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By Root 976 0

than half live within striking distance of a farmers’ market (some estimates put it at 70 percent), and most have the cash to buy some things beyond their next meal. One of those things could be a thirty-pound bag of tomatoes, purchased some Saturday in July and taken home to be turned into winter foods. Plenty of people have freezers that are humming away at this moment to chill, among other things, some cardboard. That space could be packed with some local zucchini and beans. Any garage or closet big enough for two months’ worth of canned goods from Costco could stash, instead, some bushels of potatoes, onions, and apples, purchased cheaply in season. Even at the more upscale farmers’ markets in the D.C. area, organic Yukon Gold potatoes run $2 a pound in late summer. A bushel costs about the same as dinner for four in a good restaurant, and lasts 2,800 times as long. Local onions and Ginger Gold apples at the same market cost less than the potatoes, and the same or less than their transported counterparts at a nearby Whole Foods.

It doesn’t cost a fortune, in other words. Nor does it require a pickup truck, or a calico bonnet. Just the unique belief that summer is the right time to go to the fresh market with cash in hand and say to some vendors: I’ll take all you have. It’s an entirely reasonable impulse, to stock up on what’s in season. Most of my farming and gardening friends do it. Elsewhere, Aesop is history. Grasshoppers rule, ants drool.

Three-quarters of the way through our locavore year, the process was becoming its own reward for us. We were jonesing for a few things, certainly, including time off: occasionally I clanged dirty pot lids together in frustration and called kitchen strikes. But more often than not, dinnertime called me into the kitchen for the comfort of predictable routines, as respite from the baked-on intellectual residue of work and life that is inevitably messier than pots and pans. In a culture that assigns nil prestige to domestic work, I usually self-deprecate when anyone comments on my gardening and cooking-from-scratch lifestyle. I explain that I have to do something brainless to unwind from my work, and I don’t like TV. But the truth is, I enjoy this so-called brainless work. I like the kind of family I can raise on this kind of food.

Still, what kind of person doesn’t ask herself at the end of a hard day’s work: Was it worth it? Maybe because of the highly documented status of our experiment, I now felt compelled to quantify the work we had done in terms that would translate across the culture gap—i.e., moolah. I had kept detailed harvest records in my journal. Now I sat at my desk and added up columns.

Between April and November, the full cash value of the vegetables, chickens, and turkeys we’d raised and harvested was $4,410. To get this figure I assigned a price to each vegetable and the poultry per pound on the basis of organic equivalents (mostly California imports) in the nearest retail outlet where they would have been available at the time we’d harvested our own. The value-added products, our several hundred jars of tomato sauce and other preserved foods, plus Lily’s full-year egg contribution, would add more than 50 percent to the cash value of our garden’s production.

That’s retail value, of course, much more than we would have earned from selling our goods wholesale (as most farmers do), but it’s the actual monetary value to us, saved from our annual food budget by means of our own animal and vegetable production and processing. We also had saved by eating mostly at home, doing our own cooking, but that isn’t figured into the tally. Our costs, beyond seeds, chicken feed, and our own labor, had been minimal. Our second job in the backyard, as we had come to think of it, was earning us the equivalent of some $7,500 of annual income.

That’s more than a hill of beans. In my younger days I spent a few years as a freelance journalist before I hit that mark. And ironically, it now happens to be the median annual income of laborers who work in this country’s fields and orchards.