I did something that you should never do yesterday. I worked out how much our one tomato had cost us, and it came to 16 euros. That includes compost and fertilizer for all of our plants – but I am averaging it over the produce, so when (or if) we get another tomato, then this will bring the price per tomato down to the bargain price of 8 euros each. Happily we do have some peppers ripening, and Basil has left us with 6 peaches, so all in all we may be looking at a euro per item of fruit or veg come the end of harvest.
What made it worse was that I had to pick our one tomato early as the chickens were showing much too much attention to it.
And to make things doubly worse, we can buy a kilo of tomatoes in the shop for about 60 centimos – and we can’t say ‘ah, but ours are home grown, not like these nasty shop ones’, because we know that the man in the supermarket sells his own produce.
Next year it won’t cost so much as we have our own compost which is rotting nicely in the back yard – and of course chicken manure is also good for gardens. We’ll also use water from our well and we’re going to put an irrigation system in.
We’re thinking about getting the back yard sorted later this year. We’ll try and borrow a rotivator and dig it over. We’ll then plant some trees – we’re thinking that we’ll have two each of olive, fig, peach, almond, pear and grapefruit.
Sam has started yodeling, which is quite funny during the day, but immensely annoying at night. I hope that they others don’t start to get ideas…