Squash Opportunity Cost

When I was a graduate student living in the Eagle Heights Apartments at the University of Wisconsin, I planted my first garden, and every summer since then I have continued to garden. This summer I have been worrying about the costs involved in my garden.

The most obvious cost is the time of gardening itself. Is it really worth doing? When I came to Rensselaer 30 plus years ago, the college had recently started allowing faculty and staff to have gardens on a two-acre plot of land west of the college. In those early years the entire two acres was divided up and planted in plots that were as large as 100 feet by 25 feet. But over the years the number of gardeners dropped, and gradually the only a small part of the area was being planted. In the summer of 2006 I was the only one left. In the summer of 2007 the physical plant people just ignored my requests for garden space, so I moved my garden to my back yard. Did the rest of the people decide that their time was better spent doing something else? They did not even know that a herd of deer had made gardening much more difficult than it had been in the past.

In the spring when the garden looks empty, I have a tendency to over plant. This spring some animal kept nipping the pea plants as they emerged, so I thought I should put something in the emptiness that resulted. I put in a couple of squash. Now two months later the squash are trying to take over everything. I have not had good luck in the past with squash. I have always had problems with squash vine borers, which are moths that as adults look like bees, but as larvae live in the vines of squash plants, and if they are too numerous, kill them.

If my huge squash plants do not get killed by the squash vine borers (and I know they are there, because I have killed three adults and been unable to catch several others), I will have a bumper crop of acorn squash. But if the plants do get killed, I have sacrificed the chance to use that space for things that are pretty sure to produce, like beans and beats. I guess life is good when that is the sort of thing you are worrying about.

My other space allocation decision that I wonder about is my decision to plant potatoes. My colleague Brian offered potatoes to anyone who wanted them this spring. Brian belongs to a seed saver exchange that I think tries to preserve old varieties of plants. One of the varieties of potatoes he offered was Carola and I took a few. However, I wonder whether, given the limited space I cultivate and the very low cost of potatoes in the store, I should be growing potatoes at all. I know that I should not grow sweet corn. The yield is too low (and uncertain given the raccoons who stroll by at night), and most years I am given plenty by my friend Marge whose husband farms.

So a garden is not really free food. I justify spending the time there by telling myself that it is a hobby. A hobby is something that you cannot justify on a simple cost-benefit tabulation. You have to include the benefits of enjoyment, and that enjoyment often seems a bit strange to people who do not share the hobby, to make the benefits exceed the costs.

Update, Oct 4, 2008

I got lucky this summer. The bugs did not kill the squash and they spread out to cover much of the back yard.
The end result was a decent harvest of squash. Here a a few of them. If I plant them next year, I will put them some place else, where they can interfere with the grass, not other garden plants.