Cheaper than Physio, Better than Drugs

Every now and then I get back ache, and thus end up in a pre-emptive visit to my local physio, Martha, who is brilliant. Physio, however, is not cheap, whereas owning an allotment is. A non sequitur? No, as the more digging and weeding and picking and barrowing I do the fewer problems I have with my back. Yesterday we cleared space for optimistic late-August plantings (lettuce, endive, beet, chard, rocket...), weeded Hamburg parsley and celeriac beds, and generally tidied up at summer's end. Today I feel like a 20-year-old (something my wife would frown on).

Our annual allotment rental is the price of two sessions of physio. Not a complaint about Martha's pricing, which is very reasonable, but a comment on how cheap even after several price rises our allotment is for what it gives in return.

There are of course several other elements to that health boost. In terms of emotional well-being the sight of beds full of delicious veg can only be good. And as regards the inner man, when your daily diet includes lettuce, fresh herbs, courgettes, sweetcorn, spuds, kohl rabi, turnip, beetroot and carrot all picked or dug that day there is no need for vitamin pills (supposedly bad for you anyway), supplements, or any resort to those disgusting penances of wholewheat pasta, brown rice or bran-flakes.

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.

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

We are having the finest summer for six years, though given that means about one week of sunshine that's more a reflection on the vileness of the weather in previous years. The spring though was, in Britain at least, the coldest for half a century.

Combine those two phenomena and it is making gardening a bit of a bugger, which for those of us who enjoy eating food we grow is beyond annoying. We are at least three weeks further back in the growing year than we would normally be, and now the ground is exceptionally dry so to prevent everything running to seed or dying off watering is needed.

In a spare moment the other day I calculated we had 44 different fruits and vegetables on our allotment (and you can add to that another two or three like fennel grown in the garden but not the plot). That isn't counting different varieties of the same thing either. So in spite of the conditions we can hope for some plenty to come, which is probably one definition of the allotment gardener.

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.

Waste Not

I just spent a happy half hour digging three barrowfuls of compost out of our kitchen-waste compost bin. The main driver for this was there being so little room at the top that something had to come out of the bottom.

Some of the goodness has doubtless leached out in the several months the stuff had to rot down, but it looks good and smells ok - I love the way gardeners talk about how good compost smells 'sweet'. It was dumped on one of the raised beds in which we grow (in the main) salad stuff, heavier duty crops being reserved for the allotment.

There is something immensely pleasing about how the bits of veg peelings, fruit skins, and the odd dose of chicken poo (great accelerator) can turn into such useful and free material for future crops. It was full of worms too, some of them now being turned into eggs in the innards of our hens who were out when I was doing this.