Cost comparison analysis - Earthbox vs grocery store

[mark]

I just gotta do this. I can't believe how insanely expensive it's getting to eat healthy nowadays.  I have a very long growing season in my area, so that's a plus for me.  This year I wanted to keep track of how much money I'm saving by doing an Earthbox vs grocery store.

This season I'm doing:

1. Better Boy Tomatoes
2. Yellow Bell Peppers
3. Ichiban Eggplants
4. Zucchini

I bought my Earthboxes long ago (2003), so I'll leave that up to the viewer to go to the EB purchasing page to see what the start up costs are.  I later bought some PVC as a support structure for the vegetable plants.  I'm at a point where I'm looking at ongoing costs.  Each year, at the beginning of the month of March (March 15th this year), I purchase:

(2) 64 QT bags of Miracle Grow Potting Mix = $12.97 each from Lowes = $27.75 incl tx
I mix in a half bag per box to the existing soil from the previous season, while throwing out roots, etc. Been doing it this way for years and I get excellent results.

(1) bag of 10-10-10 for about $12.00

Seedlings (2 tomatoes, 4 bell peppers, 2 eggplants, and 2 zucchini) = $30

Total = about $70
Prep time: about an hour and a half to prep 4 boxes.  I have an automatic watering system, so my time spent tending to these boxes during the growing season is nearly zero.

Now I'm going to keep a running total of what I harvest.  This should be interesting.  In 2010, my peppers stopped producing in December. By that time I had enough of it cooked and in the freezer, ready to be eaten until the boxes are producing again.

Here's a shot from the grocery store a few days ago.  Each (not by the pound but EACH) bell pepper is $2.50. They're not organic either.  And...Canada / Mexico??



I want to see what I come up with at the end of the season if I were to have purchased these vegetables from the grocery store.  I've never put this down on paper, so I am curious to see what volume these things are putting out, and how much it would have cost me if I were to buy these vegetables from the grocery store.  I'm going all out this year - I'm going to stick it to the man!

[Rockdawg]

Hey mark,
     That's a very ambitious trial. Please keep us updated. I believe this will be very interesting. Are you going to weigh your produce?
Peace, Rd

[mark]

That's a good idea, Rockdawg. Haven't thought of weighing, but since I recently bought a food scale, there's no reason not to weigh it. 

What bothers me about grocery store vegetables going by weight, is that I have this conspiracy theory that somewhere along the line, someone is injecting water into them to drive up the weight/cost.  So, I don't think it's a very fair comparison in that regard.  Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?

[deep]

I have two family members who formerly worked in grocery stores.  They both witnessed some suspect practices.  Those even included adding water to ground meat to hydrate it and make it weigh more.  

If you want more reasons to grow your own produce, consider the following.
1.  Human sewage (AIDS virus, Meds, Meth byproducts) and more are going from waste water treatment plants to farm fields as fertilizer.
2.  Food prices are continuing to face inflation.
3.  Local gardeners are more likely to grow varieties with more nutrition than commercial varieties.
4.  Less chance of someone tampering with my food supply.

[mark]

Not to get too off topic here, but I know for sure, at a major grocery store chain, that the adults (union employees) would get the innocent kids to do their dirty work.  I haven't seen or heard of adding water to ground meat, but I know of a major chain (at least one store) that was doing something worse than that. They have their young kid meat clerks add the fat that they trimmed off of the steaks into the ground beef so that you (the customer) would still be paying for it AND consuming it too. They also add an equal amount of fat to the Ground Round, Ground Chuck, and Lean Ground Beef so that they would pass the "side by side visual inspection." I always tell my family to buy the ground beef that's in the tube with the metal wire on the ends (yes, the one where you can't see the ground beef) because the local meat departments haven't tampered with that one (it's bad enough you have one group tampering,  you don't need two.) My mom always says, "but the grocery store label ground beef is so red and pretty."  To which I respond, "Mom, when blood mixes with oxygen, it turns bright red.  The blood that's in the ground beef in the tube is actually purple.  It's at an earlier stage of spoilage than your pretty bright red ground beef." 

