So, I made a spreadsheet. I just love spreadsheets. They make me happy in all sorts of ways. I get to organize my thoughts, make them make sense and add up things in the end. This time, I tackled our garden.
One of the things we started last year is to weigh and track the yields from our garden. It sounds simple enough but you have to be vigilant. Every time you come in from the garden – even if you picked something for dinner that night – you have to weigh it or somehow quantify it and then we record it on a yellow legal pad. From there, it eventually gets transferred to my spreadsheet, which calculates the items by fruit vs. day collected. Finally, it gets cross-referenced to Wegman’s online grocery cart so I can calculate the earnings to date. So far, it’s $434.25. And we’re only about a third through the season. Genuinely, I calculate that we’ll come in somewhere between $1,500 and $1,800 for the year. To me, that’s pretty amazing. Considering I spend about $800 a month for food. Our garden would literally represent two months’ worth of food or a little less than 20% of our annual grocery bill.
Now, while I’m celebrating, my curmudgeon husband just reminded me that I have to back out our costs for having the garden, such as the seeds, plants, natural fertilizer, etc., that he buys. There, I’ve acknowledged it. Still, regardless of these costs, we will make $1,500-$1,800 worth of food and whatever way you slice it, it’s a significant portion of our grocery bill.
All the time, I am struck by the things we do which either create resources or preserve resources so that our operating costs – what it takes for us to live our life – continue to go down. Any chance we get, my husband improves the insulation in our house. Along with the geothermal and solar panels, it now costs us $20 a month to heat, cool and power our entire home all year round. Granted, there was an upfront cost but on the back end? It saves us $350-$400 a month in utility costs. We also make use of fallen trees and some of the trees on our property to support our heating system with a very efficient wood stove, which helps on those days where the thermometer outside doesn’t rise about 10 degrees. The result of the new wood stove? We went from nine face cords of wood per year down to three and have nearly eliminated buying wood. Plus, our wood stove helps push our thermostat to 74 degrees in winter. Pretty toasty.
I preserve a lot of food and with the garden, there are just certain things I wouldn’t even think about having to buy from a store, including most spices, marinara and pickles. We also grow enough beets, celery, beans, potatoes – both sweet and regular – that I don’t buy them from the grocery.
Other things we do? I hang out laundry. Mostly because I love how it keeps my whites bright and white, the smell of sun-dried clothes and it makes both my jeans and my towels stiff. (My husband isn’t the biggest fan of stiff towels, but I love them.) The result? Well, according to the ever-resourceful internet, each load of laundry I dry out saves $.36. Doesn’t seem like much but when you think that I do at least three loads of laundry per week and dry them outdoors from as soon as I can until I can’t (think mid-spring to late fall), we’re looking at about 20 weeks of clothesline dried laundry, or a savings of a whopping $20. Not much, I agree, but it goes into the pot. Plus, line-drying is so much better for your clothes and helps them to last so much longer.
We also create our own compost, reuse items from my husband’s scrap wood pile, chip branches and yard debris to make pathways for the garden instead of buying mulch and complete most of our renovations ourselves. For example, in our most recent laundry/pantry and half-bath projects, Darryl is doing all of the work. That saves us easily $5,000.
And when you calculate it all up, we save ourselves over $10,000 a year in living more naturally and doing that for ourselves. Calculating what it would cost to earn that $10,000 ~ about $15,000 ~ and it all starts to make sense. If we can save the money, then we don’t have to earn it. And even at $75 an hour, $15,000 would take 200 hundred hours of work and 200 hundred hours of work are five straight 40-hour weeks, not counting drive-time or getting ready for work. And that assumes that a person makes $150,000 a year. From someone making $75,000, it’s 400 hundred hours or 10 weeks of work. Thus, living naturally essentially feels like buying yourself extra vacation or early retirement.
So, today on this Sunday, I’m basking in the glow of our garden production and enjoying the affirmation that it really does pay to live naturally. Mostly, the difference is in me, of course. I’m more calm, more satisfied and overall healthier because one must keep on moving to keep on living naturally. But I’m also pocketing these five weeks we have earned for ourselves. This is how we semi-retired at age 50. Maybe it’s all semantics and we just changed gears going from monetarily compensated work to non-monetarily compensated work. Who knows? It doesn’t actually matter to me all that much. Mostly, of course, because I get to live like this.
The Yuppie Homesteader 