Gardening and Grow Your Own

Growing your own food these days is more accepted in the main. Even if it's a few herbs on the windowsill right up to a small holder plot of several acres with animals it is seen as either the thing TO Do or the thing you WANT to do.The reality for the vast majority is that people spend a large proportion of their income on food and the fuel it takes to get the food to our stores from the supplier and then from the store to our homes. After a few days the plastic packets with some arbitrary lettering on it say it's too dodgy to eat so you chuck it in the bin and head off to the supermarket to do the ritual all over again..

I once watched a programme with two chefs who took certain sets of people, very rich, students, 2 working parents with kids etc and the aim was to stop a lot of the waste and save money. The rich couple were spending something like £1000 a week on food and throwing away probably £800 worth and the same but in proportion to the incomes were the other groups. This programme showed up one glaringly obvious point and that was we buy a lot of food, but what about growing a lot of food? What effects would growing your own food have on you and your family etc?

A lot of people reading this will have a reason for not growing some of their food.It may be you are too busy, you have a hectic lifestyle or even you are just not interested. All valid reasons but why not turn each one around especially if you are looking to be more self sufficient or prepared for the tribulations that life might throw at us from time to time. Why not let me turn your objections around and give you a reason why you SHOULD grow at least some of your own food. Planting seeds is not rocket science. You put some soil in a dish and sprinkle some seeds on the top and add a bit of water and leave. Even between the extra activities you are taking the bairns to can spare a few minutes here. Maybe you could do this right before you go to bed? Of course you WILL save money even from just growing herbs providing you use herbs of course.. You will also know where your food comes from, the fact that they have "food feet" instead of Food miles and they are fresh. The best example of sweetness, if a little difficult to grow is Sweetcorn. As sweetcorn is picked the sugars that make it sweet instantly start turning to starch so what I do is get a pan of water boiling on the oven then go to the garden, pull a couple of corn cobs from the plant, run inside and put them into the boiling water.

Oh man, the taste of these are just out of this world but how much of the sugars have turned to starch in the cobs that are grown in Argentina or the USA!! You think that sweetcorn is good, try your own grown corn and you will never buy another cob.

Now I am not at all a romantic with rose coloured glasses but everyone could grow some herbs on a window sill. If you make a pizza for tea why not throw on the top of it a handful of sweet basil as you serve it up.

Mint is another easy to grow herb and can be used for minted peas or potatoes. Just make sure it is in a self contained pot of some type as the roots are quite virulent and it becomes a bit of a garden thug.
If you don't like cats don't grow cat mint... They love it and you get probably 100's of screaming moggies in your garden.  If you grow some thyme then this works well with pork as does the various sages. Try making some Yorkshire puddings and as you rest the mix in the fridge add a few sprigs of lemon thyme and leave it for an hour or two to rest. The taste difference is enormous when you bite into a crisp, hot, yorky pud!!. 

Going on from the window sill you can grow in plant pots if you have a balcony or a patio.  If you plant specific crops at the right times of the year you can get a lot of flavoursome food from very little space. A 12" or 15" plant pot will give you a good 2 kilo of new potatoes. You could plant Garlic in pots, carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks in fact there is probably an odd one or two crops you can't grow in a plant pot but as yet I've not seen them.

Moving on up from the plant pot you can use a plastic dustbin or a thick black sack like a compost bag to grow your crops the same as the plant pot version. Heck it's even been known for me to stick a couple of seed potatoes in a fresh bag of compost and forget about them.

The next upward stage is into a garden setting but again, many of you reading this will say I haven't got the room. You have. At least if you have 1 sq ft of land that is 30cm x 30cm or 12" x 12" then you can grow food in the "square foot garden " version. With square foot gardening it all grows against the traditional long rows and careful weeding regimes. In SFG the idea is to plant many seeds a lot closer together but pick younger, sweeter, fresher crops all the year round. Take for instance Beetroot. You can grow beetroots until they resemble tennis ball size and they taste really nice. In a Square Foot of space you might get 2 plants to grow and each at harvest might weigh say 4ounce or 100 g so you have 200g of beetroots. You might get another crop out of the same soil if you have a good season. Thus in total you have grown 4 beetroots which weigh around 400g in total. In Square foot gardening you might plant 10 seeds in the square of ground. as they germinate and start to put on leaves you plant a second set of seeds in the spaces you have left between your first lot of seeds. This will probably be about 3-4 weeks after the first sowing.

As the first sowings get larger, say 8 weeks after first sowing you pull a few baby beets for your meal. In this space you plant a third crop of seeds. Your first crop is 8 weeks old, your second crop is 4 weeks old and your third crop is new. You keep going on like this until the season finishes and you can end up with as much as 25 to 30 pounds in weight of fresh garden baby beets. Now have a look in the shops to see how much this amount of food would cost, subtract the cost of your seeds and fertilizer and the rest is profit that you can use as you wish but you can also use it to pay down your loans or mortgages. 2 seasons ago I grew food in a deep bed with a size of 4.8m x 1.2m divided up into square foot gardening spaces. It total I had 48 little plots all nicely divided up by string and nails in the deep beds and I grew over 800 pounds of food crops. It cost me about £45 in manure and chicken pellets and another £24 in extra soils / compost to help rejuvenate the soil but I hammered the land and it paid dividends. In the end I had to give away a lot of fresh produce.

Other versions of gardening for larger scales ( larger than plant pots) are allotments, permaculture, three sisters, Hoogerculture and no dig no weed deep beds.
So you can see that from a small windowsill up to many acres YOU can grow at least some of your food and boy does it taste so much fresher.
 During this season I was able to pay over £1800 off my mortgage that I would have spent on fruit and veg and this represented about 75% self sufficient AND I was able to save seeds for last year as they were not F1 hybridised seeds etc.

Please do leave comments on any posts I do, especially if you want a topic looked at or anything clarified.

take care,


Alan