We Tried to Grow a Garden to Save Money on Fruits and Veggies. Here's How That Worked Out

Several years ago, my husband and I decided we wanted to try to get serious about gardening. We were spending a fortune on fruits and vegetables because we want to try to eat local, organic foods as often as possible. And we thought perhaps if we grew our own food, we would be able to save some money.

Here's how that's panned out for us over the past couple of years. Spoiler alert: our checking accounts did not thank us for the effort.

Starting to garden can come with big upfront costs

While my husband and I had grown a few tomatoes in pots here and there, we had never been serious about gardening before -- and we didn't really have a good place to do it.

We decided to opt for raised-bed gardening after doing some research, as our soil here isn't very good (it's rocky and not conducive to growing anything). So we spent about $800 on cedar and a delivery of organic dirt so we could get six raised beds going.

We have a lot of critters in our area, so we also decided to spend some money to put up a DIY fence. We purchased some no-dig fencing from the home improvement store, which ended up costing around $400 for all the fencing we needed. This expense went on our credit card.

We also bought seeds, a DIY drip-irrigation system so our crops would be watered even if we traveled during the summer, and some chicken wire to help keep critters out. These costs together came to around another $200.

So, all-told, we had spent around $1,400 upfront out of pocket to get our gardening endeavor started.

Here's how it panned out

In the first year or so, we got a ton of food from our garden. We were able to grow enough tomatoes and peppers to make many batches of salsa, we didn't need to buy celery or carrots from the grocery store after our garden started growing, and we saved on lettuce greens, peas, broccoli, and beets. We estimated we saved about $550 over the course of the year with all of the produce we did not have to buy.

Things started to go downhill from there, though. In year two, we had very dry weather and while our garden was OK because of the irrigation system, there must not have been a lot of other vegetation for animals out there because our garden was under serious attack from rabbits, groundhogs, and deer. We bought an owl statue and did everything we could to try to scare off the creatures, but we mostly ended that year with a few tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, and not much else to show for our efforts. We saved about $100 at the grocery store.

In years three and four, the animals obviously remembered they had a great place to dine and ate most of our seedlings before they were even able to grow and start producing food. Some of the nutrients from our soil must have also been depleted, because not as much grew. We still saved around $25 though, since there was one tenacious cucumber plant that stuck around.

We started to get bored with the endeavor and had kids in year six, which left us too busy to do much garden tending and we ended up not producing anything at all.

The final cost of our gardening adventure

So, our garden endeavor ended up costing us about $775 not including added water bills, and we now have a garden that's mostly empty -- and if we do go back to it when our kids get older, we'll probably need another soil delivery.

Moral of the story: If you're going to try to garden, don't make a big upfront investment unless you are sure you will stick to it, and don't assume you'll make your money back, as growing food isn't as easy as it may seem.