How Much Does a Raised-Bed Kitchen Garden Really Cost?

Isn't Gardening Supposed to Be Cheap?

Money. It's one of the reasons my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival, got some pretty harsh reviews on the interweb.

Before my book was even published, I stumbled across some Goodreads reviews. Goodreads gives reviewers a copy of books for free and allows them to post reviews before a book's actual release date. So, I told myself that these people were not my target audience anyway—they're not familiar with the work that I do.  

Even though I'd heard from wise mentors I follow like Brené Brown not to read reviews, I did anyway. Here are some:

Why did this reviewer emphasize "cheaply"? I'll get to that.

I knew that when you put yourself out there, you open yourself up to criticism, but... Ouch! My ego!

Another one was a little bit nicer.   

That reviewer says:

There are parts of this book, this lavishly illustrated new garden book, that I really liked and parts that had me rather frustrated. The author helps homeowners set up kitchen gardens and also has maintained her own at many houses over the years.  

She tends towards high-end, expensive gardens, and the instructions reflect this. I cringe to see how much she estimated it would cost to put in your own kitchen garden, as it's just not that expensive at all, if you don't care about the fancy aesthetic. 

My own kitchen gardens are simple raised beds that my husband and kids built with inexpensive, safe lumber, homemade compost, and good Minnesota dirt. It's true they don't offer the gorgeous architectural design of Burke's beautiful raised beds and metal arches, but at the heart of it, a kitchen garden is just about growing food. 

I would have liked to see more examples of simple kitchen gardens like those of our grandmothers.

Readers who are looking for modern, beautiful kitchen gardens will be especially happy with Burke's ideas, but all gardeners are likely to find something useful or inspirational.

She does end it on a kind note, which is nice.

The Real Raised-Bed Garden Cost from Someone Who Sells Gardens

I think one of the reasons reviewers reacted negatively is because most gardening books don't speak about money. That's mostly because those gardeners have never sold gardens. 

As someone who's consulted on hundreds of garden spaces, I think I have a different perspective on how much a garden costs and what really goes into a garden. I've also got some tips on how you can find money for the garden you want. I am approaching this as a business owner, someone who does this service for others.

Let's look at the costs of a raised-bed kitchen garden space.

(Prefer to listen? Check out episode 32 of the Grow Your Self podcast, "How to Find Money for Your Garden", on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Stitcher.)

The Cost of a Garden Is Rarely Considered

In Chapter One: "Site" of my book, I discuss the inputs of the garden—how much space, how much time, and how much money—to consider, and I dive into the money aspect pretty honestly. I even have a chart with DIY and professional installation costs. I've long felt that what things actually cost is a missing piece in so many gardening books.

I've seen the shock on people's faces when I quote the total, and even then, my business still doesn't have the profit margins that it should. Some of the numbers I give, from a business standpoint, are conservative.  

Even so, when I read the reviews, my first thought was, "Oh, I have to delete that chart so nobody can see it for the second round of printing.” I felt embarrassed.

But then I watched some episodes of HGTV. A contractor was quoting numbers for a renovation, and I thought, “Wow, I've never gotten numbers that low when I've asked someone to do renovations in my home.” I think these shows are misrepresenting what things actually cost. So I left the chart in—it's on page 29. I have it there so that people actually know what things cost. 

That being said, I did create all these gardens in Houston, Texas, a thriving economy with lots of commerce and economic growth. Things inside the city probably cost more than they would in a rural setting. Obviously, costs are location-specific, so keep in mind my numbers are from a big city.

Garden Inputs

The three garden inputs are time, space, and money, and they should all be considered before installing a garden. For instance, you might have a huge backyard but should consider installing only a small garden due to time or money constraints.

Our focus today is money. You might have seen claims that gardening will save you loads of money. The early reviewers of my book believed that gardening should be cheap and should save you money on food. I've had clients who believed they would be saving hundreds at the grocery store each month once their garden was installed.

That's not exactly true. And this is coming from someone who tried to build a garden as cheaply as possible. When we installed our kitchen garden in Houston, we bought untreated cedar and built the beds ourselves. We shoveled the soil in ourselves. We planted nearly everything by seed. Sure, we bought high-quality materials, but we looked for the least expensive version of those materials. We spent over $2,500 for a 120-square-foot kitchen garden.

As I write in my book:

I felt more than a little guilt over the cost of the whole setup. So, I'd proudly report to Jason every time I skipped buying boxes of organic lettuce, kale, and parsley at the store.  

