Growing your own

It is, at present, almost impossible to open a garden magazine, or the gardening pages of a national newspaper, without coming across an article on how we are all now kitchen gardeners and allotmenteers; the theme is that the uncertain economic conditions have turned us back to our gardens, to grow comestibles and thereby ensure that we eat well, now that lack of the readies has reconnected us with our cookers. So far, so unexceptional, even trite. I have written such pieces myself. However, the difficulty for me comes when the writer gets over-excited and starts claiming that we can save enough money to make a difference to our circumstances by ‘growing our own’. Really?

This proposition might well have had some truth 50 years ago, when food and non-alcoholic drink made up a third of the household budget. These days it is a paltry 15 per cent, of which fruit and vegetables are only a part; it just feels like a whole lot more because we spend so much of our time food shopping. The items which cost us the most are mortgage repayments, utility and council tax bills, and our cars. Think how many cabbages, even organically grown ones from the farmers’ market, you could buy with the money you pay in council tax. Quite.

Indeed, kitchen gardening is more likely to cost you money than save it. If you grow vegetables, you will almost certainly want to construct raised beds, since they are the most efficient way of doing the job. If you fancy fruit, you are on a trip to nowhere without a properly constructed fruit cage, with netting to keep out birds, and posts and wire on which to tie summer raspberry canes.