How Much You Could Save Growing Your Own Food
The average UK family spends around £475 a year on fresh fruit and vegetables. The average annual cost of growing your own, once you have a basic setup, sits between £30 and £80 in seeds, compost and a few inputs. The gap between those two numbers is hundreds of pounds a year, sat in your pocket instead of on the supermarket conveyor belt.
The savings come from knowing which crops to grow, and tomatoes are the obvious place to start. A pack of cherry tomato seeds costs around £2, and each plant grown from a single seed will produce roughly 200 tomatoes across a season. The supermarket equivalent runs into hundreds of pounds. If raising plants from seed feels like too much for a first try, young tomato plants are sold at garden centres and supermarkets in spring for as little as £2 to £4 each, and someone else has already done the hard work of germinating them. Cheaper still, you can save the seeds from a tomato you have already eaten. Pick a nice ripe one from your shopping, scoop out the seeds, and you have next year's plants for nothing.
The same trick works beautifully with peppers. Buy a pepper from the supermarket, save the seeds, and grow your own plants the following year. We did this ourselves and it cost us literally nothing. A bag of three peppers from the supermarket can run to £1.50 or more, while a single home grown pepper plant produces six to eight peppers in a season. The maths speaks for itself.
Then there are strawberries, and this is the one that genuinely surprises people. Buy one strawberry plant in spring for around £3. Using John's method, that single plant will give you fruit the same season, and keep multiplying year after year, into a whole bed of strawberries that crops every summer with no further outlay. One plant. Three pounds. Strawberries every summer for the rest of your life. There are very few financial decisions that pay back like that.
Potatoes deserve a mention too, not because they save you a fortune, but because they are so easy that anyone can do them. Keep a couple of potatoes back from your shopping, leave them somewhere cool until they sprout, and push them straight into the soil. New potatoes pulled out of your own garden in June, boiled with a knob of butter and some mint, taste nothing like the bagged ones in the supermarket. Garlic is in the same easy category. Push the cloves into the ground in autumn, leave them alone all winter, and lift fat heads of garlic out of the soil the following summer. One supermarket bulb can give you ten plants. Almost no work, almost no cost.
Add it all up across a single growing season and the picture becomes hard to argue with. A family willing to grow even a handful of these crops, in the right way, can save hundreds of pounds a year off their fresh produce bill. Year after year, growing season after growing season, those savings stack up. Across ten years you are looking at thousands of pounds staying in your pocket. That is before you factor in the taste, the freshness, the lack of plastic packaging, and the food miles you stop paying for.
That is money lining our own pockets for a change, instead of the supermarkets'.