"Jason, I saved $19 today."

He just laughed. How many grocery store trips skipping past salad boxes would it take to make up our $2,500 investment? I'll tell you the answer: too many.   

There are times when harvests will save at the grocery store, but I'm sorry to say the kitchen garden isn't really a way to save money, especially in the beginning.  

Do yourself and your partner a favor and don't expect to make money on the deal. Instead, see your garden as an investment in your home and landscape, like buying a nice piece of furniture, splurging on a beautiful piece of art, or adding on a new room.  

Consider money spent in the garden like money spent on gym equipment, a club membership, or music lessons.

But just how much money we talking here?

Raised-Bed Garden Cost per Square Foot

Costs will add up quickly when you're planning and installing your raised-bed garden space. You can, of course, start simply for a couple hundred dollars, or you can invest more significantly with a few thousand. If you're DIY'ing your garden installation, expect to spend anywhere from $25 to $50 per square foot of garden space for wood raised beds. Stone, brick, and steel will be more expensive.

You also have the option of hiring a kitchen garden company to install your raised-bed kitchen garden for you. A turnkey installation means a garden consultant comes out to your space, designs the kitchen garden, and installs the garden paths, the raised beds, the soil, and the plants/seeds. They do all of the work involved in the initial setup for you. Turnkey installations typically start at $100 per square foot.

Looking at the chart below, you can probably see how some of the turnkey gardens in my book easily cost more than a thousand dollars.

I included tending time in the chart below because I think it's important to keep all inputs in mind. It doesn't matter if you have a $5,000 budget for your garden installation if you only have 30 minutes a week to tend your plants.

Realistically, you should expect your garden to continue to cost you once it's installed. For instance, I spend about $50 every time I need to add mushroom compost to my six raised garden beds (10 bags at $5 each to cover just under 100 square feet of garden space). I do make my own compost but not nearly enough to cover all my beds, so that's an expense I expect to pay quarterly.

This is the reality of the marketplace. This is the true cost of setting things up properly instead of skimping on bad soil or materials that will rot within 5 years.

So, how do you find the money for your kitchen garden? I recommend you look at your landscaping budget, your home improvement budget, and your fun money to see how much you can invest in your garden this first round. Let's look at each of those categories.

How Much Should You Spend on Landscaping for Your Home? 

I began researching this topic when I first started Rooted Garden and felt I needed to justify spending money on a kitchen garden setup. Most real estate experts and home professionals estimate that you should probably spend about 10 to 15 percent of your home value on landscaping. If your home is worth $100,000, then that means you should spend about $10,000 on landscaping. If your home is worth $300,000, you should spend $30,000 on landscaping, and so on.

The kitchen garden is just a small part of your overall landscaping plan, but I can tell you that it is a very important one. In fact, I experienced this firsthand when we sold our home in Houston, Texas. While I had invested quite a bit in the landscaping around our home, I had splurged on the kitchen garden. The realtor put a photo of the kitchen garden as one of the main photos in our real estate listing, and it became a key selling point. The first offer we received even asked for the garden trellises to be included. That potential buyer obviously saw value in the work I had done and the space I had created.   

Keep that in mind. If you're going to spend, say, $10,000 on your entire landscape, then why not consider putting 10 percent of that toward the kitchen garden? A thousand bucks is a great budget for about 25 square feet of growing space. And this growing space will become not only a central feature of your landscape, but a place where you can grow food and have special experiences. 

How Much Should You Spend on Home Improvement Projects?

Experts suggest setting aside about 1 to 4 percent of your home's value each year for home improvement funds. That means if your home is valued around $200,000, you should expect to spend between $2,000 and $8,000 on annual upkeep.

So it's safe to assume that the average homeowner spends thousands of dollars per year on maintaining and improving their home.

I wonder how much the people who were appalled at my garden quotes are willing to spend on things that bring unique value and beauty to their home. How much would they invest in a new piece of furniture like a dining table or a couch or a bedroom suite? How much would they spend on a home addition, like a sunroom or a new deck or an office? How much would they spend on an entertainment space, like a new porch or a new patio? How much would they spend on a swimming pool?

Maybe I have my priorities mixed up, but I'd rather spend a fraction of the cost of a pool on a garden I can enjoy for 9 months out of the year instead of a pool I can enjoy for a couple months.

How Much Money Should You Earmark for Fun Money?

There's no hard and fast rule for how much money you should dedicate each month for fun money. Consider how much you already spend on entertainment and experiences. How much do you spend on vacations? How much do you spend on excursions, toys, hobbies, etc.?   

