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Step 7Return on Investment
It's probably not a secret that this wasn't cheap to build. I wanted something that looked good and would last forever. I want it in my living space looking nice. I know that pretty presentation makes foods more appealing. I chose plants, in part, based on great colors. Before I went ahead with the project I considered a few things:
A head of nice hydroponic lettuce goes for $5 at my grocery store. This isn't organic or anything special, just good. If I buy one of those every week for a year that's $260, which, on it's own more than covers the cost of the system. And I anticipate getting a lot more than that in production. One bell pepper are as much as $3, one per week is another $156. In general, fresh foods are the most expensive per calorie available, so it can be fast to make up the cost.
Having a constant supply of fresh things makes me feel obligated to eat them which will hopefully displace some other, less healthy choices. Not letting them sit in the fridge means they don't decrease in quality, don't go bad from being hidden and forgotten, and don't take up space. I know they don't have an pesticides or herbicides on them. If they come with food poisoning it's my own fault.
Every bite of produce I eat came from somewhere. It probably came by truck, and possibly by other transportation as well. It's stupid to haul this stuff half way around the world if you could be measuring how far it moves in feet. I'm working toward figuring out how much space it would take for me to grow all of my fresh produce. How many people would have to do this to get a truck off the road? How much gas/pollution/etc could be saved?
Seeds are cheap and cuttings from other plants can be free. I would never buy shallots (or even $5 lettuce most of the time) because it's seems to excessive. If I grow them I can eat them all the time, and my cost is a fraction of what I would be paying otherwise.
There are even tiny ways this helps - I drag less weight home from the grocery store every week (a 7.5 mile drive without public transportation option.) Having my parts laser cut almost eliminated waste plastic. The water I change out from my system just goes into the nearby garden space. If I skip over a processed food for something I grew I save the energy that went into that processing, too.
*The photo is a mid-late summer image, after I had eaten a lot of the lettuce (it was much more overgrown at the top) but before the tomatoes came in. You can see a few yellow flowers low in the picture. Before the frost hit there were a lot of tomatoes to eat, but the season was quite disappointingly cut short by a series of brutal and early overnight freezes. By then the whole thing was so overgrown that I couldn't move it.*
A head of nice hydroponic lettuce goes for $5 at my grocery store. This isn't organic or anything special, just good. If I buy one of those every week for a year that's $260, which, on it's own more than covers the cost of the system. And I anticipate getting a lot more than that in production. One bell pepper are as much as $3, one per week is another $156. In general, fresh foods are the most expensive per calorie available, so it can be fast to make up the cost.
Having a constant supply of fresh things makes me feel obligated to eat them which will hopefully displace some other, less healthy choices. Not letting them sit in the fridge means they don't decrease in quality, don't go bad from being hidden and forgotten, and don't take up space. I know they don't have an pesticides or herbicides on them. If they come with food poisoning it's my own fault.
Every bite of produce I eat came from somewhere. It probably came by truck, and possibly by other transportation as well. It's stupid to haul this stuff half way around the world if you could be measuring how far it moves in feet. I'm working toward figuring out how much space it would take for me to grow all of my fresh produce. How many people would have to do this to get a truck off the road? How much gas/pollution/etc could be saved?
Seeds are cheap and cuttings from other plants can be free. I would never buy shallots (or even $5 lettuce most of the time) because it's seems to excessive. If I grow them I can eat them all the time, and my cost is a fraction of what I would be paying otherwise.
There are even tiny ways this helps - I drag less weight home from the grocery store every week (a 7.5 mile drive without public transportation option.) Having my parts laser cut almost eliminated waste plastic. The water I change out from my system just goes into the nearby garden space. If I skip over a processed food for something I grew I save the energy that went into that processing, too.
*The photo is a mid-late summer image, after I had eaten a lot of the lettuce (it was much more overgrown at the top) but before the tomatoes came in. You can see a few yellow flowers low in the picture. Before the frost hit there were a lot of tomatoes to eat, but the season was quite disappointingly cut short by a series of brutal and early overnight freezes. By then the whole thing was so overgrown that I couldn't move it.*
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Aug 1, 2009. 7:55 AMpessoa
says:
This is a beautiful, well-thought-out system and I'd love to see harvest updates!
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Nov 14, 2009. 7:53 PM
technoplastique (author)
says:
technoplastique (author)
says:
Thank you! I just added a late season picture to the last step!
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