Square Foot Gardening High-Value Veggies

by Mel Bartholomew

  HIGH-VALUE

  VEGGIES

  BY MEL BARTHOLOMEW

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  SECTION 1 WHAT IS A SMART GARDEN INVESTMENT?

  SECTION 2 HIGH-VALUE VEGGIES: THE WINNERS!

  SECTION 3 OTHER KINDS OF VALUE

  INTRODUCTION

  Mel Bartholomew doing what he likes best: relaxing in a lush Square Foot Garden.

  I’ve been gardening for more than 70 years. Over all those years, I’ve worked with or taught more novice gardeners than I can count. I’ve been around the world spreading the gardening gospel, and I can tell you, it always starts with one simple question: “What should I grow?” I bet you think that’s an easy one. Well, think again.

  The answer I usually give is: “It depends.” Where do you live? What are your favorite vegetables? What would your family prefer to eat? How much money could you save on groceries? How much room do you have in your yard to dedicate to a garden and what sun exposure does it receive? Any of these, and more to boot, could affect your decision.

  But I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to determine what to grow, a way that works for every gardener and every garden, is to ask yourself, “What are the most valuable crops I could harvest?” One of the reasons many people garden, after all, is to save some money on their grocery bills. If you decide to grow zucchini rather than carrots, you’re going to have to buy your carrots. But would it be smarter to grow carrots and buy your zucchini? That’s a dollars-and-sense calculation well worth making. Unfortunately, it’s the type of calculation that most gardeners I’ve met just never make. They wouldn’t know where to start.

  You start with the numbers. I like numbers, and I like making them work for me. That’s how I became a successful engineer, and that’s how I was able to invent a brand new way to garden. After all, you can tell just from its name that Square Foot Gardening is all about numbers.

  But here’s why I wrote this book. One of the very best answers to, “What should I grow?” is, “The crops that will bring you the biggest return on your investment.” It’s not easy figuring out what your payback for every potential fruit or vegetable might be. You need to figure out how much yield you’re going to get in a given season versus how much time, effort, and how many resources you’re going to put into growing that vegetable. You’ll need to find out the going market rate per pound for the vegetable, and then relate that price to the amount you can reasonably grow in a season. You can get a headache doing all that math. No need to reach for the aspirin, though; I’ve done the math for you.

  Just looking through a seed catalog or taking a trip to the local nursery can overwhelm someone confronted with the amazing number of options gardeners have to choose from. Next, visit a farmer’s market and a grocery store in the same town and you’ll understand the wide diversity of prices for the same edible. Figuring all that into your garden’s return on investment involves a lot of calculations. But now, you’ll find all the calculations boiled down in one easy resource—this book.

  Fresh produce is expensive, plain and simple. Most of us are willing to pay the price because there is nothing better in the whole-food world. But instead of paying four bucks for a few leaves of kale, more people are choosing to grow their own veggies. In fact, every year there are around 800,000 first-time gardeners in the USA. But just as you need to pay attention to prices and be a smart shopper at the market, you need to make smart investment decisions when you’re planning and planting your garden.

  MY STORY

  My interest in gardening started at a young age, watching my mother tend our backyard garden in Buffalo, New York. When we moved to San Gabriel, California, we could be outdoors all year round, and I was assigned garden duties. World War II brought Victory Gardens. Our next move took us to Ridgewood, New Jersey, where I did so much weeding and heavy work that I came to hate gardening. It was time I could have spent playing ball. When I left for college I vowed, “I will never garden again!” As the years went by, I moved my own family several times, started my own business, and was too busy for much more than a tomato patch. I sold my company and retired at 42 and decided to rediscover gardening as a hobby. As a trained engineer, I was always looking for efficiency in the numbers. That’s what led me to found Square Foot Gardening, the method that led me to write several bestselling books, film several TV shows, and start a nonprofit foundation. I wanted to design a better way to garden to get a bigger yield with less work. I didn’t want to waste any time, effort, money, or space. Why would you want to plant a lot of one crop that takes a long time to mature or has little food value or takes an inordinate amount of water or fertilizer compared to its yield? When I was learning and listening to experts, I kept thinking, “this is all backwards. It’s not how much you want to plant, or how long the rows are, it should be how much you want to harvest and even more important, what value are you getting for all your efforts?” That led me to think about the best crop to plant for the best dollar return and yield! I found that in Square Foot Gardening.

  Build a box. Fill the box with Mel’s Mix. Add a grid and start planting. That’s Square Foot Gardening (SFG) in a nutshell. But even if you don’t use the SFG method (and why wouldn’t you want to?), you still need to think about return on investment (ROI). The information in this book is just as useful for gardeners who grow in containers or straw bales or even rows as it is for SFG growers. It’s all about the ROI, after all.

  HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

  I’ve asked my good friend and fellow writer Chris Peterson to help me research the information and crunch the numbers for the comparison tables. Together, we have laid out the meat of the subject so that you don’t necessarily need to read the book all the way through. Sure, you can start with Section 1 and find out what drives the calculations we had to make and what the variables are. If you’re like me, you’ll find that stuff pretty interesting, and the information lays down a good, solid foundation for understanding what we mean when we say “smart garden investment.” But if you’re like a lot of gardeners I know, you may be chomping at the bit to figure out the plants that work best for you. If that’s the case, you can just jump right into Section 2, where you’ll find the actual plant listings themselves. We’ve put the top ten ranked plants—according to the actual dollar return on your investment—right at the front of the section. The plant listings themselves are organized according to their rank (you’ll find an alphabetical index here).

  Once you’ve got to the point where you’ve narrowed your search for this season’s plants, you can consult Section 3, where you’ll find other a lot of other ways to look at high value. We’ve included several “Top 10” lists to help you make all kinds of other decisions.

  WHO KNOWS MORE ABOUT FOOD VALUE THAN A CHEF?

  Jason Stoneburner, the executive chef of Bastille Café and Bar in Seattle, Washington, chooses plants for the restaurant’s expansive rooftop garden with value foremost in his mind. The idea of fresh, organic greens and veggies just a staircase away is appealing, but the garden takes a lot of planning, work, and resources. Jason makes sure it provides tangible return on that investment. Managing the restaurant’s rooftop garden is a lesson in screening plant choices through the thoughtful lens of value to meet specific needs. It’s a lesson we can all benefit from.

  For Stoneburner, value translates to a quick and usable harvest. “It’s about getting as much of the rooftop produce onto diners’ plates. So we have to grow crops that mature quickly.” Stoneburner harvests the vegetables young, serving baby turnips and baby carrots—a strategy that any home gardener and cook could use to plant and harvest multiple crops in t
he same season.

  Admittedly, the chef has a slightly different idea of value than the home gardener and cook might. “We try to plant things that we can harvest and put on a plate with minimal effort. Like different varieties of lettuces. We can charge somebody for a bowl of lettuces. But it’s hard to charge for herbs, because they are a specific ingredient that isn’t a main focal point of the dish.”

  Any home gardener can, however, use Bastille’s strategy of growing unusual species and varieties that are easy to prepare and exceptional on their own. One example is substituting for standard bell peppers with Padron peppers, a much more flavorful and adaptable option. Stoneburner finds these incredibly useful in his kitchen. “Padron peppers are a Basque heirloom pepper grown very small and served simply. They are the perfect pepper because you can eat them whole, enjoy them with a beer or a glass of wine.”

  —Chris Peterson

  SECTION

  1

  WHAT IS A SMART GARDEN INVESTMENT?

  Although the return on investment you get from planting a garden can be calculated many ways, the best way to make an objective comparison between, say, tomatoes and broccoli, is to crunch some numbers.

  How do you determine value in what you plant, cultivate, and grow? That’s a great question, and it just might be the perfect question for any gardener to start with. For a lot of the gardeners I’ve met, value starts with the joy of growing something you usually have to buy, and that tastes a whole lot better than most store-bought produce. Getting back to the land, the pleasure of getting your hands deep into the soil, and accomplishing something profound can all be valuable parts of gardening too. But as wonderful as that all is, as valuable as it might be, it’s mighty hard to measure. If you’re like most people, the “value” of your garden investment can more easily be broken down and measured in the actual price you can put on the produce you grow. Put in more practical terms: how much money are you going to save?

  Let’s face it, anything you grow and eat is something you don’t have to buy. Even though you’ll put a good deal of work into a garden—along with tangible investments including plants or seeds, soil amendments, and gallon upon gallon of water—you’ll usually get a decent return on your investment. However, it’s important to understand that this isn’t always the case. It all depends on what you grow. I have watched many gardeners simply pick what’s easiest or what they think will do best given the local weather, the space they have available in their backyard, and whatever has worked for their neighbors. But here’s something I tell all the novice gardeners I meet: keep in mind that the easiest things to grow are also likely to be most widely produced, and are probably vegetables that can be purchased locally at a very low price. The fact is, you might save a lot more money growing something a bit more in demand, something grocery stores and farmer’s markets in your area don’t regularly carry. Of course, it must be something your family wants to eat or you’ve wasted your time and money.

  No matter what measure you choose to use, the time to figure out the real value of what you grow in your garden is before you ever drop a seed into a hole you’ve made in your sun-warmed soil. That means relying on numbers. I’m an engineer by training, so I know that numbers don’t lie. You just have to get the numbers right, and they’ll tell you more than you can imagine. Getting them right in terms of calculating garden value means measuring one thing against the other while making sure that it’s a fair comparison. That’s what I call “garden investment.” At its core, it’s a thoughtful approach to edible plant selection with an eye to which plants represent the best use of your time, money, and effort.

