Would you pay $5 for a strawberry? I did.

I should frame my March 18 Fred Meyer receipt in case I ever doubt my insanity. That was the day I impulsively decided to grow strawberries on our deck.

We've lived in rural south Salem for seventeen years. We've always gotten all of our food from grocery stores, not our property. That's worked just fine.

But a strawberry pot displayed in the garden center caught my eye. I pictured myself going out and picking handfuls of super-sweet Oregon berries every day. I'd slice them for my cereal. I'd savor my strawberry self-sufficiency. If I couldn't eat them all myself, I'd set up a roadside stand. Probably would turn a healthy profit. While eating fresh berries well into the summer.

Here's the reality. And this is the better bunch of plants.

The deer really mangled another container. Note the single flash of red. That's a strawberry. The only strawberry. A small strawberry. A $5 strawberry.

Following in the furrows of the author of "The $64 Tomato," I just figured out what this misadventure in gardening cost me:

Strawberry pot $ 20
Organic potting soil $ 13
Strawberry plants $ 12

Total $ 45

On the benefit side of the equation, there's no way I ate more than ten strawberries before the deer (even though I used Deer Off), drought (caused by my frequent forgetting to water the plants), and depleted soil (belatedly, my wife told me strawberries are supposed to be fertilized, not just plunked in potting mixture) brought my farming career to an ignominious end.

Given how small each berry was, and my preference for round numbers, I'm figuring that each berry cost me close to $5. By contrast, yesterday I bought two boxes of local (Blue Heron Farms) berries from Vista Market for $4. The boxes held 33 strawberries.

That's 12 cents a berry. A mere 42 times cheaper than what I was able to grow myself.

William Alexander, author of "The $64 Tomato," had a similar experience with his much more extensive (and expensive) garden. Here's an excerpt from his book that I can totally identify with, albeit on a smaller scale:

So just how many tomatoes did I get this year? Exactly nineteen. The groundhog got almost as many. They were large and delicious, these nineteen Brandywines, and that number does represent a tomato a day for almost three weeks. Still, it doesn't seem like much. It isn't much.

Time, finally, to do the depressing math: $1,219 divided by nineteen equals -- gulp -- $64 per tomato.

Holy cow.

This was sobering. I never realized how much growing my own food was costing me. I went to Anne with the numbers.

"You won't believe this," I said. "Remember that joke I made about the expensive tomato?"

"Uh-huh," she said, distracted, as she leafed through the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Twenty dollars turned out to be a tad low. That was a sixty-four-dollar tomato."

"Maybe that one you stuffed with crabmeat? That was good," she said, not looking up.

"You don't understand. I'm not talking dinner-menu prices. Every Brandywine tomato we picked this year literally cost us sixty-four dollars to grow."

Now I had her attention. She put the journal down and stared at me for what seemed an eternity.

"And just how do you know that?" she finally inquired hesitantly, not sure she really wanted to know.

I laid the spreadsheet in front of her. She studied it for a minute.

"We spent all this on the garden?"

"Maybe more. I'm sure I forgot some things."

She pushed away the paper as if it were contagious and flipped a page in her journal. "Well, we see this," she said, borrowing a phrase she often uses with patients. Meaning, in this case, that she was over the shock and ready to move on. And inviting me to join her. Truthfully I wished I hadn't done this exercise in accounting. Some things you're better off not knowing. I've said that the garden had become a family member, but at the moment it felt, not like the beloved grandmother you care for, but like the embarrassing uncle you avoid at weddings, loud and extravagant beyond his means, always in trouble, always in debt.

We see this. I, too, wanted to move on, but there was still one unspoken question troubling me, one that spanned months, years, ages. A question I both had to ask and was afraid to ask.

"Was it worth it?"

Anne deliberately closed the journal, placed both hands on the cover, and looked up at me.

And smiled.

What else can you do?

Well, at least I made some deer happy. Maybe it's better for me to view this experience as a successful exercise in providing gourmet supplemental feed for wildlife rather than a failed attempt at strawberry growing.

Rationalizations: the backyard farmer's best friend.

Comments

[Eat Salem]

My strawberries aren't doing so great either. Kind of small.

[Rain]

very funny and true for sometimes farmers. I decided my garden deserved a sabbatical this year and will incidentally save myself at least $25 :)

[nancy siverson]

wait, aren't you two vegetarians? You have how many acres in the Willamette Valley, one of the most fertile areas in the U.S.
You should buy Steve Solomon's "Gardening When it Counts," growing food in hard times. We are vegan, about 3 miles from downtown Portland, 7000 sq. ft. city lot and grew so many strawberries we gave away to all our neighbors! You can do it...buy his book. I enjoy your blog!