Lesson 01
Cost per bed-foot — the number under everything
Before you price anything, know roughly what a single bed-foot costs you to plant, tend, and pick. Everything else is guessing.
Most people growing for other people never work this out, and then they can't tell you which crops carry the garden and which ones just keep them busy. You don't need accounting software. You need one bed, one season, and a notebook.
Pick a standard bed and stick with it. A 30-inch-wide, 50-foot bed is the common small-farm unit, so 50 bed-feet. Every cost you can tie to that bed goes on the list: seed, potting mix, trays, drip line and fittings amortized over how many seasons you expect them to last, compost and amendments, row cover, harvest bags and rubber bands, and any hours you paid someone else for. Divide by 50 and you have cost per bed-foot for that crop.
Your own hours are the part people leave out, and it distorts everything. Track minutes for seeding, transplanting, weeding, and harvest separately. You don't have to pay yourself yet, but you do have to see the hours, because a crop that pencils out fine on materials can still be the worst thing in your garden once you notice it ate eleven hours of picking. Pick a number you'd want to earn per hour and use it as a yardstick, not a promise.
One warning about the numbers you'll read elsewhere, including ours: published per-bed-foot figures are ranges other growers reported in their climate, their soil, their market. Treat them as a starting hypothesis to test on one bed, not a forecast for yours. Your first season's real numbers beat anyone else's averages.
Standard bed unit
30" wide × 50 ft = 50 bed-feet. Keep every record in this same unit so seasons are comparable.
Costs to capture
Seed, mix, trays, amendments, drip and fittings, row cover, bags/bands, delivery fuel, market or platform fees, paid labor.
Time buckets
Seeding, transplanting, weeding, harvest, wash-and-pack, selling. Four of those five usually surprise people.
Amortize the durables
A $40 roll of row cover across four seasons and eight beds is roughly $1.25 per bed per season, small, but only if you actually make it last four seasons.
Do this
- Choose one bed this week and start a cost sheet for it. Every receipt that touches that bed gets written down, same day.
- Set a timer on your phone for harvest on that bed and log the minutes. Do it three times before you trust the average.
- Log expenses in Market HQ under the matching category so the season total is already assembled when you want to look at it.
Watch out for
- Tracking revenue but not hours, then concluding the busiest crop is the best crop.
- Averaging across the whole garden. One bed at a time is what tells you where to change something.
- Treating a single strong week as your new baseline. Weather and weekend foot traffic swing hard.