Retail Value
There are lots of great reasons to create a home garden: the taste of fresh produce, the ability to grow varieties that might not be available locally, control over use of organic fertilizers and avoidance of pesticides, and so forth.
But one thing that helps make a home garden sustainable is that it is cost-effective: the retail value of the food grown by the garden exceeds the cost of the materials used to grow the food.
GeoGardenClub provides an experimental feature called "Retail Value" that is designed to help Gardeners determine if their Garden is cost-effective.
To utilize the Retail Value feature, all you have to do is provide a value for the "Quantity" field for a Planting. You do this in the Update Planting screen. For example, the follow screen shows the Gardener entering "2" as the number of "bunches" harvested so far from a Basil planting.
Once the Gardener presses "Submit", the Planting Details screen is updated to show an estimate of the Retail Value of the harvest from that Planting so far:
The Retail Value feature is experimental because there is a lot going on behind the scenes. We think calculating retail value will be too time-consuming for Gardeners if they have to come up with the cost of each crop or variety themselves.
Instead, the Chapter admin has the responsibility of doing the research and determining, for each year, a reasonable retail value for the crops and/or varieties being grown by Gardeners in their geographic region (i.e. Chapter).
There is a lot of subjectivity in determining a "reasonable retail value", and so we view the Retail Value feature as experimental at this time.
However, if it's possible to determine a "reasonable retail value", then it's possible for the app to provide Gardeners with an estimate of the retail value of their harvest for each year, simply by asking them to provide the "quantity" of harvest from each Planting, as you'll see next.
Once a Gardener has entered at least one "Quantity" for a Planting, then the Garden view will include a "Retail Value" section that shows the Retail Value for all Plantings with Quantity values for which a Chapter admin has provided Retail Value data. For example:
The bottom of this section provides totals for each year:
If a Gardener keeps a rough track of their expenses, then they can determine if the Garden was cost-effective. In this example, the app estimates that it would have cost this Gardener $647.50 to buy the equivalent amount of food that they harvested from their Garden. If that Gardener spent less than that amount on materials for the Garden, then the Garden was cost-effective.
The Retail Value feature is still under development. Drop us a line at info@geogardenclub.com if you have any thoughts about it!