Gardeners' Holidays: Last Harvest

Once again, it's that time of year when production in the garden slowly winds down. Or rather, most years it happens slowly. This year, we got a frost warning on Friday, so Brian hastened out into the garden to pick all the tender veggies that weren't likely to survive it. And he came back in with this.

The contents of that overflowing bowl: one Pineapple tomato, one Premio tomato, 39 Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, 10 Carmen peppers (green), 7 Caballero peppers (also green), 16 Takara Shishito peppers (mostly green), about 2 cups of arugula, and about half a cup of basil. And the little pink cup in the background is holding approximately half a cup of raspberries, which just might be the last of our haul for the year.

This isn't quite all that was left in the garden. Brian figured the frost wouldn't be likely to hurt the thick-peeled winter squash, so he didn't bring those in until today. Even now, there are still a few left on the vines that he didn't pick because they were still green, so he's leaving them out in the hope that they'll ripen a little more. (If that doesn't work, we'll have to pick them and try to ripen them up indoors, though we certainly can't provide an environment that's 80 to 85 degrees with 80 to 85 percent humidity.) There are also a few leeks still in the ground, and we still haven't harvested those three other buckets of potatoes. But it pretty much finishes out the year, so I thought it might be a good time to do a little tally and see how much our harvest came to in total.

Now, there are some crops I don't have an accurate tally for. Although we've been harvesting little bits of leafy greens all year, Brian hasn't really been notifying me about them, because he says it's hard to figure out how to count them when you're just collecting a few leaves at a time. So, although I know we got some value out of these crops, I can't say just how much. Generally speaking, Brian says the arugula wasn't very productive this year, because it bolted quite early on (although it did come back to give us a small second helping in the fall). But he has literally no idea how much we got of the basil, Thai basil, or the various lettuces we planted. So, conservatively, I'm estimating we got the equivalent of one bunch of each, for a value of about $18.

With other crops, however, we can calculate a bit more precisely. Since all our produce is organically grown, I'm using approximate prices for organic produce to calculate its value.

• Cucumbers: 1 Marketmore, 1 large Cross-Country, 5 medium, and 11 small. It's not an impressive showing for the Marketmore, but given that it's produced substantially more in the past, we'll probably keep it in next year's garden. The total weight of cucumbers was probably between 5 and 6 pounds, for around $11 worth.
• Green beans: About 33 ounces of the Provider and 10 of the Climbing French variety. That's actually a rather disappointing take for us: in the past, we've harvested 5 to 6 pounds of Provider and 1 or 2 of Climbing French. We'll probably try both again next year, as they've done well in the past, but it definitely wasn't a good year for beans. But even so, it's about $9 worth.
• Leeks: Eight smallish ones harvested to date. For some reason (maybe too short a season?), we've just never been able to grow big fat leeks like you can get at the store. Total weight was probably around a pound, for a value of $3. Not the best use of garden space, maybe.
• Peppers: 26 red and 16 green Takara Shishitos (about a third of an ounce each), 9 red and 11 green Carmens (2 ounces each), and 3 red and 10 green Caballeros (3 ounces each). So that's a total of 2.2 pounds of red peppers, which cost maybe $6 per pound, and 3.6 pounds of green ones, which cost about 2.50. Total value: about $22, which is a little more impressive.
• Tomatoes: We got 5 big tomatoes off our Pineapple plants — not nearly as many as last year, but better than 2018, when we got only one. And they're big, tasty tomatoes, about 12 ounces on average, so that's actually around not too bad a haul. Then we got 37 small Premio tomatoes (maybe 7 pounds), 3 Opalka paste tomatoes (about 1 pound, not at all impressive, but then we've never done well with plum tomatoes), and a whopping 528 Sun Golds (at 6 tiny tomatoes per ounce, roughly 5.5 pounds). So that's a total of 17.25 pounds of tomatoes, or about $69 worth. Now we're talking.
• Potatoes: Based on the harvest we got from the first bucket, we figure we might get about 4 ounces total, for a value of about four bits. Pretty sad. But we think we can do better next year.
  
• Winter squash: So far, we've harvested a dozen, averaging around 2 pounds each. There are eight left on the vines, but we're not counting on them. So I'm putting it down as 24 pounds of butternut squash, a value of $48.
  
• Zucchini: Terrible. We got exactly one squash — not even a big one — off both vines before the borers did them in. (Next year we're going to try applying some Bt to try and stop them, since burying the stems doesn't seem to do the trick.) That might be one measly dollar's worth, at most.
• Plums: Even more terrible. Between the brown rot and the squirrels, we didn't harvest a single one. Next year we're stepping up our control measures.
• Cherries: Equally terrible. The few that we actually produced got picked off before they were ready, because we had so few that we didn't even bother netting the bushes. Not sure what was wrong, but it's probably the same thing that affected so many other crops this year.
• Asparagus: Not great, but not terrible. We got about 39 ounces — enough for a few meals, at least. So that's a little over $12 worth.
• Garlic: We got 3 ounces of garlic scapes and about 25 small heads, of which about 8 will be saved for planting. We don't normally buy organic garlic, so I'm not sure what that would cost exactly, but I figure it's about the equivalent of three $1 packs of fresh garlic, for $3.
• Rhubarb: Whatever was wrong with the weather this year didn't affect these plants. We've harvested about three pounds this year, and there's still more out there for the taking. I figure that's a value of around $10.50.
  
• Raspberries: This is the crop that makes up for everything. Between the summer and fall crops, we harvested a total of 37 cups — 18.5 pints, at an estimated value of $6 per pint. That's $111 worth, in one year. Yee-haw!

So, all told, our garden provided us with about $318 worth of produce this year. However, we also invested a lot in it, what with seeds, seed potatoes, compost, spray for the plum trees, stakes and wire for the one that tipped over, and materials for altering the raspberry trellis (though it really has made harvesting much easier). All told, we've spent around $164, which brings our profit down to only $154.

That doesn't look like a great return for all the work we've put in, but the numbers are somewhat misleading. A lot of our expenses, like the stakes and wire, were only one-time expenses, and a lot of the crops were unusually poor producers this year. In a more typical year, we'd probably get a much better return — maybe not enough to pay us a great hourly wage for all the work we put into it, but oh well, everyone needs a hobby. And after all, the flavor of a homegrown tomato, like true love, is a pleasure money can't buy.