Is Indoor Gardening Expensive?
Gardening indoors has its costs in money, time, and effort. Nothing’s free. But is indoor gardening expensive?
To know whether indoor gardening is expensive, you need a baseline. You need to ask, “Compared to what?“. Depending on your circumstances, you could answer that question one of two ways.
If you have a back yard, you might compare the costs of an indoor garden to an outdoor raised bed. If you live in an apartment, where you have no back yard, then you might compare the costs of an indoor garden to buying food at the grocery store.
Non-financial costs factor in the equation. During the pandemic (and still even now), some fresh food just wasn’t available in the grocery store. Is coming home without the fruits and vegetables on your shopping list “expensive”?
What are the Costs of Gardening Indoors Versus an Outdoor Garden?
Estimate the cost of an outdoor raised bed garden
Gardening outdoors can get expensive quickly. The cost estimates below come from building a small raised bed in your back yard. You could save money by forgoing the raised bed and planting directly into the ground. However, a raised bed will likely produce more food in less time with less effort (after you construct it, of course!).
The unit prices shown come from a variety of sources and will change. Take them for the approximate examples they are meant to be. You may have to buy more material than you need due to bundling or volume discounts.
Building the raised bed frame
Let’s sketch out the cost of a 4’x4’x18″ (four foot square, eighteen inches high) raised bed garden.
We’ll construct our raised bed garden frame from cedar lumber. Cedar is naturally resistant to bugs so it’s not treated with chemicals. Treated lumber would work, too, but cedar adheres closer to the ideal of a natural garden.
We’ll need six (6) eight foot cedar 2×6 boards. Cut each in four foot sections. We’ll also need one (1) eight foot cedar 2×4. At $25 per 2×6 and $12 for the 2×4, our cost comes in around $162 for the frame materials. Cut the 2×4 into four 2-foot sections. A box of two and a half inch screws will come in around $20, so we’re up to $182.
Assuming you have a saw and impact driver [affiliate link], you can assemble the four foot long 2x6s into a frame using the two foot long 2x4s as the inside corner braces. Extend the extra six inches or so of the 2x4s into the ground to anchor the raised bed frame. You’ll end up with a frame about four foot by four foot.
I have gophers and other underground critters in my yard, so on my raised beds I added a wire mesh [affiliate link] as a floor before setting the beds into their permanent locations. Wire mesh is costly. You’ll pay a dollar or more per foot for a 48″ wide roll. And you’ll have to buy more than the four feet you want, so this purchase only makes sense if you have a really bad critter infestation or you’ll be constructing multiple beds. At a dollar per foot, a 50′ roll of wire mesh will cost you $50.
I know the wire mesh protects my gardens because when I empty a raised bed I see tunnels crisscrossing right below the wire mesh.
Our costs for our raised bed are up to $232.
You can layer the floor (above the wire mesh) of the bed with scrap cardboard or newspaper (if you can find it). Your call. It’s just an additional weed barrier or water retention tool.
I layered the inside of the raised bed frame with weed barrier fabric [affiliate link]. Fabric comes in 3′ or 4′ wide rolls, although narrower or wider rolls can be found. Thickness of the fabric varies as well. Fabric costs around 25 to 50 cents per foot. Thickness and width factor into the cost. Fifty or hundred foot rolls are very common. At 25 cents per foot, a hundred-foot roll will cost you about $25, so we’ll add that sum to the running total.
A roll of fabric often comes with U-shaped metal anchors. Be sure before buying or buy them separately. However, you’ll need a staple gun [affiliate link] to hold the fabric to the inside walls of the raised bed frame.
You’ll get a couple seasons from your fabric, maybe. The weather really chews it up. The extra you buy can be used to replace damaged fabric later or for a second bed now. I wrap the inside of the bed well, overlapping seams, and bring the fabric up over the top of the frame. You can decide your preferred balance between looks and weed deterrence.
Our raised bed frame price is now up to $282.