I've also seen a grocery store meat department pull chicken on its day of expiration off the shelf, bring it back into a huge vat, where they soaked it in water and some chemical, then they rewrapped it putting a *new* expiration date on it and back out on the shelf it went.

I could go on and on. This is why I have a lack of trust when it comes to Produce. I know FOR SURE what they do to meat. You never know what is going on behind closed doors.  I know exactly what's going on in my backyard, though.

[cushman350]

Mark, people need to know but.....I knew an employee of a now defunked chain and I was horrified. Meat, fish ( shipped with guts still in the large fish) GAK, everthing. All the tricks of the trade. "Fine for BBQ" pre-seasoned with dry rub to hide the meat off-coloring. Nuf said.

[mark]

Mark, people need to know but.....I knew an employee of a now defunked chain and I was horrified. Meat, fish ( shipped with guts still in the large fish) GAK, everthing. All the tricks of the trade. "Fine for BBQ" pre-seasoned with dry rub to hide the meat off-coloring. Nuf said.

I've seen that trick too.  When it comes to meat and seafood, I think I've seen it all.  And get this, try to report an issue to your State Department of Agriculture.  Know what happens then?  You get passed to an "Agriculture Manager" who immediately checks their yearly donations list.  Guess what they're looking for? Guess what entities you see on the donations list donating the maximum amount of money they can per year?  The donors are the very people the Agriculture commission is supposed to be "policing."  Check out the lists for yourselves if you think I'm kidding. Imagine if prostitutes donated tens of thousands of dollars to their local Sheriff's office.  It's basically legalized protection money. If the entity you're planning on blowing the whistle on has been a huge contributor of money throughout the years, expect to be labeled a PITA while your complaint gets dead ended.  It's pretty sickening. 

Sorry, didn't mean for this thread to turn into a "Dateline NBC" type thing.    Just want to avoid the grocery stores and use Earthboxes since the cost of groceries has gone sky high.

[movrshakr]

And that is POSSIBLY better that what is generally called (incorrectly) 'news" these days.

Maybe we need a 'political' subforum?  Nah, it would degenerate...we're friends; let's not mess it up!

[Rockdawg]

This description covers the majority of things I view in todays' America the Corporate. Democracy died in Florida, Banking , We the People need to redefine just exactly who We is when we start talking about WE. Those in our pockets, filling theirs and never are held accountable, instead they get rich. We smile and say go Gleenn Beck..
IT'S NOT NEWS...........................

     What Democracy you talk'n about cushman. We live in a Republic! You know "the Republic for which it stands. One Nation, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for ALL"
     It's not news it's Faux News!
Rd

[fhemmer209]

I never think about the cost benefit. I just like the home grown taste much better, especially the tomatoes. And I like watching them grow.

[Dace]

Mark, I like your idea of keep track of expense vs grown produce.

I copied you and made a record of my expenses, and I will weigh and count what I harvest. Great idea!

[pennywallin]

Anybody read the book The $64 Tomato?  This discussion reminds me of it. 

[mark]

I never think about the cost benefit. I just like the home grown taste much better, especially the tomatoes. And I like watching them grow.

You would if you were frugal    Frugal people always think in terms of cost benefit.  I believe the moment I turned 15 years old, got my worker's permit, and a job, I HAD to think in those terms. I was poor! LOL  I'm not exactly poor today, but I haven't stopped thinking in those terms.

Mark, I like your idea of keep track of expense vs grown produce.

I copied you and made a record of my expenses, and I will weigh and count what I harvest. Great idea!

Sounds good. Lets compare notes. I'm going to try to keep it as fair as possible. It's not exactly fair to post a pic of non-organic vegetables to compare to my organic vegetables (like I did in the opening post), so I'll have to make sure that criteria stays the same. There is a significant price difference between the two. The grocery store I went to when I took that picture (and they are known for having organic) didn't have a single organic Bell Pepper...so I just snapped a shot of what they had.

