Believe it or not, May beat out June in harvest totals. May beat June by over 25lbs. The majority of the harvest in May, however, was strawberries (27lbs) and artichokes (24lbs). The strawberries really tapered off in June, but they are still producing.
June is kind of a month of limbo. The spring crops are done but the summer crops haven’t kicked into gear yet. So the totals for June are:
Fruit:
Blueberries – .21 lbs
Cherries – 1.56 lbs
Oranges – 1.06 lbs
Raspberries – .19 lb
Strawberries – 9.69 lbs
Vegetables:
Beets – 4.32 lbs
Garlic – Still curing so we haven’t weighed it yet
Kale – 2.45 lbs
Lettuce – 11.69 lbs
Parsnips – 2.88 lb
Peas (shelling) – 5.38 lbs shelled
Potatoes – 1.38 lbs
Turnips – 3.51 lb
Animal Products:
Chicken Meat – 22.56 lbs
Milk – 5.31 gallons
Eggs – 157
We spent $768.29 on feed and livestock bills. This includes a $500 vet bill for Mindy from UC Davis (on top of another few hundred dollars spent with our regular vet). That’s a hard pill to swallow when you lose the animal. I had been debating on even including that number in our totals but I figured it’s part of the cost of running an urban farm so it should be included. Because of it, though, I’m wondering if we’ll break even this year.
The chickens were going through ridiculous amounts of feed too – a 50lb bag a week – which has now been reduced thanks to culling 8 of our meat birds.
Hopefully our garden will pick up the slack and our broody hens start laying again. Having two hens out of egg production for a month and a half now really puts a dent in the totals. The month of April we had almost 90 more eggs than we did in June.
We spent $52.57 on nursery stock and growing supplies. Apparently I developed a pepper addiction. No really, I must have nearly 2 dozen pepper plants now.
Our water bill went up as well by $79.63 (we’re on a two month cycle so that’s the total for 2 months). This has many reasons. The first is that the city raised their water rates. Joy! Also, the ducks are the biggest water wasters ever. They will be culled soon. I don’t think I ever want to raise ducks again. They are loud, demanding and messy. They have this compulsion to ruin any clean water source in a matter of minutes – not such a great compulsion when they have an auto-waterer. The third reason is we had a broken irrigation line for a few days before we realized it. So that wasted quite a bit of water too. I’ve since been able to reduce the amount of water that’s going on the garden, everything is fixed and ducks will be gone soon, so hopefully our water usage will go down.
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Ugh. I've had the burst irrigation pipe bill surprise. That one sucks. As does $500 for an animal that doesn't make it.
I love that you keep track of this – last year I got two months of weighing and recording down and then gave up. The one additional step was one too many for me. But I think that the corporate axiom of, "If you can't measure it, you can't fix it" holds true in a lot of things…data is our friend, if one has patience enough to gather it.