Of course, the cost of the frame will vary depending on the materials you use and local prices. Maybe you’ll locate your raised bed on concrete and not need the wire mesh or weed barrier fabric.
Other than the fabric, the frame should last you many years with minimal maintenance. If you want, seal or stain the lumber, keeping in mind you are growing food in this raised bed and roots or branches may come into contact with the frame.
It adds to the cost, but you can build a lip on the edge of the raised bed to act as a bench. Sitting on the edge of a 2×6 can get uncomfortable quickly.
Another improvement you can make to your raised bed frame is a trellis or hoop cover. Since the frame is made of wood, mounting attachments to your frame is easy.
The cost of building a cedar raised bed frame with the mesh floor comes in just under three hundred dollars. You can save money up front by purchasing a metal raised bed kit [affiliate link]. A metal raised bed kit would cost about a third of the cost of the cedar frame bed. However, the cedar frame bed should last years longer than a “kit in a box”. One argument for the metal raised bed kit is that you have a variety of colors from which to choose.
Filling the raised bed frame
A raised bed frame four (4) feet long by four (4) feet wide by eighteen (18) inches tall holds twenty-four (24) cubic feet of grow media when filled to the brim. Grow media consists of some combination of peat moss, coconut coir, vermiculite, perlite, compost [affiliate links], and/or other materials.
Three cubic feet of peat moss costs about $22 at my local big-box store. Compost costs about $6.50 per cubic foot at that same store. Vermiculite [affiliate link] runs about $18 per cubic foot in bulk. Using Mel’s Mix Formula, filling 24 cubic feet of the raised bed costs roughly $262.
The materials breakdown is 3 three-cubic-foot bags of peat moss (you’ll have some left-overs), 8 bags of compost, and 2 four-cubic-foot bags of vermiculite.
Constructing the raised bed frame and filling it brings the overall cost to $544.
Rounding out the raised bed garden
You’ll also purchase incidentals for your raised bed garden. Fertilizer is a given. You may want some soil modifiers. If you construct a raised bed garden, you owe it to yourself to read the book, “All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition” [affiliate link], by Mel Bartholomew. The book has value for the indoor gardener, as well, as you’ll see later in this article.
We’ll just put the purchase price of incidentals at $56, so our raised bed project lands at a flat $600.
The estimated cost of a raised bed garden does not include a drip irrigation watering kit [affiliate link]. Nor does the cost include the cost of using more city water (or electricity, if you’re on a well system). When you spray water on your garden, you water the entire surface, even if no plants grow there. Drip irrigation delivers water directly to each plant. And with your drip irrigation system attached to a water hose timer [affiliate link], your plants don’t suffer from neglect. You could easily spend $50 to $100 on a complete drip irrigation system.
A 4'x4'x18" raised bed garden costs about $600
Our raised bed as described cost us about $600.
You can reduce the cost by substituting treated lumber for the cedar and skipping the wire mesh floor. You could reduce your lumber and grow media expenses by making the bed only twelve inches tall.
You could just purchase a raised bed frame kit, which certainly lowers the initial cost, but probably ends up costing more in the long term as a store-bought kit may deteriorate quicker.
Six hundred dollars sounds like a steep cost for a garden in the back yard. But that’s still less expensive than a powerful gasoline-powered tiller [affiliate link] like you’d need to start a fresh in-ground garden.
But what do you get for that $600?
Square Foot Gardening maximizes the yield of your raised bed garden. You can grow as many as 16 plants in one square foot, and you have 16 squares in your 4×4 garden. The Square Foot Gardening Foundation offers a chart listing many garden foods and how many plants of each you can grow per square foot.
You could grow 256 radish plants in your 4×4 garden. That’s 16 radishes per square foot, 16 square feet. Or 16 pepper plants, at one per square foot. Or 4 tomato plants, which take 4 squares each.
(OK, actually, you could cheat and grow radishes around your taller, slower-growing plants since radishes grow small and fast. The radishes will be harvested before the tomato or pepper plant grows tall enough to block the sunlight.)
