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. All kitchen gardeners need specialist tools for the tasks, as well as fertilisers and bulky organic soil conditioners; devoted ones will also want a greenhouse, or windowsill propagator at the least, for germinating vegetable seeds in trays and modules.
I don’t want to be too negative about this. Kitchen gardening is great fun, and this present enthusiasm for ‘growing one’s own’ is good news for everyone, but particularly for parents who wish to teach their children a great deal about their world in an agreeable and positive fashion. And there are some fruits and vegetables that do, so to speak, pay their way. Apples, surprisingly, are one, provided they can be stored efficiently, while pears are always best picked from the garden, since they travel so badly when ripe. On the other hand, plums and greengages rule themselves out because the blossom is liable to be frosted disastrously. (Not that that stops me growing them, but then I never said I wanted to save money particularly.) Bought strawberries are often sour, so growing them at home means a much better choice of variety, even if crops are small. Fruits hard to find in shops, so definitely worth the effort, are quinces, mulberries, morello cherries, Japanese wineberries, honeyberries and pineapple guavas.
Asparagus has not much longer a season in the shops as in your garden (six to eight weeks) and, once planted, will last for many years, if you have the space to give for a permanent bed. Salsify, scorzonera and seakale are virtually unobtainable commercially, so obviously worthwhile, as are black tomatoes, kohl-rabi and Chinese artichokes.
This March, sales are up in the garden centres by as much as 30 per cent over the same month last year, thanks in large part to this increasing enthusiasm for kitchen gardening. As I say, it’s not saving us much money. Never mind, eh?
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