Frugal Faculty: The Money Value of Growing Your Food

There is a dilemma we keep continuously facing in our small urban food garden. We’ve resigned to ever resolving it in a final manner: when planning what to grow (next), do we go for food with the biggest financial return or do we opt for the staples which are cheap to buy anyway? First option is the rare and/or the high-value, pricey stuff; perhaps soft fruit which tends to be so overpriced in supermarkets, or maybe things so rare you won’t find them in any local shop, something so strikingly exotic and eye catching that will put your garden on the map? Second choice is the stuff you’re actually most likely to eat, and enjoy eating on a regular basis: your potatoes and your onions and carrots and parsnips and broccoli and beans... You get the idea.

These high-value beef tomatoes grow without a polytunnel, so the October harvest had to ripen at home. Still worth doing! Variety Costoluto Fiorentino.

Don't get me wrong, growing your food is nearly always cheaper than buying it retail. But you still want to make it go as far as possible particularly in these hard times. In the beginning I was adamant I’d stick with option one. Mostly because setting up a kitchen garden requires an up-front investment of money, time and effort and I wanted this investment to prove viable, and quickly so. Aside from food that can marry the two options, like a particular variety of tomatoes I knew we’d definitely eat, I got a hold of some purple sprouting broccoli, Romanesco cauliflowers, red brussels sprouts, red lettuces, even... cucumelons (I was attracted by their novelty). I soon realised I’ll have to eat most of those things myself. It also became apparent that when in season, even high value veg costs much less to buy (bar the cucumelons which I’ve never seen anywhere in my area). And as you’re not likely to harvest your own produce out of season, the financial gain proves not as big as you might have imagined to start with.

Cucumelons don't require much space, they climb up any other neibouring plant and being themselves minature, they won't take over easily. So even though their taste is too novel for most of our family, I'll grow them again next year.

It wasn’t long before I was implementing plan B with my parsnips, carrots, potatoes, celery etc.

After this season, I know I will be doing a bit of both, and I will be doing that for years to come simply because both motivations are equally appealing. Particularly when you’ve eaten your own potato or carrot or beetroot and have thus been assured of their undeniable superiority in taste, not to mention freshness, zero-mileage, zero-pesticides, nutrition, all tightly linked with one another.

What’s more, there’s a way to increase the return value of some inexpensive staple vegetables that we personally haven’t immediately discovered. It’s the cut-and-come-again approach to harvesting. Put simply, rather than pulling the whole plant out, you harvest only the formed florets, the outer or bottom leaves, or stalks, and leave the rest to grow on (sometimes you can chop the whole top off an inch or two from the ground and wait for the plant to grow back up again). This increases your yields and prolongs your edible abundance. Like us, you might have heard of it or used it for your fruit, herbs and lettuces, but not realised it can be done with many more edibles, even leeks or celery?

While some veg can take chopping it flat off an inch or two above ground (leeks, lettuces) most are happiest if you only remove the lower/outer leaves and let at least two intact (chards, spinach, celery, said lettuce) or snap off just the florets (broccoli) or the new shoots (peas when grown for shoots).

This leek was chopped off only three days ago. It's already gained another inch!

Cutting or snapping off only the outer stalks of our celery means we prolong the harvest and only use what we need at the time.

So here is a list of 12 veg, both high value and inexpensive (and not herbs) that we grew the passing year, that worked well with the cut-and-come-again method. The order is alphabetical, not that of preference.

Next year we'll try all of them again, and maybe we can even manage to grow a cabbage and cut its head off for a second head to pop up?

What are your thoughts? Let us know in a comment below.

And till next time!