Let’s put this into perspective. The back of a packet of radishes recommends planting radishes in a 12″ wide row one inch apart. 256 radishes (the number that fits in the raised bed) spaced an inch apart takes more than twenty-one linear feet. You need to plow a twenty-two foot long row a foot wide to grow 256 radishes the old-fashioned way.
The benefits of the raised bed add up. Your in-ground radishes grow in dirt. With dirt, you get what you get. To get the most from dirt, you need to have it analyzed and apply compost and/or fertilizers (possibly over multiple seasons) to compensate for any deficiencies. Even dirt isn’t free! Your raised bed garden offers a plant super-soil that encourages faster growth and healthier plants than is possible with plain dirt.
Your raised bed slows down or prevents weeds from competing with your plants. You can lay a weed barrier on top of your garden soil to further discourage weed growth. Your plants get all the food and water to themselves.
So, as you can see, a raised bed garden crushes a dirt garden consisting of plowed rows and makes a worthy competitor to indoor gardening. But how does the cost of a raised bed compare to an indoor garden? Well, this is where we try to compare apples and oranges.
Apples to oranges: Comparing the cost of growing food indoors versus outdoors in a raised bed
Comparing growing food outdoors in a raised bed to growing food indoors is something of an apples to oranges comparison.
In this scenario, your reason for gardening is providing fresh food to your family. You want herbs to include in your recipes and ingredients for salads or salsa. Your goal is to grow exactly what you need, not looking to grow extra that you give away, preserve, or discard.
A 4×4 raised bed has 16 squares. Let’s say you set up your raised bed this way.
- 4 Basil
- 4 Parsley
- 1 Mint
- 1 Dill
- 1 Thyme
- 1 Cilantro
- 16 Carrots
- 16 Onions
- 16 Radishes
- 4 Leaf Lettuce
- 1 Bell Pepper
- 1 Jalapeno
- 1 Tomato (which takes the remaining 4 squares)
Let’s start comparing costs with some intangibles.
Overplanting
You planted four basil and four parsley plants. The square foot gardening chart said you can put four of each in one square, so you did. Do you need four basil plants? Unlikely. This highlights one cost of gardening outdoors. You plant more than you need to compensate for produce lost to weather, critters, and disease. Overplanting costs resources, space, and time. You’ll give away or discard what you don’t need.
Your indoor garden grows in a near-perfect environment. The only bugs that find your plants are the ones you let into your home. Disease is nearly non-existent in an indoor garden. Feeding and watering follow a beneficial schedule. Therefore, you probably can get all the basil you need from a single plant.
When comparing the cost of an outdoor garden to an indoor garden, remember you can grow fewer plants indoors. You save space, effort, time, and resources growing fewer plants indoors.
Short growing season
Depending on where you live, your growing season outdoors may be two to five months.
The narrow harvesting season for food grown outdoors increases the cost per plant per year. You can plant seeds each week for a staggered harvest to distribute your yield. But that harvest is still limited by the growing season.
An indoor garden grows food all year long. You can stagger plant life cycles in your indoor garden so you always have a producing plant. Any money spent on an indoor garden kit (discussed later) buys you a garden 365 days a year. When comparing fixed dollar amounts for an outdoor garden versus an indoor garden, remember an outdoor garden is idle half the year.
To be clear, your six-hundred-dollar raised bed frame provides you a garden only half the year.
No long-term storage options
You planted 4 leaf lettuce plants. For the entire season, you’ll clip lettuce leaves for some salads in July and August, and then you’re back to buying lettuce in the store when your plants die from the heat. Lettuce doesn’t store well. This is almost a “Why bother?” situation.
You don’t worry about how to store food or how long your stored food will last with an indoor garden. Your indoor garden grows food every day of the year. You harvest leaves of lettuce for your salad and the plant grows more. You pick tomatoes, and the plant grows more.
Indoor gardening is continuous gardening.
