I paid my Federal and state income taxes yesterday, so that means it’s almost time for our last frost date. This, in Northern Virginia, Zone 7.
This post is a bit of a potpourri regarding
- taxes,
- last frost dates,
- paper pots, and
- whatever happened to seed starting mix?
1: The joy of tax-free vegetables, or how to misunderestimate the value of food gardening.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The oddest facts I can recall from my education in economics have to do with the National Income and Product Accounts. That would be GDP accounting, to you civilians. Back in the day, I had to memorize most of the major details of how Uncle Sam figures out the value of Gross Domestic Product. (Back then, Gross National Product, which is a slightly different concept.) For reasons that totally escape me, bits of that stick with me 40 years later.
Most people have a vague understanding of GDP. It’s something like the total market value of all final (for-consumption) goods and services produced by U.S. citizens and their capital. And, in general, things that don’t get traded via a market simply don’t get counted.
Except sometimes.
In some areas where something of value is consumed, but there’s no market transaction, Uncle Sam just kind of makes up a number. These are the imputations in the GDP calculation. And these imputations are legion.
So, in 2021, US GDP was $23.3 trillion. But of that, $3.5 trillion (17%) is made up — that is, imputed.
I’m not here to dump on those imputations. IMHO, those imputations are necessary, well-thought-out, and about as accurate as they can reasonably be expected to be. The numbers are better with them than without them.
I just wanted to point out an historical artifact. One of the formal, major imputations in U.S. GDP accounting is a $200M imputation for the value of food that is grown and consumed on the farm, and never makes it to market. (That’s circled in red above.) Without going into the details (about 2% of Americans live on a farm), I make that GDP imputation amounts to about $30 worth of farm products, per-farm-resident-capita, consumed on the farm.
Arguably, we only have that adjustment because farms were a vastly more important part of the economic landscape when GDP accounting was first developed. That all took place in the Great Depression, at which point we still had about 20% of the U.S. population on farms or ranches.
Source: Farm bill fairness.org
The key point here isn’t necessarily the size of the adjustment, it’s the reason they had to make an adjustment. There’s no money transaction for food that is grown and eaten on a farm.
Not sure how accurate the underlying Federal figure is (it doesn’t matter, so I’d be surprised if a lot of effort went into it.) I’m fairly sure that one of the reasons it’s low is that this only accounts for the products of the farm enterprise. For a corn farmer in Iowa, it would be an estimate of the fraction of the corn crop they eat, rather than sell.
Just taking that at face value, I’m guessing that my back-yard vegetable garden produces that much. A few hundred dollars’ worth of vegetables per year, say.
That’s a drop in the bucket, in our overall spending on food in and out of the home.
But it’s a very sweet drop, in that it’s not taxed. If you buy groceries from the store, you’re paying with after-tax dollars. Roughly speaking, if you earn wage income, all things considered, depending on your income and where you live, you probably need to earn around $1.50 in order to buy $1.00 worth of groceries. That’s my rough estimate of the effect of Social Security and Medicare taxes, state and federal income taxes, and sales taxes.
I have just two points here. If you’re working out the math of value versus expense for your vegetable garden, be sure to multiply the difference by 1.5. Because that’s how much income you don’t have to earn, if you replace store-bought produce with your garden-raised produce. In terms of income avoided, it’s worth more than just the prices you’d pay at the store.
Second, don’t just think of home gardening as a way to get exercise and grow fresh produce. Think of it as a way to stick it to the tax man. Legally. As with all forms of D-I-Y production, there’s no money payment for the final product or service (and you are not engaged in a barter-based commercial enterprise), so there’s no tax due.
My tomatoes taste all the better for it.
2: Last frost dates and improved weather forecasting.
This is just a quick recap of my utterly incomprehensible post G21-005.
Source: Garden.org.
Springtime last frost dates aren’t hard numbers, they are probabilities. Briefly, take the last 30 years or so of temperature data for your area. Take the low temperature recorded for each day. And, for any given day in the spring, just count how often you saw a frost on that date or later, in the past 30 years.
In my case, over a reference 30-year period, there was a frost in 10% of the years, following April 21st. So April 21 would be my 10th percentile last frost date. If the climate is stable, then nine years out of ten, if I plant my frost-sensitive plants on that date, they’ll survive.
But those are simple, crude averages. They assume that you will plant on a given day, regardless of the coming forecast. My guess is, they were developed in an era before we had reliable long-range weather forecasting. Likely you’d get a forecast for a day or two out, but not much more than that. So weather forecasting just didn’t figure into the picture.
