Adding up the costs: Garden's payback is still far off

The deer food plot -- or raised-bed garden -- in our yard is producing all the expected results.

Indeed, it has already attracted the neighborhood deer, who moseyed by the other night and sampled some of the golfball-sized green tomatoes.

And the food plot has enticed an albino deer into the neighborhood. Last week our neighbor called to let us know the all-white deer was sleeping in her yard.

A nap after a good meal is always a good thing, even for albino deer.

So far, we have made a sizable investment in the deer food plot. There was the expense of creating the raised-bed garden where the old elm had stood all those years. If you include the cost of removing the tree and its stump, you can see how the dollars quickly mount up.

Then there was the cost of the dirt. Not just any old dirt. Not clay like the rest of the yard. Topsoil. That's the ticket, we were told. Topsoil mixed with sphagnum moss. As it turns out, dirt is not, as one might expect, dirt cheap.

Then there was the expense of buying tomato plants -- a deer favorite -- pepper plants and seed for lettuce, radishes, green onions and nasturtiums.

My wife and I both grew up with large gardens. One of the benefits of gardening was that week or two each spring when wilted lettuce was frequently served at mealtime. Shredded black-seeded Simpson lettuce, thinly sliced radishes, chopped green onions, vinegar, bacon and sizzling-hot bacon grease, served, of course, with hot-out-of-the-oven cornbread.

My, oh my.

So we planted the essential ingredients for what we remembered as a highlight of the gardening season. Because we got a late start on our lettuce, and not knowing whether the new garden would produce, we went to the farmer's market a couple of weeks ago and purchased three pounds of proper black-seeded Simpson lettuce, which, we discovered, had been harvested from a muddy garden and was full of dirt.

Honest to goodness, Project Wilted Lettuce consumed most of an afternoon as we washed lettuce and spun it dry, sliced and diced, fried bacon and baked cornbread. After hours of intensive labor over what we thought would be a quick throw-together meal, we finally got the first bite of our efforts. It was delicious. Every bit as good as we remembered.

But, we said, do we really want to do this again?

Then a few days later we looked at our deer food plot. The lettuce was ready for picking. The onions and radishes were just right. So we did the whole thing over again. It was delicious, despite the prep time.

We wondered, though, how important it is to have this wilted-lettuce feast EVERY year. Might we enjoy it more if we only did it, say, every few years? Something to think about.

Meanwhile, the expense side of the deer food plot ledger continues to climb.

To protect the remaining green tomatoes, I installed netting over the whole raised-bed garden. Netting is not cheap.

By my calculations, any ripe tomatoes we get from the deer food plot will come in at about $52 a pound, and we haven't even installed the irrigation system or the motion-detector light we've been told will keep the deer away at night.

These are not the economics of the gardens we grew up with. Surely the return on investment will turn around over time. By my calculations -- and you know how good I am at math -- we should break even in about 2040, just in time for our 75th wedding anniversary.

It's alway good to have something to look forward to.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.