Risk of loss due to uncontrollable variables
Financial institutions use a mathematical formula to calculate the cost of risk of an investment, and they increase how much their investment must earn to offset that risk. You need to calculate the risk to your outdoor plants as a cost.
The plants growing in your outdoor garden are at risk. Severe weather—heat or cold, drought or flood—can kill your plants. Bugs and deer can eat your plants. Disease can ruin a plant.
In the hypothetical raised bed, you’ve planted one each of mint, dill, thyme, cilantro, tomato, bell pepper, and jalapeno. You calculated one tomato plant will supply all you need. But if you check your garden in the morning to find a plump neon-green caterpillar wiping the corner of its mouth as it relaxes on the stump that used to be your tomato plant, you’ll realize you just lost your entire tomato crop.
The time, effort, and resources you expend defending your plants is a cost of growing food outdoors.
By growing food indoors, you protect your plants from nearly all the destroyers. You all but eliminate the risks to your plants. But it gets better.
If somehow your indoor garden plant dies prematurely, you can immediately start growing another. Very soon, you’ll have a replacement.
Dollar Comparison
The 4×4 raised bed framework, filled with special grow media, represents the outdoor garden. Indoors, you’ll grow your garden in a Hydroponic Growing System and a Self-Watering Container System.
A Hydroponic Growing System is a long, technical name for an indoor gardening appliance. It’s an all-in-one gardening device you can set up in minutes right from the box. A Hydroponic Growing System works wonders growing plants with “normal” roots, but is the wrong tool for plants with bulbs, tubers, and taproots.
A Self-Watering Container System could be described as a raised bed garden, utilizing square foot gardening techniques, adapted for use indoors. Unlike the Hydroponic Growing System, which comes in a box, you assemble a Self-Watering Container System from components you buy separately.
It’s a system
Before continuing, take note that both indoor techniques are classified as a “system”. Not a device or an appliance or a kit. These systems, one started, do all they can to automate the process of growing food for you. You power the system with electricity and maintain the system by adding water and nutrients.
You can build a Hydroponic Growing System from components you have on hand or buy a ready-made device, but, regardless, the system is the same. Follow the system, get a bountiful indoor garden.
Hydroponic Growing System
A Hydroponic Growing System gardening appliance is a “garden in a box”. Setting up a garden is not much more complicated than following these steps.
- Unpack your Hydroponic Growing System
- Fill tub with water
- Add seed(s) to each pod
- Seat pods in openings in tub lid
- Add nutrients to water
- Plug it in
If you’re factoring in the cost of your effort and time when starting a garden, that list should have sold you on indoor gardening already! We’re talking minutes to set up a garden.
A 6-pod Hydroponic Growing System takes up about as much countertop space as a 2-slice toaster.
In the raised bed example, you planted 4 basil, 4 parsley, a mint, a dill, and a thyme plant. That’s 5 square feet of your garden. With a Hydroponic Growing System, using a toaster-sized area of you kitchen countertop, you can grow one each of basil, parsley, mint, dill, and thyme, plus one more herb.
The AeroGarden Harvest Elite [affiliate link] Hydroponic Growing System comes with pods already seeded with parsley, mint, dill, thyme, and two types of basil (meaning you can skip step 3 in the list above). The entire garden is less than 7 inches by 11 inches. That’s a savings of more than four square feet versus growing your food outdoors.
Our example Hydroponic Growing System comes with seats for 6 pods. If you really need those two basil and three parsley plants, just get a Hydroponic Growing System that holds 18 pods (such as this one from MUFGA [affiliate link]). In the area typically occupied by a small microwave, you can grow all your herbs plus the 4 leaf lettuce plants and have room left over for that cilantro plant and two more small plants. Wow!
The cost of a Hydroponic Growing System seems to be coming down. Fierce competition in this market prevents even the most popular company from raising its prices too high. This contrasts with the back yard raised bed garden, which only gets more expensive each year.
For this example, we’ll get two 12-plant Hydroponic Growing Systems. To save a few dollars, we’ll forgo the convenience of WiFi, which is being built into a growing number of appliances.
