The first season of the Böszi Garden ended. I have made all kinds of summaries and now I would like to present a different approach. What numbers can we put on the garden in the year of the garden’s creation?

There are many different numbers, let’s see some of them:

Number of garden meetings, trainings, garden events: 28 occasions

Municipal consultations, designer meetings, building contractor site visits: 19 occasions

Press releases in figures:

9 articles in the local newspaper Hegyvidék

8 news reports in Hegyvidék Tv

1 article in the Magyar Mezőgazdaság newspaper

1 lecture at the MOME, about the creation of a garden, including the creation of the Böszi garden

7 blog posts, mixed in Hungarian and English (I’m a lazy pig for writing so little, I’ll make up for it.)

I was interviewed by 3 graduate students, mainly about the Böszi garden and how I got involved in garden creation and community gardens.

Crop statistics

We have also done “garden statistics” in other gardens in previous years. The idea is to measure all the vegetables and fruits that were grown in the garden that year. The gardeners themselves keep an online crop diary, and then at the end of the season you can add up how much produce the garden and the beds separately have had that season. This is what “garden statistics” looks like.

Although five bed holders did not fill in the table, it appears that there was a large harvest of nearly a tonne. With a total of 47 varieties of vegetables and herbs grown in the garden, it seems that many people have already started experimenting with plants in the first season, which has resulted in a diverse garden and crops.

Clearly the most tomatoes produced was 380.9 kg, with 30.6 kg of green tomatoes, good for pickling. This is true for all gardens, tomatoes are the most popular product. In the Böszi garden, the courgettes produced a very good 154.8 kg, followed immediately by the cucumbers 147.4 kg. Although I think they only planted batatas in 2-3 beds, they still came in at 36.5 kg.

This Excel is interesting, Vazul one of the members from the garden has done a very good job of showing the quantity of crops in the beds. Somewhere very funny. In the Böszi garden the average yield was 29 kg per bed.

How much does this mean in HUF? I started to look for prices for the harvests, but there is a lot of variation, in fact I could only add up the main crops, which came to nearly 2 million forints. In other words, in lower terms, they produced nearly sixty thousand forints per bed, which is more like how much money the gardeners saved by growing what they would otherwise have bought in the shop or market. By comparison, the size of the beds is 6+1 square metres, so it is not at all an underestimate of what can be made from an urban garden. And that’s not to mention the quality, the community, this whole phenomenon on Böszörményi út.

The gardeners also had their costs, this year if I remember correctly the annual bed rent was 5000 Ft, they bought their own cattle manure (2500 Ft/bag, roughly one bag per bed), seeds and seedlings, and their own tools.