Grow Your Own and Then Some

If the media are to be believed then Britain is undergoing a renaissance of grow your own, and even raise your own, as back gardens fill with chicken coops. But why is this?

There are so many reasons that a list is the best option here:

• It's economic and times are tougher. I have calculated - back of the envelope style - that we save about £1000 a year by growing our own fruit and veg, and that was before we got chickens. Next year I intend from January 1st keeping a diary of what is spent on seeds, compost etc, and what the estimated price of the produce we get to eat would be, to prove the economic case.

• The fantastic variety: with what we have growing now on our allotment and in the kitchen garden here we have, depending on how you score the thing, nearly 40 different vegetables (I count things with different uses, rather than varieties, so radicchio, Catalogna chicory and sugar loaf count as three, but the eight or 10 different lettuces is one). On top of that we have more than a dozen fruits.

• That variety means we get to eat stuff that never makes it to the shops - Hamburg Parsley roots, asparagus chicory, Chinese artichokes, cima di rapa, loads of different chilies, Swiss chard, fresh borlotti beans, tiny broad beans (the shops go for biggies which are bitter and mealy) quince...

• It is great exercise. For a couple of years I had a gym membership, and loathed the tedium of machines and the narcissistic people using them. In the end my £25/month meant one reluctant visit over that period. Digging, carrying, pulling etc etc take it out of you, but with a purpose that obviates the need for posing mirrors.

• We control what we put on our plants, so can be confident that our salad has not been sprayed with noxious pesticide and stored in an unpleasant gas.

• The supermarkets choose veg for looks (so they sell) not taste, and for keeping quality. Not taste is an important thing. If you grow your own then keeping quality is secondary, as the bulk of the stuff you produce is harvested and eaten the same day or within two at most. The difference between our own new spuds and the ones bought from Sainsbury's is incredible, especially if we dig, cook and eat them within an hour.

Lettuces for Less

Not sure if this should go in the Austerity Cook blog or here, but given it is about growing food rather than cooking, and concerns saving money, here it shall be.

We have a friend to thank for this tip. Thanks Louise.

Supermarkets sell cartons of 'living salad' for (in the case of Sainsbury's at least) £1. Buy one, harden the plants off with a few days outside and nights inside, then separate and plant them. We got 19 plants from one such container, all of which have proven healthy, and about half of which have been eaten already - they give you a quick start while your own seed-grown stuff is still on the way.

Another money saver that some gardeners won't be aware of: when you harvest a lettuce like this, leave a few of the outer leaves on the root, water it, and with luck you'll get a second plant in a few weeks.

Lettuce forms the basis of so many great things other than salads, so it's one of the must-haves in the garden. Cook peas fresh or frozen with a few leaves of green lettuce, some butter, and scraps of bacon fried till crisp and you have an approximation of petit pois a la francaise, a vegetable course in itself. They braise well in the oven too, again with a bit of bacon plus some stock to moisten things.

When you pay £1 a piece for decent lettuces in store such things can seem a bit extravagant; but when you have effectively paid about 5p for the growing salad jobbies they're a bargain. And if they are grown from seed we're talking a lot less than 1p each. Get growing.

Growing our own

Now that the allotment is yielding produce for the table again my smug rating has risen by several notches. Over the last two days we have had green salads (inappropriate label when they generally contain wonderful bronze lettuces as well as various green ones), root salads with grated icicle radishes and purple top turnips in them, strawberries - the first granita of the year will be made and eaten tonight - and onions that taste of something. And last night's meal ended with rhubarb pie and creme fraiche. And yes, thanks for asking, my bowels are in wonderful order. You can, as it were, stick your colonic irrigation up your...

When we started growing our own veg, I thought it was a waste of time growing onions. An onion is an onion, they are cheap in the shops, so why bother? The reason is flavour, though they are also far moister and crunchier than anything I have ever found Sainsbury's offering. A home grown onion cut into tiny half-moon segments and added to a Greek salad lifts it hugely.

The broad beans are about a week off now. They are another vegetable showing the difference between shop bought and home grown. In the shops you see monster pods, floppy after their travels, with beans the size of ten pence coins within, coarse and in need of the outer skin peeling to be palatable. We will pick ours with beans about five pence sized, quick to cook, and perfectly tender.