In one container, you’ll grow your basil, parsley, mint, dill, thyme, and leaf lettuce. You can leave three pod seats unused to space out your plants. You don’t have to use every pod seat.
In the second container, you’ll grow your (cherry) tomato, bell pepper, and jalapeno pepper plants. Choose a Hydroponic Growing System that offers an 18 to 24 inch (preferred) gap between the tray and the light. These are taller plants that will take all the room you give them.
Your two Hydroponic Growing Systems, which replace thirteen (13) square feet in your raised bed, occupy less than three (3) square feet in your house. You can put them on a counter, on an end table, or on a shelf unit. (Leave enough vertical space for the light deck to fully extend.)
What’s your cost? Each 12-pod garden can be purchased for approximately $50. You’re into this for about a hundred dollars ($100). Watch for sales like Amazon’s Prime Day or Big Deal Days.
At this point you’re into the indoor garden for $100. You nourish your plants by adding liquid food to the water tank. Several companies offer plant food compatible with your Hydroponic Growing System.
You can buy a 1000 milliliter (1 liter) bottle of AeroGarden liquid food. At 24mL per feeding every 2 weeks, you’ll get more than a year of feedings from a single bottle for a 12-pod tank. Figure on two bottles for the year, since you have two 12-pod gardens. (Note the dosage recommendations are for an AeroGarden 12-pod device, and you may need to adapt dosage for other brands.)
Alternatively you can buy plant food from the manufacturer of the Hydroponic Growing System you bought. This will be an ongoing expense you can budget for once you get in a routine with your plants.
We’ll set the annual cost for plant food at $100. That may be a little on the high side. But padding the amount allows you to stay under budget even as you experiment with a few different solutions to see what best suits your own garden.
Now, what’s missing? Seeds! We didn’t add the cost of the seeds into the raised bed price estimate because we’ll buy the same seed packets for any garden. But you’ll spend about $4 per packet and we listed 10 different plants that will be grown in the Hydroponic Growing System, so that comes to about $40.
The cost of electricity will be a factor. The power supply for one 6-pod Hydroponic Garden System with a controller, water pump, and 22 watt (22w) LED shows a rating of 0.8 amps at 120 volts. Let’s do the math to figure the annual cost per device.
120 volts * .8 amps is 96 watts.
96 watts * 24 hours is 2304 watts, or 2.3kW (kilowatt), per day.
2.3kW * $0.13/kWh (kilowatt hour) is $0.30 per day.
$0.30/day * 365 d/year = $109 / year
We have two devices, so that totals up to $218 per year in electricity. But that is not realistic. The Hydroponic Growing System only powers the light for 16 hours per day at most. And the pump only runs a few minutes per hour; thirty minutes at most. The computer runs all the time.
We can cut the cost of 8 hours of light and 60% of the cost of running the pump. $218 * .667 (two-thirds) is roundabout $145, or slightly more than $12 per month. We’ll estimate the cost of electricity per year for two 12-pod gardens at $145.
(Note: You can use a Kill A Watt electricity usage monitor [affiliate link] to get a very close approximation of your actual costs.)
We didn’t add the cost of city water to the cost of the raised bed but did include the cost of electricity when calculating the cost of the indoor garden. Growing food indoors just has fewer hidden costs!
Your indoor garden, with 10 of the 13 plants from your raised bed, rings up at a total of roughly $345 (not counting the seeds).
Did you remember this is a comparison between apples and oranges? The indoor garden runs all year long. The $345 is for 12 months of food growth, whereas the raised bed is for half that, just 6 months.
An outdoor raised bed garden costs $600 versus a pair of indoor Hydroponic Growing System appliances that cost $345, but the Hydroponic Growing System appliances provide a continuous growing season.
But we still need to grow our onions, radishes, and carrots.
Self-Watering Container System
To properly grow onions, radishes, and carrots, you need soil. Not dirt. Enter the Self-Watering Container System, a variation of the raised bed garden adapted for use indoors.
