2023: How much food did I grow? 🥬

My tiny garden saved me some serious lettuce 💵

This is a follow-up to my blog post from earlier this year, where I introduced my goal to track my grocery savings as a result of having a small food garden in my back yard.

Here are the final numbers.

My garden’s high level statistics for the 2023 growing season.

If you’re new to my story, I’ll give you some background information.

1. My garden planning platform plannt.ca launched in March 2023.
2. My goal for the first year of using the platform was to see how much food I could grow in 102 ft² of growing space.
3. My food garden is located in Southern Ontario, where we have 127 days in our growing season (the time between Spring and Fall frost dates).

With that out of the way, let’s see how I did!

The Analytics page of plannt.ca has a number of helpful plots to show how much food you harvest throughout the season.

My cumulative harvest quantity over the season. Tomatoes, much?

On the Cumulative Harvests chart, I noticed a gradual increase in harvests in the middle of the growing season, but hit a plateau as the weather got cooler, around September. The harvest yields are irregular (i.e. the slope of the line is not perfectly smooth) because I would typically log harvests every 5–7 days.

The color-coded legend that applies to all plots shown here.

According to the handy color-coded legend, Beans and Tomatoes are dominating the charts as my heaviest producers. The crop in the “Other” category is a Ground Cherry (Physalis).

How much did I end up harvesting per crop, you may ask?

Here’s the breakdown.

The final tally of harvest yields, according to my Analytics page.

A brand new addition to the Analytics page, the Garden Productivity Breakdown table provides a quick breakdown of harvest yield per crop type. This summary makes it easier to determine which crops are worth the effort to grow again next year.

A few things to note about this chart:

• The No. Plants value represents the maximum number of plants possible, based on the allotted space.
• The Crop Type header clusters the information for all varieties of a certain crop. For example: I grew 4 varieties of beets, 5 varieties of tomatoes, 8 varieties of beans, etc. Their results are all combined together.

But let’s get down to brass tacks. What’s it all worth?

Grocery Savings

Using Walmart.ca’s online grocery prices, set to my location, I gathered a list of unit costs for my crops. I chose the fresh, local produce version of each item (i.e. no canned or frozen products) in order to show a comparable, fair price. I didn’t specifically choose organic products to gather these prices, even though my garden is organic.

Needless to say, I was blown away by the final amount of nearly $390 CAD. That’s a lot of money saved just from growing food with a proper plan!

My napkin calculations for how much $CAD my garden saved me this year. Prices gathered Nov 7, 2023.

Obviously, certain crops are carrying the team.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the outcome, and feel like I did pretty well considering the fact that I was building a garden planning platform while also tending to a high-variety food garden at the same time.

In the years before plannt.ca, I tried to follow my own DIY spreadsheet, but found that tracking my harvests and adapting to schedule changes was too messy and error-prone. This year, using the platform, I found the planning, scheduling, and harvest logging to be very enjoyable. I definitely still made some mistakes, but also learned a lot.

That being said- what will I do differently next year?

Lessons Learned

1. Use my growing space the whole time. Using the planning features of plannt.ca, I’ll be able to figure out which crops will maximize the use of my growing space for next year. If you’re in a short-ish growing season like me, it can be easy to decide that you can only fit in a single round of crops, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Simply plan to have a succession crop ready to go as soon as your initial crop has been harvested, and watch the dollar bills pile up.
2. Thin seedlings properly. I was deeply disappointed by my carrot harvest, and I only have myself to blame. I over-seeded an area due to concerns of low germination, but a few weeks later I had many more carrot seedlings popping up than I expected, and didn’t thin them out until it was too late. Remember, double the seedlings != double the harvest in the same space.
3. Re-evaluate crops that didn’t reach harvest. My squash, okra, and cauliflower failed to reach harvest for various reasons. These unhappy crops took up space that could have gone to a more productive crop. When I plan for next year, I need to decide whether I want to skip these altogether, or put effort towards preventing the issues that I observed this year. Do I want to keep pursuing high variety to find more crops that work for me, or do I want to focus on a handful of surefire winners instead? 🤔
4. Find the cash crops. It was quite eye-opening to see how cheap some vegetables are at the grocery store. Whatever happens, it’s clear that tomatoes, ground cherry, and green beans will continue to be a solid space investment for my garden.

Thanks for reading! Go grow your savings! 🌱