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Cultivate Financial Freedom
By Saying No to Sod
It's no secret that holistic living can work wonders for a person's well being. Eating organic food, connecting with nature, and generally “greening up” daily life has never seemed so important. Realistically speaking, though, most of us face an inescapable economic bottom line, and make the mistake of thinking that holistic living has to cost more than less healthy lifestyle choices.
Looking at the price of organic food at the grocery store, it's easy to make this mistake. I know I can't afford to pay a dollar for a single tomato, or five for a box of herbal tea. There is a simple way around this, though: The Garden Solution.
Without even considering the the potential benefits to health or property value, turning your lawn into a garden is a solid and sensible investment. With just a little time and money up front, anyone can make their yard into a beautiful investment account, and realize far better long-term interest rates than those offered by any bank I know of. Breaking down a hypothetical situation will show you what I mean.
Taking my most recent trip to Whole Foods, I saw organic raspberries on sale for four dollars per six oz. Container, half an ounce of mint tea for five dollars, and that buck-a-tomato deal mentioned earlier. If I consume one tomato, two glasses of mint tea, and three oz. Of raspberries per day, that's about $3.83 I've spent at the store. Per year, then, this small portion of organic food goes for approximately $1400.00.
That's fourteen hundred bucks for roughly sixty-eight pounds of berries, three hundred sixty-five tomatoes, and eleven pounds of mint. Eighteen healthy tomato plants, twenty large mint plants, and a few dozen berry bushes around the perimeter of my medium-sized urban yard can produce this amount of food in a single season.
I don't want my yard looking like a farm, though, and it's not good for the soil to limit the variety of flora to just a few edibles, so a diverse combination of edible and ornamental plants would seem to serve my hypothetical needs here best. If I were to transform my yard into such a garden, how much would it cost? To find out, I talked with Russ Henry, owner of Giving Tree Gardens. This is a local gardening company with a holistic and petrochemical-free approach, so it seemed a sensible choice for my inquiry.
Mr. Henry informed me of the difficulties in estimating the installation costs for my imaginary garden, because each site is unique from an horticultural perspective. Still, with the numbers I gave him, Mr. Henry assured me that, barring extraordinary circumstances, it would be reasonable to assume the price would be significantly less than the fourteen thousand dollars it could save me over the next ten years. Everything after that initial ten-year payback period (which is about half the time it takes for an array of solar panels to repay their initial cost) is, as they say, gravy
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