The Self-Watering Container System consists of a self-watering container, modified for use indoors; quality soil, additives, and fertilizer; and a powerful grow light on a timer.
A self-watering container participates in watering your plants.
You are familiar with a traditional flower pot. You pour water on the soil surface and a dish under the pot catches the excess. That water just evaporates; it’s wasted, so you have to water the plant often.
A self-watering container holds soil above a water reservoir. The floor of the soil basin dips into the water reservoir, and holes allow water to wet that soil. The water in the soil wicks up through the soil.
To see that wicking action, dip the edge of a paper towel in a puddle of water on your kitchen counter. The water defies gravity to flow up the paper towel.
The water coming up from the water reservoir draws the roots of the plants down to meet it.
Holes in the floor of the soil basin (above the water line) allow deep roots direct access to the water reservoir.
You fill the reservoir by pouring water down a tube in a self-watering container. The only time you water the soil directly is when you establish your garden. The water reservoir allows you to go days between waterings.
A hole in the container allows excess water to spill out should you try filling the container above the recommended fill line. Since you’ll be using this container indoors, you must provide a pan or cup to catch the overflow water.
A Self-Watering Container System works better with seedlings you started from seeds elsewhere than with seeds themselves. This expense is not covered here, like the drip irrigation was not covered for the raised bed garden. Interesting note: you can use your Hydroponic Growing System to start your seeds and transplant seedlings to your Self-Watering Container System. This just keeps getting better!
EarthBox and Emsco offer popular self-watering containers. Those are the EarthBox Original [affiliate link] (rectangular), EarthBox Root & Veg [affiliate link] (square, deeper), and the Emsco City Picker [affiliate link].
The EarthBox website provides a handy planting chart that shows how many plants you can grow and offers helpful information about many plants.
Since the container holds about 2 cubic feet of growing media, it’s easy to just buy a bag ready-made (like Espoma Organic Potting Soil Mix [affiliate link]) and pour it in. You can mix in any soil modifiers (like dolomite) before applying a strip of fertilizer to the soil surface.
You cannot compare a self-watering container directly to a raised bed garden using square foot gardening techniques. Some plants you can grow in less space but others require more space.
You can grow two tomato plants in a single self-watering container. Two tomato plants in a raised bed occupy eight (8) square feet. So a self-watering container truly wins that comparison. But a self-watering container with about two (2) square feet of surface area can grow only 16 carrots or radishes, which is half what could be grown in the same area of a raised bed. The loss is greater for onions, which drops to about 12 in the self-watering container.
In the comparison between the raised bed and the Hydroponic Growing Systems, we chose to grow one basil plant indoors versus the four growing in the raised bed. Could we reduce the number of plants grown in the Self-Watering Container System and still have a fair comparison?
We can grow 16 carrots, 16 radishes, and 16 onions in three square feet of the raised bed. We grew that many because we could. Do we need to harvest 16 onions, carrots, and radishes all at once? We could stagger the harvest so we get one onion, two carrots, and two radishes a week, but that only gets us food for 3 weeks and then we’re without food until each plant matures. And it also assumes three types of plants will be ready to harvest at the same time.
Our indoor garden requires two Self-Watering Container Systems.
You can plant 6 onions along the long edge of an EarthBox, pour the fertilizer along the center line, and grow 8 carrots on the other side. In the other container, plant 8 radishes along one long edge and a mix of carrots and radishes (up to 8 total) along the other long edge. You don’t plant them all at once. Plant one onion and a couple radishes and carrots, then plant again in a week. Continue to get a rotation of harvests and feedings. Adjust to satisfy your needs.
Let’s look at costs.
A self-watering container can run roughly $40 – $70, depending on what comes in the kit. Let’s go with $60 for this example.
A typical Self-Watering Container System holds about 2 cubic feet of soil. As was done above, let’s estimate high at $40.
A pound of 7-7-7 fertilizer can be had for around $5.
