www.tanstaafl.co.uk

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:

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.

My wife asked me to pick some salad today to go with our meal this evening. I was going to leave it a little longer as growth has quite obviously slowed down now and I suspect we’re not far off going two weeks between picks. Most of the plants are looking healthy though, at least. The obvious exception is the salad rocket which does seem to be struggling a little and not showing much growth at all.

In the end however we managed a pretty reasonable quantity of leaves totalling 146g (90g for the container again):

That gives us a total of 786g of salad so far.

The long shadows in the photo are thanks to the late afternoon sun, just above the horizon, shining in through the window on the other side of the kitchen.

Wandering through the veggie plot during the week I’d seen the salads in the greenhouse and didn’t think there’d be much to pick this weekend, so I was quite surprised by the number of leaves available when I went to have a closer look and pick what was available. I’m assuming that I have to keep picking fairly regularly to make the leaves easier to pick, especially with the lettuces.

Back in the kitchen I ended up with 220g of salad (90g for the container)

plus 10g of coriander that I’d had to pick separately as apparently my mother-in-law isn’t keen on it.

So, 230g in total, which is less than 20% short of what I picked nine days previously. Half has gone to my in-laws and the rest should see us through the week now half term is over and the children area back to school.

The total from three picks is 640g. Bags of organic salad leaves are about £2 per 100g by the looks of the results from a quick search, so that’s almost £13 worth of salad since 25th October. I must look up the cost of everything involved to find out when we break even, but of course there’s also the benefit of not having bought the plastic packaging, not to mention the enjoyment of eating salads containing such a wide variety of flavours and textures. Organic salads also appear to be sufficiently uncommon in local supermarkets that much of the time we’d probably go without or buy non-organic if we weren’t growing them ourselves.