Let's Grow

After just finishing getting the final seeds in the ground for the Fall/Winter garden, I'm excited.  I love to plant things, love to watch them grow, and love to eat fresh produce from our garden.  We're harvesting bok choy right now and the kale will be ready in a week or two.  Other items will be coming along shortly thereafter.

I plant a garden for several reasons:

1. It's in my blood: I grew up on a farm and have always loved agriculture.  The rural life, getting dirty, growing things, and caring for livestock has always been very attractive to me.

2. I like being somewhat self-sufficient: I've said it a million times: it is so invigorating to sit down to a meal that came from your land straight to your table.  You were involved from planting to harvest to preparation.  It is nice to not be dependent on the Global Supply Chain for your food.

3. The health benefits pay dividends:  Gardening is an activity that gets you outdoors working in the fresh air.  The produce you grow is devoid of chemicals, additives, preservatives, GMO's, and artificial colorings, flavors and it lacks all the enrichment and processing.  This food is good for you and is delicious!

4. It's a nice hobby that will actually help the family budget:  Over the years, we've been able to reduce money spent at the grocery store and this helps out with family finances.

Although I could post some photos of the garden, instead I'd like to show some infographics that I was able to find on this topic that interested me.  Please note that all of the data is not from the same year, but it is close enough in proximity to still derive meaningful information.  First, the percentage of US Household Income Spent on Food:

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Citizens of the United States of America spent about $2,273 or 6.4% of their consumer expenditures on food in 2012 according to the USDA.  To put that into perspective, as a percentage of consumer expenditures, that is less than any of the 83 other countries the USDA tracks.  What does that mean? It doesn't mean that our food is cheaper as the USDA actually says that our food is more expensive. The average amount spent on food as a percentage of all our consumer goods is less than those 83 countries.

While it doesn't go into detail and state this, I think it is expressing what we all know is true.  We live in a wealthy country with many having discretionary incomes that allow us to spend money on lots of things, like consumer electronics, entertainment, clothing, automobiles, vacations, etc.  We are blessed and we have money to spend on other things beside food.

This graph from roughly the same time period gives a frame of reference against other countries.  If you are spending almost half of your household consumption expenditures on food, that doesn't leave much left over for discretionary items.  You are trying to purchase necessities.

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We are truly blessed to live in America, but despite the fact that we pay relatively little for our food, who is to say that prices will stay this low?  The drought in California has sent produce and beef prices skyrocketing.  Have you bought a roast or even hamburger meat lately?  For this reason and others, many people are taking food production back into their own hands.

According to This Article 31% of Americans are gardening due to concerns about the safety of the food supply, the fact that homegrown food tastes better, and the ability to save a little money.  That is encouraging news.

But here is my favorite infographic of all. It is full of interesting information. If it is too small for you to see either click the image and it will enlarge or click HERE to bring you to a larger rendering.


The ranking of popular vegetable crops in US gardens was pretty much where I thought it would be, although where's okra?  Okra must be a regional thing! Look at the increase in households with food gardens from 2008 to 2009 - a 19.5% increase.  Most interesting to me was the economics. Americans spent $2.5 billion of seeds and other gardening supplies, but experienced a return on investment of $21 billion dollars.  So for an average garden of 600 square feet, people spent $70 bucks and that investment yielded a $530 return.

The last time I checked, you won't get that rate of return in a savings account or CD!  The numbers in the charts and graphs above are all about five years old.  I wonder how they might compare to today's figures?  There's just too many benefits to growing at least a portion of your own food.  Let's get growing!