You’ll need a pound of natural dolomite, but a 5 pound bag costs only a bit more than a 1 pound bag, so just buy the larger bag for $18 and keep the leftovers for later.
Finally, you’ll need a grow light. Watch the sales and you should be able to get a 100 watt grow LED for at or below $60. The large surface area of your garden requires a large light to cover it all and the extra power handles taller plants.
Add $10 for a basic timer you can program to light up your garden 16 hours per day.
You can calculate the cost of electricity for one light using this formula.
100 watts * 16 hours per day * 365 days per year = 584 kWh per year
584 kWh per year * $0.13 per kWh = $73 per year
Your electrical costs will be $73 per year if you run the light 16 hours per day at full power. With a dimmable light, you can cut that cost down significantly. However, for the sake of this project, we’ll factor in the full cost.
The bill for all these parts comes to $256. If you watch sales and conserve electricity, you can lower the cost quite a bit.
To match the raised bed garden, you need two Self-Watering Container Systems, so the actual total comes to $512.
Dollar Comparison
The $512 for the two Self-Watering Container Systems plus $345 for the pair of Hydroponic Growing Systems brings your one year indoor garden bill to $857.
Wow. That sounds terrible! The raised bed costs only about $600.
But back up. Oranges to apples comparison, remember?
The indoor garden runs all year long, twice as long as the raised bed garden. You can build a greenhouse to extend your outdoor growing season, but that adds considerable cost to the outside garden and you still only get to grow a very limited selection of plants during the cold months.
Your indoor garden rarely loses any plants to bugs.
You don’t have to go outside to plant, maintain, or harvest your garden.
You control just about every variable of your indoor garden, allowing you to experiment to find repeatable ways to improve your yield.
You waste less food by growing only as much as you’ll eat.
Nobody sees your garden unless you invite them into your home.
You don’t get eaten alive by mosquitos while tending to your garden.
Live plants in your home can be very calming and the bright grow lights might reduce the winter blahs.
Conclusion of the comparison of outdoor and indoor gardens
You compared the cost of a 4×4 raised bed outside to an indoor garden comprised of two Hydroponic Growing Systems with 12 pods each combined with two Self-Watering Container Systems. The yield of each garden was different but reflected the strengths of the environment.
The in-home garden came in at a higher cost (although adding in your increased water bill and a drip irrigation system for the raised bed would have narrowed the difference). But you get twice the growing season and many conveniences bundled with the indoor garden. A continuous growing season makes the in-home garden the less expensive option overall. The raised bed outdoors simply cannot compete with that.
The title of the article is, “Is Indoor Gardening Expensive?”. It’s costly, especially when paying for all the equipment that first year. But look at the dramatically lower costs during subsequent years, and indoor gardening becomes much more the bargain.
But how does that indoor garden compare to just buying your food at the store?
What are the Costs of Gardening Indoors Versus Buying Food at the Grocery Store?
You could just forgo the garden (indoor or outdoor) and just buy all your food at the grocery store. Let’s explore the cost difference of buying your food or growing it indoors.
Onions are $1.25 per pound.
Cilantro is $0.60 per clump.
Parsley is $0.60 per clump.
Carrots cost $1.00 per pound.
Radishes are about $2.00 per bag of about eight.
Romaine lettuce is about $2.00 per stalk.
Cherry tomatoes are $4.00 per pound.
Bell peppers cost about a dollar each.
Jalapenos cost $1.00 per pound.
Spices like oregano, dill, basil, thyme, and mint come preserved in plastic dispensers. You’ll pay between one and five dollars per spice container.
Your indoor garden, as calculated above, is $857 for the first year. For later years, your costs will be electricity, pods for your Hydroponic Growing Systems, plant food and fertilizer, and seeds. We’ll figure $325 per year, give or take some, after the first year.
So, when you’re at the grocery store and buy 200 pounds of cherry tomatoes, you’ll just be breaking even! No, you don’t shop like that.
How much do you spend per week on fresh food? Depending on what you need, maybe $10 per week? That’s $520 per year. Huh. $520 per year comes in pretty close to the cost of a first-year garden and more than the annual garden cost after the first year.