People complain about the price of a garden, but I haven't seen that many people complain about how much it costs to go to Disney World. We've never brought our kids to Disney World because we spent all our fun money on the garden (obviously!), and gardening together was a priority for us. But I know tons of families who prioritize taking their kids to Disney World every year or so. The expense of a Disney trip for 10 days could more than cover the cost of a garden you can enjoy for 10 years. (I'm not trying to harp on Disney, but I think we can all agree that it makes for a super expensive vacation.)

Look, I'm not saying don't travel or spend money on things your kids will enjoy. My point is for you to consider how much you're willing to spend on things you enjoy.

I think we balk at the price of something when we don't quite see the value in that thing. Let's look now at the value a garden can bring to your life.

The Value of a Kitchen Garden

As I've grown Rooted Garden and marketed my services and helped my garden coaches around the country grow their own garden coach businesses, money is an issue that's constantly coming up. A phrase that I hear more often than not is:

I'd love to garden, but I don't have the money to make it happen.  

Here's what I say to my clients and anyone considering a garden: Don't think about the cost of a garden. Think about the value of a garden.

Those negative reviews completely ignored the value that these gardens have brought into my clients' lives in the areas of experience, health, beauty, and community.

Gardening Is an Investment in Unique Experiences

There are so many opportunities for unique experiences in your garden. Here are just some of the potential things you can experience:

• A therapy session- Gardening, to me, feels like going to counseling, having a really good chat with a friend, and meditating all in one. The garden is a place to clear your head or notice your thoughts and emotions in a new way.
• A classroom- You will learn so many things in a garden. It will be like going to college, only there's no grades or pop quizzes or $20,000 tuition. Continuous learning experiences and discoveries bring me back to the garden every day. There aren't very many spaces where we adults can keep learning without feeling foolish for not knowing something like how to tell the difference between a male and female squash flower. I feel like I'm a preschooler sometimes in that each and every new thing fills me with wonder.
• A workshop- Now that so much of our lives has gone digital, there's a real pleasure in doing something with your hands, in making something yourself. Every time I go into the garden, it's an opportunity to make art, to build something, to create something, to tie something together, to trim something up. I've tried a lot of arts and crafts projects with my kids, but nothing else has given me the simple joy that gardening has.   

Gardening Is an Investment in Your Health

Did you know that gardening counts as working out? While it's not the most aerobic activity, gardening has been shown to be great for your cardiovascular health. The reason is because you're moving your body for a long period of time and end up walking more steps than people who don't garden. You're doing something purposeful as you're moving.

It's like heading to the gym, only when you're done, you get to walk out with a bowl of salad that you grew yourself.   

Speaking of salad, when you harvest food from the garden and enjoy it fresh, you get the most nutrition possible. You can't go to the store and buy vitamins that will provide more nutrition than that, and farmers' market produce and grocery store produce can never compete with food you pop into your mouth straight from the garden.

How much money have you spent on shakes and powders and vitamins and nutrition plans? What if you put that money instead toward plucking cherry tomatoes fresh from the vine and popping them into your mouth?

Or think about this: maybe you only buy one box of salad from the grocery store a week because you're worried about leaves going bad. You end up eating all that salad and then having processed foods for lunch the rest of the week. When your salad leaves are growing outside, you can go and harvest fresh greens all week. Those greens are more nutritious, more flavorful, and so much cheaper.

More Variety from the Garden = More Nutrition for You

Gardening is also great for your overall health because you'll get to try vegetable varieties and colors you've never tried before because you can't get them from the store thanks to our current food system. That means more vitamins, more nutrients, more variety.

How many times have you seen, for instance, kohlrabi at the store? I've found this veggie a couple times, but they were just selling the bulb. When I grow kohlrabi myself, I get to enjoy the bulb and the kohlrabi greens, and I get to enjoy beautiful colors and varieties I'd never find in the produce section. Growing your own food means you get to eat more parts of the plant—the parts the store can't sell you because they don't travel and store well. Like kohlrabi leaves, which are actually delicious. Same with carrot greens. These don't save as well as the root, so you never get to enjoy carrot greens, which are great in pesto and chimichurri. You can do all kinds of things with all parts of the plant, because you've got them all right there in front of you.

Those are just a few ways that the garden provides added health benefits to you. Plus, they say variety is the spice of life, right? 

