As with a lot of things, there are costs that are associated with gardening, but these will vary by the situation of any individual who does gardening. I’m going to go through some of mine today, as I have to garden in pots on my patio.

I’ll start with my pots first. The ones I have are all plastic at the moment, either rectangular or square in shape with the odd round on thrown in. The round ones are ones that I have had floating around for years, and I can’t remember how much they cost or where they are from. As for the rectangular and square ones, the total cost was $338.28 (Australian dollars) for sixteen of them. I also have a box of little coir pots that I use for sowing seeds-which cost $14.80 for 120 pots in the box. That’s a total so far of $353.08.the coir pots are one use only, but I am hoping to use the plastic pots for many years.

Next, I will look at the growing media and fertiliser. I recently bought some, ready for my new season of growing my flowers and vegetables. I bought four 25 litre bags of premium growing media and one 10 litre bag of seed raising mix. The cost of these five bags came to $60.60. My organic fertiliser costs $29.95 per 2 kg tub. The running total so far is $443.63.

I will be growing all my vegetables and flowers from seed. For the eighteen different things I will be attempting to grow, each seed packet has cost an average of $4.25, for a total of $76.50. Do bear in mid that I wont use all the seeds in each packet in one seed sowing session, and possibly not in one season, mainly due to my limited growing space.

The grand total comes to $520.13. Why am I willing to spend so much, along with the added time and energy growing flowers and vegetables?A lot of the reason for wanting to grow veg is so that I have ingredients to use to go towards making lunches for myself and my family that are healthy and tasty. There are three people at home, so if all three bought lunch every week day, that could easily be at least $150 dollars a week if each of us spent just $10 (but it can easily be more than that!). While using the veg I grow as a contribution towards our homemade lunches, then that cost will be a lot lower overall. The veg I grow can also be added to our dinners, which is also a good thing.

I also enjoy growing the plants that I want to grow, in the way I want to grow them. At work, I have to look after the plants already there, or add the ones that they want, so being able to do my thing at home is really really liberating as a result. The fact that I’ll get food and pretty flowers as well is a bonus!