One question I see asked by new gardeners a lot on social media is “What vegetables should I grow?”
My answer is……”it depends”.
It depends on why you want to grow vegetables. Do you want to save money, reduce your carbon footprint, for the flavour, or grow for showing? This article explores growing to save money and to reduce your carbon footprint.
Saving Money. I hate to say this, but vegetable gardening is unlikely to save you a lot of money, and more likely will cost you money. Food is so cheap now (despite recent inflation, it still remains relatively cheap especially for vegetables and fruit). Vegetable gardening has gone from a necessity to feed the family to a hobby and luxury (I’m not judging, just observing).
Take carrots for example. A kilogram of carrots costs £0.60, which I guess if you like carrots will last a week. A packet of carrot seed costs £1-2 which is enough seed to supply carrots for most of the year. So, for £1 investment you can supply carrots for the year, saving £31 (52 x £0.60). Simple right? Not quite.
Carrots like well drained sandy soil. So, growing in Brinkworth clay soil is possible but you will lose a lot of carrots to rot, slugs, general sulking etc. Also, you will most likely need to protect the crop from carrot fly and slugs. Compost is not cheap, so assume 10 bags are needed for your yearly crop at £5 per bag, carrot netting, say 10m at a cost of £25 (you can reuse this each year, but probably you will need to renew every 3-4 years), and organic slug pellets at £5 (other slug control measures are available!). So, to grow your carrots you will need to spend £81. Not really a saving.
Ok, so a bit simplistic, and perhaps overexaggerating the costs, but you need to take all costs into account, depreciation on gardening equipment, gardening clothes, etc. There are plants you can grow that will save you money, but it does depend on what you want to eat. If you have a fairly basic diet based upon vegetables easy to grow in the UK, you may break even (but not save money). If you want more exotic vegetables (e.g. tomatoes, peppers) you are unlikely to save money.
However, there are some vegetables that will give you a chance of saving money. Herbs are the best bet, but they do depend on you using herbs regularly in your cooking. Take basil for example. Basil costs £0.79 from Aldi, which is enough for one meal. Assuming one meal a week, equals a spend of £41 per year on basil. One bag of compost at £4.99 is probably sufficient, and basil seed for the year will cost £10. Assuming you have the pots to grow it in, it will save you a princely sum of £26.
Fruit trees and soft fruit bushes are another possible method to save money. Whilst the initial cost of purchasing the trees/bushes is high (apple trees cost £10-£50 depending on variety, size etc), they need minimal expenditure once planted and yield year after year. You are likely to save money if you intend on making juice, cider, wine, jams etc.
Photo – Apple juice harvest from a medium size apple tree.
Reducing your carbon footprint. Usually your carbon footprint goes hand in hand with how much you purchase, so see above! Let’s use one of the most carbon efficient vegetables, carrots as an example. The carbon cost of carrots is 0.4Kg of CO2 per 1Kg of carrots consumed, small when compared to tomatoes (2.13 kg of CO2). To put into perspective intensively reared beef has a carbon cost of 155kg of CO2. However, this carrot carbon cost is based upon commercial growing. You will need to take into account everything you need to purchase, so with all the compost, carrot netting etc, your trips to the garden centre, delivery costs etc etc. Whilst commercial growers have all of these costs, they have massive economies of scale. I cannot see how you can grow carrots at a lower carbon cost than a commercial grower.
Other vegetables, such as tomatoes, may result in a bit of carbon saving, assuming you grow outside or in an unheated greenhouse. I suspect there is very little carbon saving though.
Quite often food miles are quoted as an environmental benefit, i.e. the lower the food miles the better. Be aware that the carbon costs of some semi-tropical vegetables such as tomatoes is largely attributed to the heat required to grow them, so produce grown in Spain and transported to the UK could have a lower carbon footprint than produce grown in the UK.
There are things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint when gardening. The two main ones being minimising heating greenhouses, and use of compost, in particular peat compost. Fairly obviously heating a greenhouse requires a lot of fuel, you are essentially heating an uninsulated glass box. If you can get away with it, try to use your house for starting seeds early (a windowsill or conservatory).
Peat compost has a huge environmental impact. Firstly, peat bogs are a diminishing habitat, and have reduced greatly due to exploitation over the years for compost, heating etc. Secondly, peat bogs are very good carbon sinks, i.e. they absorb carbon from the atmosphere, and are very efficient at it (peat bogs and saltmarshes, two habitats that have been decimated over recent history, have been shown to be very useful in absorbing carbon). Why pay to capture carbon when nature can do it for us much cheaper? The third reason all compost has a high carbon cost, is linked to transporting it; it is heavy and bulky.
One solution to this is to make your own compost. Whilst this sounds great, I struggle to make anywhere near to what I actually need, even though I compost just about everything I can. An alternative would be to purchase compost from a local source of recycled compost, we are lucky to have such a facility on our doorstep, Mr Crappers Potting Shed (they also offer free local delivery for bulk orders).
Part 2 of this article explores growing for flavour and growing for showing.
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