growth
Explanation
This comic depicts a bearded man in a wide-brimmed hat proudly announcing to his family that he has decided to save money by growing his own strawberries. The next panel simply reads "4,000 DOLLARS LATER..." He then triumphantly holds up a single strawberry, declaring "Behold! The literal fruit of my labor." In the final panel, he warns his family, "Do not eat the fruit of my labor. It is mostly slugs."
The joke satirizes the common experience of amateur home gardening, where the fantasy of saving money by growing your own food collides with the expensive reality of buying soil, planters, tools, fertilizer, pest control, and other supplies -- only to produce a pitiful harvest. The $4,000 price tag for what appears to be a single slug-infested strawberry is a hyperbolic but recognizable exaggeration of what many hobby gardeners discover.
The phrase "the fruit of my labor" does double duty as both the literal strawberry and the idiomatic expression for the results of hard work, making its failure all the more comic. The final warning that the strawberry is "mostly slugs" is the perfect anti-climax, suggesting that not only was the venture financially ruinous, the product is not even edible. This is a relatable comic for anyone who has attempted backyard gardening and ended up spending far more at the garden center than they ever would have at the grocery store.