Gardening Is an Investment in Your Community

Gardening can help you feel more connected to people, first within your family unit and then in your greater community. I've enjoyed so many moments with my kids and my husband in the garden, being outside, harvesting, planting, and working together in the same space. The garden is a place to pull my family together.  

It's also a place to meet great people in your own community. You get connected to the growers, the soil providers, the fertilizer makers, the worm compost makers, all the people in your area who are doing great things. The garden connects you to them.  

It also enables you to make a difference by doing things like supporting your local economy by buying your materials and plants locally.

Meanwhile, you're reducing your food miles, your single-use plastic consumption, and your overall food waste, which is better for the entire planet.

How Much Value Can a Kitchen Garden Bring to Your Life?

It's time to do a little math to figure out how much a kitchen garden is worth to you.

First, write down how much you might spend a year on home decor and improvements.

Write down how much you spend on entertainment and unique experiences meant to bring more variety into your life or to fill a void.

Then, how much money do you already spend on your health and nutrition? On gym memberships, on studio classes, on buying organic produce and vitamins and supplements and shake powders and all that good stuff?

When you add up those numbers, I would like to suggest you have the potential value of a garden.  

Believe It or Not, You're Already Spending Money on a Garden

Besides focusing on the value of a garden instead of the cost, I want to point out one more thing: You're already paying for a garden, whether you have one or not. If you're eating food, you're investing in someone's garden every single day. It just might not be your own.

Here's the deal: when you're buying food that other people grew for you, you're also paying for fuel because most of our food travels at least 1,500 miles before it hits our plate. You're also paying for packaging. How much packaging do we get rid of every single week from our grocery store food? Then you're also paying for storage. Food that travels across the US has to get stored on a truck and then in the grocery store and then in your refrigerator.  

So ask yourself this: How much do you already spend for someone else to garden for you?

There's nothing wrong with paying for other people's gardens. I do, and I will continue to do so my whole life. I still spend a lot of money on produce in the store for my family of six. I buy things that I don't have space to grow in my beds. (But there are tons of things that I don't have to buy because I'm growing them myself.) The thing I want you to do here is to appreciate how much money you're already spending on food.

Again, I'm not saying you'll save a ton of money on food by growing at least some of your own. But at least you'd be putting more of your money toward something that provides you with so many benefits and food, instead of that little piece of plastic that holds your store-bought basil.

Start Small and Simply

When you grow your own food, however small or simply you start, you're going to get so much more value from the money you spend.

Even though my book features the fanciest (and in most cases, the priciest) gardens I've designed for my company, I will tell you that I kept in mind gardeners from every economic level. In fact, in the introduction, I recommend starting with a pot of chives if that's all you can do for now. My intention was to help every single person get started, however simply. My own gardens started very simply and small with some potted herbs.

With that in mind, I want to highlight some of the ways you can start inexpensively.

• Follow these instructions to build a wood raised bed for a little over $100.
• Follow these instructions to create your own large planter on wheels.
• Start an indoor herb garden or a small container garden for herbs.
• Grow your own salads in a container.
• Grab a Tupperware container and grow microgreens or sprouts indoors.

There is always a garden that will work for you no matter what level you're at economically—all you have to do is find the match.  

No matter what you decide to grow, I do think it's worth it to spend a little extra time and money to set it up beautifully. Create a space where you'll be happy to go every day, your own little retreat.

How to Find Money for Your Garden

What are you spending money on right now out of boredom? Out of the desire to improve your life, your self? What could you pause spending money on for a bit to free up some cash for your garden? The great thing is that the garden is something that you will have for many, many years to come. So, figure out how much that's worth to you.

Instead of saying, “I'd love to start a garden, but I don't have the money to make it happen,” you're going to say, “I have all the money I need for my garden because it's one of the most valuable things I can own.” 

That's what I've been saying about my garden for many, many years, and my Rooted Garden clients have said similar things. In fact, I asked one of my first clients to give me a testimony, and she wrote me back immediately to say, “This is the best home improvement project we have ever invested in.”  

She saw how valuable the garden is, not just as a place to get food cheaply but as a home improvement project, as a place to provide new experiences, as an investment in her health, right outside her back door.  

That's why I'm so passionate about the kitchen garden, because I really do think it's one of the best investments we can make in ourselves, in our community, and in the world. And it is pretty beautiful to boot, whether you build it for $30 or $30,000.

Thanks so much for being here and bringing back the kitchen garden with me. How you spend your money is your business, but I do hope you do something that brings you joy... and maybe tomatoes!