One winter I sat down and roughly added up what my vegetable garden costs against what it produces. The honest answer is that I am not saving money on most of it. Here is why the beds are still going in this spring.
Textbook crop rotation assumes you have a field. I have four boxes and a path. Here is the crude system I ended up with after my best tomato bed quietly stopped growing good tomatoes, and the problems rotation did not fix.
One season I lost the squash overnight, the brassicas to caterpillars, and most of the seedlings to slugs. This is what actually happened, what I did with my hands instead of a sprayer, and which losses I decided to simply accept.
The summer I chased volume, I filled the counter with produce nobody wanted to eat. Here is what I learned about the trade between how much a plant gives you and how good it tastes, and how I split my four beds because of it.
Every gardening list tells you what to plant. This is the other list: the crops I gave real bed space and real seasons to, and then pulled out for good. Corn, cauliflower, melons, and one brassica that broke me.
I have four small raised beds and a weekend gardener’s attention span, so every crop has to justify itself. After several seasons of tracking what I actually cooked and ate, five vegetables kept their spot and the rest quietly got evicted.