I recalled whilst writing my last post that I intended to work out the costs for producing the winter salads. I’ve therefore been back through all my order confirmation emails and here they are:
| Compost | £6.00 |
| Mushroom trays | £19.50 |
| Newspaper | £0.00 |
| Webbs Wonderful seeds | £1.99 |
| Red Little Gem seeds | £2.49 |
| Lollo Rossa seeds | £2.49 |
| Salad Rocket seeds | £1.99 |
| Red Chard seeds | £3.00 |
| Leaf Radish seeds | £1.39 |
| Red Frills seeds | £1.99 |
| Pizzo seeds | £1.79 |
| Robinson lettuce seeds | £1.99 |
| Coriander seeds | £1.49 |
| Chervil seeds | £2.59 |
| Land Cress seeds | £1.49 |
| Golden Streaks seeds | £1.49 |
| Total | £51.68 |
The total seems quite high for (what I hope to be) one winter’s worth of salad leaves, but I think it’s fair to say that the costs aren’t really what they seem. The compost is clearly a one-off thing though in fact I used some that we had lying about and I could have used some we made last year, but the trays may well last for years. The lettuce seeds were all from packs that I happened to have left over from the summer and in fact I’ve probably barely used a tenth of the contents of any of the packs. I’ve put the newspaper down as free since I just raided my in-laws recycling, but if I didn’t have that then I might well just have used bits of cardboard packaging from online deliveries or something like that. Even scraps of old clothing would probably do the job. Whatever I used I don’t think I’d have paid anything for it.
For the sake of argument if I guesstimate that the trays will last five years and that I could keep unused seeds to sow next autumn and the following year as well and they’d remain viable then that would actually bring the annual cost down to about £18.60 which would leave us about one more pick from breaking even, based on the cost of buying pre-packaged organic salad leaves.
If I used our own compost and I knocked up some trays myself from scraps of timber we have lying about (which was my original plan, but I just ran out of time) then the annual cost would be just under £8.75 which should mean breaking even after one more pick even pricing based on the cost of pre-packaged non-organic leaves.
And of course there’s still the additional benefit of not having the plastic packaging waste, and perhaps also having a more healthy diet because we eat the salad we have rather than choosing something else less healthy.