If you’ve been following my blog over the past year, you’ll know that my husband and I have been engaged in a little project to record everything we harvest from the garden for an entire year—winter solstice to winter solstice.

Well, we passed the solstice earlier this week, and with it, our project has come to a close. My husband, data wrangler extraordinaire, did some calculations and created a graph of our harvest to help us visualise and understand our data (see below).

Some quick takeaways from the data:

• We harvested a total of 771 kg of food (91 different crops) from the garden over the past year!
• Our largest crop was pumpkins, at 115 kg.
• We picked a whopping 97 kg of tomatoes over a 7-month-long season.
• Our chooks laid 1047 eggs weighing a total of 53 kg!
• Although I tried to be reasonable when planting zucchini, we still harvested 51 kg of them.
• We harvested 40 kg of sweet corn after a terrible, late start to the season.
• Our smallest crop was saffron—dried, the entire year’s harvest weighed less than 1 gram.

What an amazing year!

I’m not sure I fully grasped the sheer volume of food our garden produces, and I certainly didn’t think I’d be tallying up nearly 800 kg of food from this property six years ago when we arrived on what was then an absolutely stripped and sterile piece of land. It’s amazing what a lot of hard work and tonnes of manure can accomplish in six years!

I don’t know the monetary value of the year’s produce, but it hardly matters. The garden has fed us like royalty all year. Provided us food of a quality money can’t buy, not to mention all the weird and wonderful crops and varieties we grow that never appear in the grocery store and simply aren’t available unless you grow them yourself. In addition, I’ve given away countless eggs, zucchini, cucumbers, pumpkins, currants, quince, and more, helping to feed those around us as well. 

Eat your heart out, Elon Musk! Your trillion cannot possibly give you as much joy as my 771 kg of fresh produce.