  That’s the theory. In practice, wise garden investment can be broken down into a simple but powerful equation:

  The beauty of the formula is that it works for any plant that produces a crop. It is also scalable; because we’ve included the projected yield per square foot, you can just multiply the square foot space you’re growing in. Like any really useful formula, it’s flexible.

  The calculations that use this formula, and that form the heart of this book, have been carefully researched to ensure the information for each variable comes from reputable sources and that the sources are comparable in each plant’s case.

  In simple terms, the calculations take into account what you put into each individual plant subtracted from what the harvest from that plant is worth. It’s a fairly simple idea, but the actual calculations are somewhat more complex, dealing with a wide number of variables.

  MEASURING YOUR GARDEN INVESTMENT

  Einstein once said, “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.” That was the challenge we had in actually building a formula that would provide conclusions that readers and gardeners could use to guide their crop decisions, without making the numbers so complex that you would need to be Einstein to figure them out.

  When I started discussing this book with the editors, the first question that came up was: How are we going to actually calculate value? The trick was to create a formula that would work with every edible on a long and diverse list. Of course, no matter what calculations the formula included, we had to make sure that it made an (excuse the pun) apples-to-apples comparison.

  I like facts, so it was very important to me to use reliable sources of information that could provide real-world numbers for the listings. We had to use references that worked from a national average, so that the formula would apply to all gardeners across the country. As it turned out, no source—not even the USDA—was comprehensive. In practice, some of the primary sources didn’t list information for one edible or another, or didn’t provide numbers for one of the key factors in the calculations. For those situations, we had to develop secondary sources that would match the information in the primary sources. There was a lot of looking at databases for just the right starting places.

  I like to work with numbers, and I’m comfortable with them. I also know that a lot of people aren’t as comfortable. That’s why it was essential to me that the formula itself makes sense. I wanted any reader to be able to look at the formula and see how it worked at a glance. It had to be intuitive and it had to be relevant, no matter if you were a first-time gardener, an experienced backyard grower, or even someone with a larger piece of land doing the kind of intensive gardening that could be called small farming.

  Basically, we came up with a formula that uses an average price per pound to determine what a season’s worth of produce from any given plant is worth. That value is then measured against the cost of inputs to grow the plant over a season, to calculate overall return on investment (ROI) in terms of both an actual dollar figure and a percentage.

  That gives you two ways to look at the results: the money in your pocket and the actual return you receive relative to what’s put in and market value.

  Tempering the Formula

  One final word on using the formula as we’ve presented it here. Although we’ve taken great care in tying the calculations to real-world numbers, what can’t be calculated are personal goals and preferences. Earning money back from what you plant is a great feeling. So is eating well, enjoying the food you eat, showing off your garden to your friends, and sharing what you grow. The point is to never get so focused on profitability and high value that you forget the higher purposes of gardening: to grow nutritious, delicious food with a minimum impact to the environment. In my experience, you can realize a return on your garden investment and meet other important goals at the same time.

  GROWING VALUE: A HIGH-VALUE LEDGER

  Having grown more gardens than I can count, in more places than you can imagine, I know better than most that the best calculations are the ones that refer to your garden specifically. The strength and weakness of the calculations used in High Value Veggies is that they are geared toward a national average. In reality, of course, this is a great big country and prices and growing conditions are different from one place to the next.

  That’s why I recommend gardeners keep a garden
investment ledger. A ledger provides a snapshot of how profitable your garden actually is. Record-keeping is crucial if you’re going to make adjustments that will help you realize the greatest return on investment from what you grow.

  The most important things to log in your ledger are the actual costs. Check local produce prices for the crops you’re growing. Note if those prices swing up or down at harvest time. Also keep close track of “inputs” such as a large water bill. Unusual garden expenses can skew the calculations as we’ve listed them.

  It shouldn’t take much time to get your ledger in order if you update it as the season moves along. Then, at the end of the season, or during that nice down time in the winter, assess what the ledger tells you and use those results to adjust your plant selections for the next season. I think you’ll find that the ledger becomes a gardening tool as important as a trowel!

  PRODUCE COST FACTORS

  Although some produce is sold by the head, ear, or bunch, most is sold by the pound. All produce can easily be converted to a per-pound equivalent. That’s why we decided to use per-pound yields and pricing for the first two columns of our calculations—it was just the obvious choice. Pounds might not equal flavor, and there is no accounting for personal preference, but when it comes to measuring the dollar value of what grows in garden, yield weight is the best common denominator with which to start.

  However, it’s not as simple as it might seem to calculate the pounds of harvest you can expect from any given plant. Even choices that grow in self-contained units—for instance, carrots—can differ radically in the actual weight of one unit, from variety to variety. Large Scarlet Nantes carrots are several times bigger than ball varieties. A beefsteak tomato is going to be appreciably larger than an Early Girl, not to mention the case of many heirloom tomatoes, which can grow noticeably different-sized fruits on the same plant. Diversity occurs in just about every vegetable.