What's it all worth?

Inspired by Daphne, I've decided to figure out how much money my vegetable garden "makes". I think I've spent about $250-300 on supplies for the garden this year. Much of that was spent on wire mesh to keep the gophers out. It's absolutely necessary here. For instance, I planted 10 potato plants in January. Last month I harvested potatoes from 9 of the plants:

What happened to potato plant #10, you ask? Well, it was the only plant not protected by wire mesh... = gopher dinner.

Anyway, back to my statistics on the garden's production. I weighed the potato harvest and the total was 8.4 lbs. Organic potatoes are only worth $0.80 per lb, so my total 'savings' on potatoes was $6.72. As it turns out, I paid $15 for the organic seed potatoes (including shipping). The order was much more than I could plant, so I gave away about half of the seed potatoes. Because I paid $15 for seed and only "grew" $6.72, I can safely say that it's not really profitable to grow potatoes at these prices. Potato growing was kind of fun, but kind of high maintenance at the same time. What with all the diseases, hilling, digging, and annual re-ordering. So maybe next year I'll just buy my potatoes at Trader Joe's and give the garden space to something else. Unless of course, I see some unusual potato variety that really catches my eye on some cold winter night while pouring over a seed catalog...

So, in order to keep track of my potential 'savings', I've created a Google spreadsheet that is located on the front page of my blog - see the link? It can be found just below the poll "What vegetable grows the best for you?" (BTW, feel free to join in on the poll...I'm interested to see the results!)

Anyway, Google spreadsheets are great because they can be updated in real time. You can view my veg stats here: Veg Harvest 2009.