A friend of mine once said that gardening in Newfoundland was a bloodsport. That has certainly been the case here in the Yukon this summer. With the amount of cool, cloudy, rainy weather we’ve had, I don’t know of anyone who has been able to coax out of their garden the produce that they normally do.

Take my raspberries for instance. Here is a photo of the grand extent of my first harvest. Eight berries. Eight whole berries. Since that photo was taken, I harvested five more berries. So we have folks a grand total of 13 raspberries for the season. If I were costing this out, I figure I put in about four hours time this summer in fertilizing, mulching, weeding and generally being in the company of these plants. It was probably a lot more than four hours, since I spent many many hours in the garden as a whole. But for the sake of argument let’s conservatively say it was four just spent on the raspberry canes alone. At say $8 an hour, that’s $32 worth of my effort. Divide that by 13 and each one of those berries is worth $2.38!! I know you can’t really put a price on clean healthy food, but still – I didn’t know I had such rich tastes!