We got chickens last summer. The coop, though largely made of scavenged materials, required high quality wire ($$) to keep the coyotes and hawks at bay. We figure the first egg cost us about $400, but all the subsequent eggs are nearly free!

But an intangible benefit is the daily smiles as we see our silly chickens behavior. They are lovely birds with wonderful personalities. I'd do it again in a heart beat.

My lemon trees are actually lemon trees. I managed to get two lovely lemons which puts the cost of each lemon at around $75. Not my best plan. The trees are lovely though.

Eh. Our lemon tree cost $25, including extra potting soil and is watered from the sky. Three months in it is covered in tasty little future lemons.

I paid about $10 for a lemon tree almost 20 years ago when it was no more than a 5 inch stick. It's now about 2 feet tall and bushy. I keep it inside near a sunny window and it rewards me with 1 or 2 lemons in the summer. It makes a lovely plant because of it's beautiful leaves and the aroma of the blossoms is wonderful. Works for me.

My lemon tree is also a (meyer) lemon tree!

Indoors, in a warm, southern window, it has two lemons that are just starting to ripen. The original plant cost, soil, feeding (twice in a year with organic dry matter, twice with diluted coffee), watering, and clucking over it constantly... those two lemons are probably close to 50$ each, if not more. And they're probably not going to be very edible.

I have a sizable container garden in my apartment, and some of that cost can be offset by the pleasure it brings me to have a little green space in a city dwelling.

My mom planted her lemon tree over 20 years ago and growing up I never remember a time when the tree didn't have lemons on it. I think these things take time. Why you would spend that much on a lemon tree though is beyond me.

This reminds me of The $64 Tomato.

I think this is more about setting realistic goals for yourself and researching things before getting yourself into a useless mess. Yes, if you plant a young tree in an area where you will keep it from reaching a productive size, you can't be surprised when you get only a couple lemons form it. I was recently contemplating growing some tea for myself, but once I looked into how tea grows in my area and how the leaves are harvested, I realized that if I grew the plant, I would probably not be getting more than a cup or two per year out of it. I may grow it anyway, because for projects involving growing things it isn't always the end result that is important so much as the nurturing of new life, but in this case it winds up being an investment in growing for the sake of growing, not to save money on tea in the longrun.

Fruit trees and other perennial food-producing plants have to be considered in the long-term. They're meant to produce lemons for decades. So to say that four lemons cost $155 might be true now, but it also means that all future lemons (provided they have adequate water) will be as good as free.

People spend far more money on non-producing plants just for the enjoyment of plants (of course, in those instances, you generally get more than one plant).

If you paid yourself to make a loaf of bread, even though the ingredients might only cost a few cents, the hour plus amount of time you put into it would mean a loaf of bread that cost at least $8.

Food production is profitable only by economies of scale. If you make four loaves of bread at the same time, the price probably goes down to around $2.50 a loaf, which is about the price you would pay in the store (if not cheaper). If this guy's lemon plant had produced 30 lemons, instead of four, that same $620 would be divided up into $20/lemon. And if, over its lifetime the lemon tree produces over 500 lemons, the price per lemon is about a dollar, which is how much you typically spend in a grocery store. And even if it never produces that many lemons, you still have the enjoyment of a beautiful potted plant that sometimes gives you lemons.

But yeah, $620 for a lemon tree on your balcony? That's a little excessive.

Growing lemons is certainly something I struggled with as well, especially to keep the price down, since I wanted to start growing dwarf citrus trees on a larger scale. I decided to follow instructions on http://growinglemon.com, get myself a Meyer lemon during the winter from a specialty food shop, plant it, water it, nurture it. I found out what I had forgotten when I bought the book from the creator of http://growinglemon.com, and I felt like a total tool for forgetting it. Growing lemons, the easy way is their tagline, and it sure did make it easy.