Growing your own - the cost

Weather: Hot! Up to 30C with thunderstorms due this evening after three brilliant summer days.

This week's harvest: Two and a half pounds of shallots, two artichokes, 2 pounds of courgettes, a handful of peas, a handful of french beans, basil, one cucumber (small white), one huge Black Russian tomato (9 oz), parsley, mint.

At last summer - and the vegetable garden gets in to full swing. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to add up the cost of producing the produce I harvest v the equivalent in the shops and so far my sums have come up with a couple of interesting statistics.

Take the shallots - a dozen shallot sets set me back about £4.00. Yesterday I harvested my crop as the greenery had fallen over and they haven't put on growth for a while. On weighing the yield it was just under a kilo. Online from Abel and Cole (from whom I get a regular veg box) I costed a similar quantity of shallots for about £5.00... Theirs aren't available until October and it may be that I could have left mine in the ground longer but I don't think they would have gained much in size. This makes the saving very limited - if I cost out shallots at the supermarket (non organic) ...well they are around £2.50 per kilo.

My tomatoes will probably be in the same boat. With each growbag at about £5.00. The cost of tomato fertilizer, the special growing rings I bought last year, plus the seed....I'll be lucky if my crop per kilo will be much cheaper than those in the shops. Mind you you'd be hard pressed to find Black Russion or my Italian variety in the shops.

On the other hand there are the artichokes. Two brilliant plants, one grown from seed four years ago and the other an off shoot of the first one transplanted two years ago. We have had about a dozen artichokes - and I've left a couple to flower because they are in the flower garden and the giant thistle flowers are worth their place there anyday.


They have needed little care - just a mulch of my own compost in the spring and no extra feed. Abel and Cole have them listed at 98 pence a piece! Now that is worth growing! And as for Courgettes - the classic summer glut vegetable - Abel and Cole have them listed at £1.92 for 500g. I am picking that much a day at the moment and I have a list of favourite recipes gleaned over the years from Courgette and Mint Frittata to a lovely salad version in which they are steamed then allowed to cool in a herb vinagrette...and of course Courgette Soup, a freezer staple for weekend lunch times til Christmas (and beyond space permitting!)

The elusive scarlet Pimpernel....

Weather: Windy and cool for July (20C max) cloudy with sunny intervals

This week's harvest: 1lb green/yellow courgettes, 2 artichokes,basil, 2 white cucumbers,rocket (lots as usual) Lettuce (a few leaves),mint,bay, parsley, shallots 2.

I came one of one of my favourite 'weeds' - the Scarlet Pimpernel yesterday and coincidentally in print too. It was in the first of Beverley Nichols famous gardening books - Down the Garden Path, written in 1932 - and referred to its ability to predict the weather.

A little more research in ' A Country Herbal' by Lesley Gordon reveals that one of its common names is 'poor man's weather glass'. This is because its flowers won't open in the rain - or even when rain is expected. It is also called 'poor man's clock' because on sunny days they are said to open at seven o'clock! The weather prediction certainly held good today (see the photograph above) there was indeed no rain. As to the opening at seven o'clock .... I wasn't up early enough to tell you...

Anyway - July and August are its months and I found the specimen in the photo lurking in my runner beans. I am delighted to report that my push against the slugs early in the season allowed them to get going properly this year and between them and my french beans there are already more than 25 bean-lets set.

Oh....and the sad spinach in my last post is now doing very nicely thank you!

Sparrow attack...

Weather: Raining - should brighten up later 20C

This week's harvest: basil, courgette (one, the first small Verde di Milano!), rocket (lots) Lettuce (one Tom Thumb - between crops) thyme, artichoke (two - with lots more to come) .


And so to a small apology to the slug population of my garden (much reduced because of the success of the nematode treatments). I have been struggling to bring on spinach - and to some extent lettuce - seedlings and of course blamed the chewed leaves on the slugs....until I caught the culprits in the act. (See rather blurry photo shot through the runner beans..) There, balancing on the seed heads of the regrowth of last year's spinach, is one of my little flock of house sparrows enjoying a little greenery in addition to the seeds I put out in their feeder. There's gratitude for you! A few days before, I had watched a big fat male sparrow casually decimating a seedling...in fact technically more than 'decimating' it because he had ripped off a lot more than ten per cent of the plant.

Now this is a little difficult to take in. I love my little flock of sparrows and despite still coming out top of the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch survey as the most common bird in our gardens, their numbers have fallen drastically over the last thirty years and are on their Red conservation list.

I certainly don't want to put them off living in my garden in fact they have featured in Nature's Voice the podcast I make for the RSPB. We devoted much of the episode we made for this year's Big Garden Birdwatch to sparrows which can be downloaded from the link as an mp3, should you like to hear it.

My solution to my current problem is to suspend a criss-cross of cotton above my seedlings. I haven't caught them touching them since but we will have to wait and see. I know that some people use horticultural fleece to protect their plants but my veg garden is one of my favourite places to sit and the aesthetics are as important to me as the produce and ...well horticultural fleece just doesn't do it for me.

Cat's eye view...

Weather: hottest day of the year so far but a threat of thunder later. 26C

This week's harvest: Lettuce (Tom Thumb) Courgettes (3 tiny ones) Japanese Turnip Greens (a good handful) Rocket (many handfuls) Spinach (from the regrowth on last year's stumps 2 good portions) Lemon Balm, Mint, Basil, Chives, Artichokes (2 good sized ones)

Seeds planted in the new wooden raised slug proof (I hope) section: 1) Mizuna 2) Fennel 3) Winter Radish 'Weiner Runder Kohlschwarzer' (a cooking radish that you harvest when it is the size of a tennis ball and was really good last year) 4) Pak Choi.

All these are best sown after the longest day as before that they are apt to bolt. I haven't managed to stick to the In Tune with the Moon gardening Calendar but I notice that I sowed on a 'root' day with a waning moon on a descending orbit which should have suited the radish and the fennel but not been so good for the leafy Mizuna and Pak Choi....we shall see!