Compared to an indoor garden, shopping at the grocery store doesn’t seem to save you much money.
Moreover, your in-home garden provides fresh herbs, not the dried stuff in the plastic containers. There’s value in that.
The grocery store wins on the convenience factor, given you were going there anyway. Just drop it in the cart and pay on the way out. But what if the grocery store shelf is empty the day you shop?
Another benefit of growing your own food is you get to choose the exact variety of lettuce or tomato or pepper you get. And so long as you arrange your plant growth schedules, you can always have something ready to harvest.
Start small and built your indoor garden
When comparing the costs of an indoor garden to a raised bed garden outdoors, we compared two large-scale gardens. But when comparing an indoor garden to the grocery store produce section, we can compare growing individual plants to buying individual foods at the store.
What if you simply wanted to grow lettuce at home rather than purchase it at the grocery? Or cherry tomatoes?
Store-bought cherry tomatoes can be rather expensive, sometimes costing as much as $5 for a small container. And for lettuce, your grocery store choices are iceberg, romaine, or that basket with the random mixed leaves.
What could you do with a basic 13-pod Hydroponic Growing System like the stylish LetPot garden [affiliate link]? Grow 13 types of lettuce [affiliate link], course! One advantage of growing food in your own kitchen is choosing what you grow, and being able to grow it in small batches. Get a matching set of LetPot gardens and grow just your lettuce and cherry tomatoes, two of the most expensive grocery produce products.
Do you like a variety of peppers but cannot find them at the grocery store? Grow your own peppers [affiliate link]. If this strikes your fancy, look for a Hydroponic Growing System with 24″ clearance under the grow light so plants have room to grow. You’ll want a powerful grow light for such tall plants, a light like the 50 watt light on the AeroGarden Bounty Elite (which also has WiFi) [affiliate link].
Manufacturers will promote how many different types of foods you can grow in your Hydroponic Growing System. They neglect to mention you can grow a large crop of just one type of plant, if that is your interest. You have so many options in how you use your indoor garden appliances.
Just a side note here. A “kitchen countertop garden appliance”, the Hydroponic Growing System, makes a superb gift. It’s inexpensive, it’s compact, and it’s useful. People love growing things. If the person you have in mind prefers growing flowers, a Hydroponic Growing System can grow flowers. Check out the Bountiful Indoor Garden page for indoor garden gifts for indoor garden gift ideas.
Conclusion of the comparison of outdoor and indoor gardens
Grocery shopping for produce is less expensive than growing it in-house. At least when compared to the garden start-up costs.
However, product shortages, questionable quality or freshness, and lack of variety make shopping for fresh food unpredictable. And not everything is actually fresh, like many of the herbs.
Key Takeaways
Which brings us back to the question, is indoor gardening expensive? Relatively, no. Does it cost money? Yes. Might you spend more than if you just got all your food from the grocery store? Maybe.
Setting up an indoor garden involves a lower outlay than a raised bed garden outdoors but comes in higher at the end of the first year after factoring in the cost of electricity.
Buying produce at the grocery store is less expensive than either garden type, but you’re dependent upon a shaky supply chain. And growing your own food gets less expensive the second year, potentially even dropping below the cost of food from the grocery store.
The costs of growing food in a raised bed versus indoors versus just buying it come in fairly close. It’s the intangibles that tip the win to growing your food indoors.
Your fresh food is just a couple steps away from where you’re preparing dinner. You can snatch a cherry tomato off the plant and pop it in your mouth as you walk through the kitchen. You can harvest all the food for salads for you and your guests while they watch. Having plants in your home can be calming.
Don’t let the costs deter you from gardening indoors. Start small, maybe just a single Hydroponic Growing System and a variety of lettuce seeds. Expand your garden as you gain experience and confidence.
The prices used on this page are the “retail” costs. Shop the sales to save money on components. You’ll soon have a well-rounded indoor garden.
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