Our Garden Cost Breakdown
So, I’m kind of a nosey person and I’m always so intrigued and curious about how much people spend on their renovations, remodels, etc. Christi Dawn is a sustainable fashion brand and they’ve done a really good job at showing a transparent cost breakdown of their dresses. I love that level of honesty in marketing and social media. So now that we're nearing the end of our garden renovation, I thought it’d be a good time to do my own cost breakdown.
May 2021
We jumped into this project in May of 2021. We started it out with a small pocket of money set aside and we were able to till the ground, lay down landscape fabric and then cover it all in mulch. We ran out of our budget at that point and knew it would be some time until we could progress. Our garden space is roughly 15’ by 50’.
February 2022
About 9 months later, in February of 2022, we had enough money set aside to begin building a few beds. We built the front 4 beds at this point and knew we’d have another short break after that. We were able to really learn so much with these first garden beds — how to level them on uneven earth, how to install hardware cloth to protect from moles, and how to stabilize the beds with rebar. The front two “entrance beds” are 6’ x 3’. The two beds behind them are 4’ x 8’. All of the beds are roughly 1’ tall.
Once these beds were built, we used a lot of the tilled earth that we raked up previously to line the bottom of each bed before topping them with top soil. A week later, we scheduled a local garden center to deliver us roughly 30 cubic feet of fill dirt and 30 cubic feet of top soil. We were able to fill all 4 beds and we had a lot of soil left over. I went ahead and added compost to each bed and just did 1 bag per bed since the top soil was already high in nutrients.
March 2022
After about a month again, we decided to go ahead and build the trellis since I was so excited and already planted pea seeds. Dylan was the brains behind the build for this and he did such an incredible job making this thing beautiful & sturdy.
June 2022
And finally, our current moments. We have been itching to get the final two beds built for a while now and decided to make it a priority. These ones were tricky and we were expecting it since the ground is so steep here. We had to play with some ideas of “stepped” beds to make it work and even. It came together so nicely and we were able to use a lot of “off-cuts” of lumber. We scheduled one more load of fill dirt and top soil (again left with some excess) and got the final two beds filled.
So now to break down the cost and link all of the items we’ve used.
The project took a total of 13 months from start to “finish”. We still need to spray down some brush killer in the back, build a mini deck, and de-weed the whole space. But that’s later down the road :)
The Cost Breakdown —
Renting a Tiller — $55
Landscape Fabric — $90
Cypress Mulch — $250
Garden Timbers — $400
Rebar & Bits — $100
Hardware Cloth — $250 (worth it for all of the moles and chipmunks we have!)
Fill Dirt & Top Soil — $250 (including delivery from a local garden center)
Compost — $30
Trellis Wood — $45
Trellis Wire — $70
Total Cost — $1550
Shop the Garden —