But now, we have reliable five-day forecasts, reasonably reliable 7-day forecasts, and possibly even some forecasting skill in 10-day forecasts. But the entire process of calculating last-frost dates hasn’t adjusted accordingly.
The upshot of that is that what’s labeled my 30th percentile last-frost date above is actually my 10% percentile or better. For the simple reason that if there is frost in the forecast, I won’t plant. But if I hit the 15th with no frost forecast for the next week, excluding major forecasting error, I’m guaranteed to make it to the 21st — my 10th percentile frost date — with no frost.
The presence of an accurate 7-day forecast converts what would have been my 30th percentile last frost date into my 10th percentile.
Either way, having paid off the tax man, it’s now time to start thinking about setting out those frost-sensitive vegetables. Peas and potatoes went in on St. Patrick’s day. It’s now time to get the rest of the spring garden planted out.
3. Paper pots.
Source: Last year’s garden.
This year I finally gave up on using peat pellets for seed starting. Those are incredibly convenient, but seem to leave a lot of plants root-bound. As with the comparable tomatoes grown with and without peat pellets, above. Note the much more developed root structure on the plant without the peat pellet.
Instead, I’m doing my seed starts in paper bags. This, as laid out in one of my Wordless Workshop posts (Post G22-012). I figured, for 2 cents each, it was easier to use a pre-made paper bag than to go through the hassle of making my own paper pots.
But even the smallest commercially-available kraft-paper bags are a bit too large for most of my seed starts. And potting soil costs money.
So I finally tried making paper pots out of old newspaper. Only to find out that it’s ridiculously easy.
After reading about a dozen sets of contradictory instructions, and looking at various gizmos for making paper pots, I decided to wing it. Picked up some some tabloid-style papers that I had on hand, plus a skinny wine bottle, and some sopping-wet potting soil.
There’s no need to wet the paper, no need to use a device, and so on. Just realize two things.
- Until you fill the pot, the only thing holding it together is your hand.
- Once you fill it with sopping-wet potting soil, and set it down, it’s nice and solid.
So, in order, and without illustrations, assuming you are right-handed:
- Rip a tabloid newspaper sheet along the center fold.
- Fold the resulting half-sheet once, to make a long thin strip.
- Wrap that long strip around the bottom of a skinny wine bottle, letting the paper extend beyond the end of the bottle, by almost the diameter of the bottle.
- Fold that extended paper over in three of four places to form the bottom.
- Briefly mash the bottom against the table top to set the creases.
- Pull the paper pot off the wine bottle, cradling the bottom of the pot in the palm of your left hand, and fold down a 1″ “cuff” around the top of the pot with your right hand. The point of the cuff is to lock in the seam where the paper strip ends.
- At this point, the pot is still quite fragile and will fall apart if you take it out of your hand.
- Fill with very wet potting soil, still cradling the bottom in your left hand.
- Set it down carefully in a tray.
Any idiot can do it. No device needed.
4: Woke potting soil?
A final oddity in this whole process is that the “soil” I’m using for seed starts this year is completely different from what I used last year. Compared to what I used last year, it’s nasty stuff. Coarse, full of little sticks, and quite clumpy.
I’m pretty sure it’s the same brand I used last year.
And it absorbs water right out of the bag. The old stuff, I used to have to coax it to get wet. Pour water into the bag of potting mix and knead it for minutes to get it uniformly damp. This stuff, I just use the watering can and it’s instantly wet.
It finally dawned on me what has changed.
Best guess, they’ve taken the peat out of the potting soil. The stuff I got in the past looked so nice — and absorbed water so poorly at first — because it was a peat-based potting soil mix.
Peat — peat moss — is now officially Frowned Upon as being unsustainable. At least in some circles. But this is, of course, disputed in other circles. I haven’t cared enough to try to form an educated opinion. I guess when it comes to Canadian imports and the environment, I’m far more worried about the Alberta tar sands. (Or whatever they are called these days.)
That said, just by buying a cubic foot of peat-based potting soil each year, I’d have been a typical U.S. consumer of it. The most recent figure I could find showed that the U.S. imported 420,000 tons of peat moss from Canada in 2022. That’s down from about 480,000 in 2000. (That info courtesy of the U.S.G.S.) That’s (420,000 x 2000 / 360,000,000 = ) 2.3 pounds of peat per capita per year, on average.
In any case, it’s probably just an odd coincidence. The year I finally swear off peat pellets for seed starting, my potting soil supplier appears to have switched away from peat-based potting soil.
I’m not so attached to the old mix that I’ll even bother to try to hunt some down. It was just unsettling to find that a product I’d bought for years was now something almost completely different, in the same old bag.