Anybody read the book The $64 Tomato?  This discussion reminds me of it.  

Hi Penny. Funny...the opposite actually..I don't have sod (or any grass), it's not technically a "yard" more like a tiny patio, I didn't do my research (I'm garden ignorant actually, and am totally dependent of this forum..well, I am about to get my commercial pesticide applicator license, so I better have a clue after I finish those books and take the exam), I don't have the time to tend to a garden (hence the AWS and Earthboxes). The only similar event I have with the Author is that I have spotted a predator of my tomatoes..and it was a very unlikely suspect - a hawk! At first I thought it may have been a rat or something, so I bought this insanely large rat trap. Glad I didn't put it out there... I took pictures and video taped the hungry bird during the crime of eating my bright red tomatoes lol. Lucky for me he visited early on a Saturday morning so I was still at home and able to catch him. I've never ever heard of hawks (if that is in fact the kind of bird it is) eating vegetables.  I'll post a picture of him later today.  Can we do embedded youtube videos in this forum yet?

If I were to write a book on my experience, and we'll see at the end of this thread, I would name it, "The ten cent tomato." Although, I'm not looking at the cost of the vegetable itself per se, I'm looking at the savings of the home grown earthbox compared to the alternative of buying vegetables from the grocery store. I've done the math in my head.. I know the Earthbox route is crazy cheap compared to the grocery store...only this time I decided to document the details.

[EDIT] Meant to say, Falcon..not Hawk. Might be wrong either way.  This is the photo after he swooped in and ate the bottom off of a tomato.  It doesn't look like it in the picture but that guy was huge. His wing span was about as wide as me holding out my arms. Thought someone jumped the fence out of the corner of my eye.

[writeone]

I don't have a lot of income now bc of taking time off work to care for Mom while she battled brain cancer. I'm living on my savings. So EBs are my new hobby of choice--healing for the soul, investment in low cost food source, more independence from the corrupt & unreliable food delivery system, and better health resulting from better food. Just like plants when we feed on healthier foods, we're more disease resistant. That's another expense factor--less cost of healthcare.

One documentary about centenarians (people who live to be 100+ years) mentioned gardening in the commonalities. They had four things in common:
1) positive outlook on life
2) ability to face change well. All of their friends and family members were dead.
3) kept active in some way whether it be gardening, water aerobic, or some other form. One lady still taught a low impact aerobics class at her local spa!
4) belief in something greater than themselves. All who gave any details about that aspect were born again Christians.

Note: diet didn't show any commonality. There were those who had high fat diets for example, but their systems seemed to process it well. They maintained a healthy weight and didn't suffer any of the typical illnesses related to poor diet.


My neighbors mom is 100+years old. She says eat one tomato a day. Mmm, mmm; I love tomatoes anyway.

I enjoy living a frugal, healthy lifestyle anyway, thus I'm delighted in this new hobby. It will be a gift to myself and those with who I share for a life time. A great tribute to Mom--better for me than the traditional planting of a tree.

[mjb8743]

I'm going to try to keep it as fair as possible. It's not exactly fair to post a pic of non-organic vegetables to compare to my organic vegetables (like I did in the opening post), so I'll have to make sure that criteria stays the same. There is a significant price difference between the two. The grocery store I went to when I took that picture (and they are known for having organic) didn't have a single organic Bell Pepper...so I just snapped a shot of what they had.

I'm also frugal... sort of..... well, maybe not quite so. I can squeeze a penny 'til it screams, but when it comes to hi-tech toys or EB's, or EB accessories, I done for 

Anyway, to my way of thinking, any cost comparison to the supermarket should be against what I would normally buy. Therefore, since I don't buy organic produce due to its cost, the fair comparison is to what I spend or would have spent.

I have to laugh when the grocery shopping tape shows how much I saved using coupons, because those are items I probably would never buy UNLESS they were on sale AND I had a coupon.  So any 'savings' is really a distorted, meaningless number.

Mickie