2024 Home Garden Savings

Did I beat my 2023 numbers? 🍅

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada 🇨🇦 It’s been some time since I posted!

Fear not- plannt.ca development is still underway, even if monthly v2 releases are paused. I am currently building out the requirements for the v3 edition of the platform, which will reflect the lessons learned from planning for the 2024 growing season.

To catch you up on why I’m making this post:

1. During the 2023 growing season, I harvested over 102 pounds of food from my home garden, saving my household an estimated $389CAD.
2. My goal, set at the start of 2024, was to harvest 150 pounds of food from my home garden. I didn’t set a cost savings target.

Let’s see how I did!

A variety of fresh herbs harvested from my garden- sage, thyme, oregano, and parsley.

The Numbers

The Analytics page of my plannt.ca portal is the brains of the operation. It gives me the insight into how I am doing and whether I’m tracking towards my goals.

So, for 2024, my final numbers are…

Drumroll, please… 🥁

My 2024 summary numbers for overall garden management

The most important number to me on this page is the pounds of food harvested, which was just over 112 pounds. This fell short of my (somewhat arbitrary) goal of 150 pounds by 25%.

I started approximately the same number of plants indoors in 2023 vs 2024, and I had about the same amount of growing space (+13 square feet of growing space was added in 2024).

Let’s compare 2023 to 2024 to see what I did differently!

Color-coded legend to help interpret the charts below.

My 2023 harvest tracking chart- tomatoes much? This represents 102.5lbs of food.

My 2024 harvest tracking chart- hello, variety! This is 112.2lbs of food.

What was different between seasons?

1. I harvested more frequently in 2024 vs 2023 (224 harvest logs vs 175)
2. I grew a wider variety of food in 2024 vs 2023 (15 crop types vs 9)
3. More crops totally failed (did not reach harvest) in 2024 vs 2023, leading to last-minute pivots. Certain seeds like carrots failed to germinate, other crops like kale and beets were ravaged by critters before they got the chance to reach harvest.
4. More tasks were completed on time in 2024 vs 2023. I’ll admit it, I don’t love thinning seedlings, so I made more of an effort to stick with the schedule, which made a huge difference, especially for my lettuce.

What went wrong?

I didn’t meet my 150 pound harvest goal, but I have a good idea of why.

1. The weather was more favourable for tomatoes in 2023 vs 2024 for my specific area. Tomatoes represent the bulk of my garden’s productivity, and any problems or disease can heavily impact my harvests. The constant swings of wet weather followed by heat waves = unhappy tomato plants. When plants suffer this much stress, they need more help to prevent disease, which is done by promoting ventilation and keeping up with pruning.
2. I tried out a new variety of ground cherry that wasn’t nearly as productive as the one I had in 2023 (8 pounds in 2023 vs less than 1 pound in 2024). I will be switching back!
3. I noticed a huge increase in pest activity in 2024 compared to 2023, specifically related to squirrels, slugs, and birds. It’s difficult to say how many pounds of food was lost to these critters. It could be that, after 3 years of intensive gardening, “the word” is finally getting around in the animal kingdom that my garden is an all-you-can-eat buffet.

How much lettuce are we talking? 💰

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Sure, I grew X pounds of food. How much money is that worth?

Here’s the breakdown of harvests per crop according to my Analytics page.

My 2024 garden productivity breakdown, which sums the total harvest amount per crop type.

Using online grocery prices for 3 different stores my location (Southern Ontario), I found unit prices for fresh, local produce (i.e. no canned or frozen products) in order to show a comparable, fair price.

This is what the savings roughly work out to. Note that unit costs highlighted in red came from Metro, blue-highlighted prices were from Walmart, and green-highlighted prices came from Food Basics.

My estimated 2024 grocery savings, thanks to my high-variety food garden. Unit prices gathered October 2024.

Last year, my savings amounted to just over $389, so this year is not too far off at $348. The main difference is likely due to the “Other” category, which is where I track harvests for my Ground Cherries. At $9/pound, the additional 7.3 pounds I harvested in 2023 easily explains the $50 difference. The rest of the variation is likely due to fluctuations in grocery prices from year to year.

These numbers are really just rough values for fun, since theoretically I could be doing 2 things better:

1. Seasonal price movement. I should be recording food prices at the time of actually harvesting the food. Doing this would give a more accurate dollar value for the grocery expenses being offset by home grown food. Currently, plannt.ca does not have a feature that allows gardeners to track food prices, but who’s to say what the v3 edition of the platform will bring?
2. Price difference between crop varieties. Within crop types, there are higher-value “variants” that are priced differently in grocery stores. For example, hot peppers cost more than bell peppers. Cherry tomatoes or sauce tomatoes like San Marzano are more expensive than slicer tomatoes like Beefsteak. In every category, I chose the less expensive “variant”, which likely knocked my dollar amount down to being artificially low.

What will I do differently in 2025?

Time for lessons learned, which is the point of being intentional about garden planning.

1. Keep doing what went well. I love tomatoes, they produce well, and they will be a mainstay in my garden for the foreseeable future. To best support them in maximizing production, I need to space them out more and provide more physical supports like poles or twine.
2. Grow what tastes good. More tomatillos and peppers! We really enjoyed having these available fresh, and it inspired us to make different salads, sauces, and salsas.
3. Don’t grow what you won’t use. This is a 2-parter: first, don’t grow any crops we don’t really want to eat. Second, don’t grow excessive amounts of something that can’t easily be used. We had a hard time dealing with all the swiss chard, celery, and turnips we grew because they’re not something we would typically cook with. Just because you can grow it, doesn’t mean that you should.
4. Experiment, then focus. Now that I have a few seasons worth of data, I’m going to focus on 2 varieties of beans instead of the 5 varieties I had in 2024. Similarly, for tomatoes, I will likely grow 4 varieties (instead of 7) next year. Any crops that were a total flop (looking at you, zucchini and carrot) require more research before I try them again.
5. Don’t be cheap at the expense of time. I will be more discerning when deciding whether to use up old seed packets. If the seeds are past their best before date- toss them! It’s not worth wasting a whole season of growing opportunity to save $2. Local seed swaps are a great way to pass your leftover seeds along to someone else who can use them.
6. Be mindful of harvest timing. As much as I love the culinary challenge of “salad week” or “bean week”, I need to start staggering plantings of lettuce and green beans. It’s overwhelming to have a sudden wave of harvests for things that can’t easily be preserved. Thankfully, family and friends were more than willing to take the extras off our hands!

I hope that some of my lessons learned for the 2024 season resonate with other home gardeners out there. I’m still holding onto hope that 2025 will be a 150 pound growing season for my garden- let’s see if we can do it!

Thanks for reading, and happy harvesting 🌱