People have forgotten how to take care of themselves - Ignorance

a reply to: Aazadan

The economics of it are absolutely worth it. For example, I can buy a blueberry bush. It will produce at least 5 pints of blueberries a season. The plant costs 18 bucks, each pint of blueberries cost around $5 bucks. Yes there is some time to invest in water and picking. In the end you get fresh, perfectly ripe fruit for basically free after the first year in which you break even in cost. Most blueberry bushes last 15 to 20 years. Same with raspberries. Every crop is different, some require more intensive work, but you get to determine the yield and the variety. You can save any extras. Fresh organic produce is quite the commodity. When I was at my gardening peak, I would have people ask to buy my produce. I never had to advertise. People seek it out. I sold seeds to some heirlooms and they paid for themselves ten times over. It's the gift that keeps on giving!

a reply to: JAGStorm

Nothing is free, everything takes time. If you produce $100 worth of blueberries per year and you spend 20 hours producing them, you were working for $5 per hour. If you value your time at below $5 per hour, then it's worthwhile. If you value your time above $5 per hour, it's not.

a reply to: Aazadan

Or she's making $5 a hour in income... in her spare time.

originally posted by: Atsbhct
a reply to: Aazadan

Or she's making $5 a hour in income... in her spare time.

And you could earn above that by doing any minimum wage job, or more by doing a higher valued job in your spare time as well, which would bring in even more blueberries.

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: JAGStorm

Nothing is free, everything takes time. If you produce $100 worth of blueberries per year and you spend 20 hours producing them, you were working for $5 per hour. If you value your time at below $5 per hour, then it's worthwhile. If you value your time above $5 per hour, it's not.

The total ignorance you exhibit in your postings on this subject at least gave me a good chuckle. You haven't a clue.

a reply to: diggindirt

Then explain.

a reply to: Aazadan

Not worth my time to attempt it with someone who would post the stuff you've been posting. Thinking that it takes 20 hours of labor to produce several pints of blueberries.....lol. But you did give me some good laughs.

a reply to: JAGStormThere is at least one school near me that does gardens for the children and teaches them the basics of gardening. They serve the harvest in the school lunch program. I do not know how many other schools do this, but my city has a park that has individual plots for gardens that are leased by residents yearly. We have a yard large enough for our own small garden, but there are so many condos and even single family homes with next to nothing for yards. Most younger people don't want to do yard work, so many kids now don't have a backyard and have to be taken to a park to play outdoors.

a reply to: JAGStorm

People take care of one another, after all we are social animals, that live in a collective society these days.

So its not that we have forgotten how it's just that the knowledge is rather more distributed than it once was required to survive.

originally posted by: diggindirt
a reply to: Aazadan

Not worth my time to attempt it with someone who would post the stuff you've been posting. Thinking that it takes 20 hours of labor to produce several pints of blueberries.....lol. But you did give me some good laughs.

Then you totally missed my point. I threw out a hypothetical. Give me actual numbers, make your case. How many hours a day to maintain a garden? What was the output?

I remember growing up, my mom spent a good 2 hours per day on average in her garden for various fruits and vegetables. The output saved roughly $30 per week on groceries. Which meant she was profiting a little over $2 per hour.

What's the yield?

According to this the typical US household spends $1006 per year on fruits and vegetables. If you could grow all of that in your garden you're looking at the following rates depending on what you value your time at:
$7.45 = 135 hours
$10 = 101 hours
$15 = 67 hours
$20 = 50 hours
$25 = 40 hours

And so on.

Now, I should clarify that what you value your time at is not necessarily the rate you get paid. The logic is that your job is your highest time value exchange but not necessarily your only one. So it stands to reason that you should value your time at less than your wage. Instead you should value it at your next highest income generating rate. If you bring in $25/hour which is the median wage (and therefore appropriate for this comparison of median grocery bills), valuing your time at $15/hour should be reasonable.

As a result, that would mean that you're generating more value than the time you're spending if your gardening requires 67 or fewer hours per year. That's 1 hour and 15 minutes per week. This means that in said typical family, they're losing value if more time than that is spent on gardening.

Funny how some folks know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Perhaps some of us have become excessively urbanized, and suburbanized, and have forgotten our roots?

originally posted by: Nothin
Funny how some folks know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Perhaps some of us have become excessively urbanized, and suburbanized, and have forgotten our roots?

Not at all. Even activities that produce no revenue are ok, provided that's what you're willing to do with your time. I do it all the time with leisure activities. When the value of gardening is being presented in terms of economic value though, such as a way to lower food bills, then it must be viewed from that perspective. And that perspective is that growing food for just your family is a poor choice. Unless you can do it at commercial scale, you would wind up with more food by working McDonalds and using those profits to buy the food you want.