Vegetable economics

Only a cynic or a Whitehall civil servant would interpret the title to mean the level of understanding of economics by average people. If you don't believe there are people at Whitehall capable of such denigrating thinking and vocalization, read what Guardian editor Rusbridger wrote about the destruction of computer hard disks.

And we will defer a post about California, the land of fruits and nuts, to the time when we open an email account with a Russian provider to allow the Russian state to share our trivial thoughts.

This is about economics 101, where American teachers often use a fruit grower example to show how much sense a rational and logical approach makes.

It goes like this. Farmers A and B both grow pineapples and mangoes. Farmer A grows mangoes at 25 cents a piece while Farmer B has a cost of 30 cents a piece. Farmer B would be better off to buy mangoes from Farmer A and concentrate on growing pineapples, which he produces cheaper than B.

Apart from the disconcerting fact that economics 101 uses an example of 2nd grade math, all is well.

Unless you apply it to the garden of the K-Landnews resident gardener, replacing pineapples and mangoes with tomatoes and potatoes for climate and growing zone reasons.

The cost of homegrown veggies is easily ten to twenty times that of store bought produce by any measure. The cost of labor is tremendous, even if you calculate only at say 1 Euro per hour taking advantage of the absence of a minimum wage in Germany.

Yet our gardener veggies on,  ignoring the most basic of rational economic thinking
- we don't want to make it sound too martial by using soldiers on, although the slugs and ants in the garden might well claim that expression to be more precis.

We can hear you think "taste and satisfaction", but, please. Of course, everybody growing a tomato can beat what passes as such in an Irish grocery in January, but you need to attain a certain level of perfection to really get that old time homey taste, not counting an early frost.

Satisfaction is a good point, but the line between satisfaction and self-punishment is thin, about at thin as the thread of your jeans after a cumulative several days of kneeling on the ground and weeding.

The resident gardener sighed when confronted with these arguments and pointed out that his time possessed no monetary value.

None?

None whatsoever, I'm not on the market, he explained, so any value attributed to my time is utterly fictional, a conjecture, a manufactured consensus like macro-economics as a whole.

Would you like a few tomatoes, they are at their very best right now?