Thrift Week 2024, Day 2: Raspberry canes

The second item in my "seven purchases that have paid for themselves" series is the topic of one of my most popular posts ever: our raspberry canes. We bought these in January 2013, planted them in March, and began harvesting our first few berries that summer. By September, I calculated that we were collecting about a pint of fresh, ripe, organic raspberries—roughly a $6 value—every week. At that rate, I figured, we'd get back the $41.50 we paid for them and then some in their first year alone, and we'd continue to harvest the same amount year after year.

As it turns out, that was a gross underestimate. The berries were more productive the second year than the first, and more productive still after we switched to a two-crop system. Production varies from year to year, but over the past three years, these canes have produced a total of 47.5 pints of berries. Meanwhile, the price of organic raspberries has more than doubled, reaching $13.85 per pint. That means in the last three years, we've harvested $658 worth of berries—about $219 worth per year. And we're just now getting to the point where we think we might need to replace a few of the 11-year-old plants.

The crazy thing is, these aren't necessarily the most productive crop in our garden. Last year, our plum trees yielded more than 94 pounds of fruit in total: 37.75 pounds of Opals, 21.15 pounds of Mount Royals, and 35.5 pounds of Golden Gages. The local farmers' market was charging about $2.61 per pound for plums at that time ($6 for a 2.3-pound basket), so our harvest was worth roughly $246, exceeding the value of the raspberry crop. 

However, the plums aren't as consistently productive as the raspberries; they seem to have fallen into a pattern of giving us one good crop every two years and nothing at all in the off years. Also, the three plum trees cost more up front than the dozen raspberry canes, and it took them several years to become productive. So we've definitely gotten more bang for our total buck from the raspberries than we have from the plums, though both have repaid our original investment (in money and time) many times over.

Which brings me to that popular post that the raspberry canes inspired. Most of it was about the process of building a trellis to support the canes so that we could more easily reach the fruit (and I'm pleased to say that after six years, that structure is still holding up just fine). But at the end, I waxed philosophical for a bit about the pleasure these raspberry canes had brought into our lives:

I was heading into the house with a bowlful of fresh raspberries I'd just picked for my lunch, and I was struck once again by the thought, "How incredibly lucky am I to have fresh berries there for the picking, right outside my door? What did we ever do to deserve this kind of bounty?"

Only this time, I realized immediately that I knew the answer to that question perfectly well: what we had done was to plant and tend the raspberry canes. With our own hands, we dug the bed; with our own hands, we planted them all in one chilly spring day; with our own hands, we mulched them and watered them and trimmed them and gave them a fresh dressing of compost every spring; and with our own hands, we built this new trellis to support them. And whenever we want to eat some, we go out and pick them with our own hands as well, braving the scratches for the sake of the berries. We earned this blessing.

And that, I think, sums up the ecofrugal life in a nutshell. It's a life full of blessings that have been earned. Home-baked bread, home-cooked meals, home-grown produce, hand-picked flowers, an abundance of clothing and furniture and books acquired by carefully picking through the offerings at yard sales and thrift stores. And I don't feel I appreciate these blessings any the less for knowing that I've worked for them, instead of having them gifted to me by some gracious and unseen Providence; on the contrary, I think being able to recognize in them the loving labor of my own hands makes me value them all the more.

I'll be back to count more of my ecofrugal blessings tomorrow, as Thrift Week continues.