In the middle of a cost of living crisis, why wouldn’t you want to grow your own food? But as Ken Thompson points out, what you save will depend on how you go about it and how much you enjoy it.
Does growing your own fruit and veg make sense, from an environmental or financial perspective? Yes it does, but exactly why takes some explaining. We’ll look at fruit in a minute, but let’s start with growing your own vegetables. The main costs involved are two: seeds and fertiliser. But first, note what’s not on that list: pesticides, and your time and effort. Pesticides make no sense at all; they’re expensive, take a lot of energy to manufacture and – other than in the very short term – don’t work. I’ve also taken the liberty of assuming, as you’re reading this magazine, that you garden for the fresh air, exercise and satisfaction; in other words, that you enjoy gardening. If you don’t, and are growing vegetables purely to save money, then your labour is a genuine cost, and your vegetables are expensive. You will never match commercial growers, with their mechanisation and economies of scale, so there’s no point trying.
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Fertile ground
Gardens need a lot less fertiliser than most people realise, and ornamental gardens need hardly any at all. The vegetable plot needs more, because nutrients are removed in the crop, but most of these can be replaced by regular application of your own garden compost. Fertiliser is therefore at most only a minor cost.
Save on seeds
Which leaves us with seeds as the main cost of vegetable growing. Some of this cost is unavoidable, but much of it is not. In the first place, plan ahead. Sign up to email alerts from a few seed merchants and buy your seeds when they advertise a special offer: ‘ten packets for a tenner’ and the like. And if you like to buy your seeds in person, do not despise the cheap own-brand seeds offered by some stores. There is rarely any need to pay a lot for seeds. Also, make good use of the seeds you have. You’ll rarely finish a whole packet of anything, and even short-lived seeds like alliums will still be good the following season. Store your seeds somewhere cool and dry (the fridge is ideal) and most will last for many years. You can also save your own seeds. This is easier where the seeds form part of the crop, such as in peas or beans, but almost all crops will flower and seed eventually. But bear in mind that there is no point saving the seeds of F1 varieties. And if value for money plays any part in your calculations, do not even consider buying vegetable plug plants, which are extremely bad value – in fact ‘plug plants’ and ‘value’ don’t even belong in the same sentence. The fact that you can buy radish and spring onion plugs serves only to demonstrate (to me anyway) that there really is one born every minute.
Fruit for (nearly) free
Because the plants are all perennial, once you’re underway, fruit growing has even fewer costs than vegetable growing. And less effort too: often little more than picking and eating the crop. The main expense is obviously buying the plants or bushes, but this can generally be avoided. Strawberries and raspberries propagate themselves without even being asked, and gardening neighbours and friends will very often be digging up plants and throwing them away, so they may as well throw a few in your direction.
Taking hardwood cuttings of currants and gooseberries is scarcely any more difficult, requiring no more effort than sticking a few autumn prunings in the ground. These will show signs of life by the following spring, be well established by the end of summer, and make a decent-sized bush in a couple of years. If you do buy fruit bushes or plants, buy as few as possible and a year or two of home propagation will soon provide as many as you want; before you know it you’ll be giving them away. In fact growing soft fruit is so easy and cheap, and the results so delicious, that everyone with a few square feet of garden to spare should do it.
Love or money
What all this adds up to is that growing your own vegetables and fruit can be very cheap, or even free, and therefore the crop is almost pure profit. If 500 leek seeds cost £2.39, I’ll leave you to work out what each leek costs, and compare that to the price in Tesco. Not only that, but growing your own means fewer food miles and much less waste. A lot of wonky vegetables never make it on to supermarket shelves, but I guarantee you will eat – and enjoy – every hideously misshapen carrot that you’ve grown yourself. But never forget that the main ingredient in growing anything is your time and effort. That should be part of the fun, but if it feels like a chore, then there are plenty of more profitable, and certainly more enjoyable, ways to spend your time.
Read Dr Ken Thompson’s piece on mychorrhizal fungi.