No food waste, fruit tree payback

I once again am proud to announce 0 food waste. Though it was a tad close. I'm sure everyone knows at least one recipe that tastes absolutely wonderful . . . but makes terrible left overs.  One of my experiments turned out to be one of these recipes and though I will do it again I'm certainly going to half the recipe so that I don't have as many leftovers.

My lovely plum tree has finally run out of plums for me to devour so I thought I'd do a rough estimate of how much fruit I got off the tree, and then convert that to a dollar amount.

I didn't keep an accurate count of how many plums I ate but I estimate that it was four buckets full (I use a 4L ice cream bucket for my plum picking.) The bucket holds roughly 27 plums at a time which means that I consumed approximately 108 plums in four weeks. : )  (I was a bit surprised at first, but looking back I was munching on them constantly.)

Thought I'd add a picture of my plum tree in the spring so
that you could admire it!

At my local the cost for 3 plums is $1.27. Which is $0.42 per plum (1.27/3 = 0.42). Since I ate 108 of them that's $45.72 worth of plums (0.42*108).

My tree came with the house, but when it comes to buying a new plum tree the standard cost that I've found online is $20-$30. In other words a plum tree will more than pay for itself over a single season once it's mature. Not to mention the beauty of the tree, the shade that it provides and the biodiversity that it helps to promote. I would most certainly say that a plum tree is a good return on investment.