I've dusted off my Excel spreadsheet for this one. For those who don’t know, I quit my job after a nearly a decade in real estate investment a year ago to pursue my dream of sharing the magic of gardening with you. I don't talk much about my past career because I tend to compartmentalize—I also valued my privacy and wanted to keep my professional life separate from my social media presence. But most of all, I didn’t think people would care.
Now, I’m excited to introduce a fun new series where I dip a toe back into underwriting and analysis: "What’s the ROI on THAT!?" In this series, I’ll analyze various crops in my garden and the return on investment for different cost inputs. I'll provide post-mortem analyses on each crop investment, share what I'd do to improve it, and more. Think of me as your friendly investment banker, but instead of a suit and tie, I come with a shovel and a sunhat.
After our ROI exercise, I'll be sharing all my garlic secrets with paid subscribers:
When to grow garlic
Sourcing garlic seed
Hardneck vs. softneck varieties
How to plant
Maintenance
When to harvest
How to store
A quick video of me harvesting and braiding my garlic harvest.
ROI: Return on Investment
ROI = investment gain divided by the cost of the investment, expressed as a percentage. When you factor in the time, it becomes annualized ROI or AROI.
COSTS
Garlic Seed: Purchased by weight. One pound of seed from garlicgods.com at a total cost of $42.57. $30 for the garlic, and the remaining for shipping and handling. Varieties purchased: Inchelium Red and Lorz Italian.
Soil Amendments: $0; I made no soil amendments throughout the growing of the garlic—win! Typically, I apply compost or mulch but didn’t need to here. I’ll talk more about this in the how to grow garlic section.
Pest Control: $0; I do not use any pesticides and did not need to do anything to mitigate pests.
Labor: $0; I spent a total of two hours on this crop between the initial sowing and harvesting. I enjoy gardening, so this is free for me.
Total Cost: $42.57
RETURNS
Total Yield: 75 heads of garlic
Market Price per Unit: $0.75 (based on my local Whole Foods pricing for a head of organic garlic - I live in LA so take that information as you may)
Total Potential Revenue/”Savings”: $56.25
Investment Gain (Revenue - Cost): $13.68
ROI Calculation: GAIN divided by INVESTMENT = $13.68/$42.57
ROI: The ROI is 32.14% - What’s a “good” ROI? We’re dealing with relatively small numbers here, but typically in the investment world 5-10% is great. I’ll take it! This really will only mean something once we get to comparing garlic against other crops.
Annualized ROI: I planted the garlic on October 1, 2023 and harvested it on June 5, 2024. It took 248 days to grow this. The AROI is 50.7% - This will be important when we go to evaluate future crops. How hard is the investment working over the period of time it took to gain? This will be interesting to compare against, say, fruit trees like avocados (it’s been 4 years and I might get my first harvest this year; I have a feeling I’ll be in the negative on this one for a few more years) or radishes (ready to harvest in 30 days). Maybe I’ll make a chart comparing these.
THE UNQUANTIFIABLE
Décor and Gift: Homegrown garlic adds decor to your home. For instance, a ten-string braid added to a recent harvest basket for my in-laws. If I take some of these garlic heads and make other products with them, how does that change the return? Fermented garlic in honey, garlic powder—these items are oddly not priced straightforwardly. I’ve heard that commercial garlic powder on the shelves at grocery stores is just dehydrated and ground garlic skins, which for many would be seen as waste.
Content: Sharing my garlic-growing journey online. Inevitably, there are downstream benefits of me sharing the journey of garlic online with you—you might sign up to be a paid subscriber, a brand might see the video/content and say, "Hey, we would like to pay you to make a similar video," and Instagram and TikTok’s creator bonus programs monetize the views I get on the content. If it goes viral (who knows when/why/how that happens), it could be lucrative. For the sake of transparency, I’ve earned a combined $50.35 of me harvesting the garlic on TikTok and Instagram. Additionally, maybe the interest in this post gets me 2 paid subscribers. With the subscription at $8/month, that’s $16 gained as a direct result of me penning this post. There are some issues with that: I have other content on here, can I really attribute the $8 to the garlic or the overall work I’ve put here? Same goes for TikTok/Instagram—is it viral because of the garlic, or because I already have a following? Hence, the unquantifiable. It gets messy, quick.
Flavor: I’m going to keep it 100 with you. I don’t think that homegrown garlic tastes very different from store bought. There are certainly many crops where the flavor difference is so extreme that I wouldn’t even dare to purchase it at the store. With garlic, I don’t think that the “flavor x factor” is in the room with us.
