Million Dollar Eggplants

This year, I wanted to do a simple cost analysis - what I end up paying for each eggplant that grows in my backyard as opposed to how much it costs in the average supermarket (like Ralph's or Trader Joe's). Organic eggplants are about 2$ a pound in the supermarket. One pound of eggplants, on the average, means two big eggplants. So the price one pays to buy one organic eggplant is one dollar.

To calculate the cost I incur in growing one eggplant in my backyard, let's first quantify the yield. The eggplant saplings are planted in March. They take about 30 days to grow up and become ready to bear eggplants, and bear fruit till about mid-September. On an average, each eggplant plant bears between 15 - 25 edible eggplants. Let's set an average of 20 eggplants per eggplant plant. I planted eight plants, so we are looking at a total of 160 eggplants – i.e., 160$ at a supermarket.

Now let's consider all the parameters that add to the cost of growing eggplants in the backyard.

1.     Water for 4 months;

2.     Plants;

3.     Organic Fertilizer;

4.     Labor;

5.     Miscellaneous.

Labor consists of two components - the hired gardener's labor, and my labor. For simplicity, let's consider my charges for my back-breaking labor to be 0$ per hour. It is actually priceless, but if I apply the mathematical equivalent of that rate - which is infinity, the cost per eggplant will be infinity.

The plants themselves cost 2$ per plant, so that's 16$. Fertilizers cost about 15$, and the gardener's labor cost about 20$. Water, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. Every month for these four months, my water bill goes up on the average by about 100$, but that includes watering my entire backyard. By a very rough estimate, the water required to keep these eight plants hale and hearty would be about 20$ a month. So that's another 80$. So to grow 160 eggplants, my net cost ends up being $131, or 0.82$ per eggplant. One other aspect of this is that the eggplants that grow in my backyard are at best half the size of the ones available in the supermarket. So about 4 of them would make a pound. So, going by this estimate, the cost of eggplants in my backyard is about 3.28$ a pound. 

And this number excludes

1.     My priceless labor,

2.     Miscellaneous expenses,

2.1  Gas (at exorbitant LA prices) for trips to the nursery,

2.2  Bribes to get my kids to help me,

2.3  Insecticides, and

2.4  The cost of the land itself, which could have been used otherwise for other priceless things like barbecues, Frisbee and throw downs.

So the reality is - it is much cheaper and simpler to buy organic eggplants from a high-end grocery store like Bristol Farms than it is to grow them in your backyard.

Successful backyard gardening rules

Every year in Spring, I plant a few vegetables in my backyard - brinjals, tomatoes, green peppers, and occasionally pumpkins. For the uninitiated - a brinjal is the British name for an eggplant. Funny name - eggplant - indicates a plant on which eggs grow. But this is not a plant, it is a vegetable which looks like an egg only if you get completely stoned and then let your imagination go wild and purple.

As you can probably imagine, gardening is hard work and plants need constant attention. So the whole business needs careful planning and time allocation. 

Let me describe how a good and successful backyard gardener, like yours truly, operates.

1.  My wife goes to the nursery and buys the plants.

2.  She writes a note for the gardener.

3.  The gardener comes and then does the heavy lifting - digging, preparing the beds, applying the organic fertilizer, and putting the plants into their beds.

4.  My son waters those plants 3-4 days a week.

5.  Every alternate Sunday, my son and daughter do the weeding, with guidance and moral support from me.

Phew! This is hard work indeed.