of someone's experiment in growing her own tomatoes. It was a flawed piece in that it didn't look at price over time, just the price for the initial season (when a lot of the expenditures were for things that can be used year after year), but it might be a place to start.

[cloudscudding]

Don't forget to include the financial time cost on the gardening, at least as an optional. Basically, if you were working, you'd be getting paid XYZ per hour, so how much time money have you spent gardening?

[gunn]

I agree with this statement *in theory*. I probably *could* be paid 14/hr to do the same type of theatre work that I volunteer to do for free. I enjoy gardening, get pleasure out of it, and would volunteer in a community garden if there was one in my community. It's like saying the cost of doing your own laundry versus paying a maid to do it, kind of? I guess I'm with you on the "optional" note. But I do get what you're saying.

[cloudscudding]

Yes. If it's solely for financial savings that somebody's gardening, it has to get figured in. But there are a lot of intangible benefits.

[thegreencall]

I would call these folks: http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/horticulture/DG0434.html

These university extentions focus on gardening kinds of stuff. But really, any cost that you come up with is going to be estimate as it varys year to year.