A fresh approach: cut food bills by growing your own fruit and veg

theguardian.com:

With the cost of living crisis driving up food prices, you may be considering growing fruit and vegetables as a way to cut the cost of your weekly food shop.

But doing it yourself is not guaranteed to save you money. Before you pick up your trowel and start digging, it pays to find out which crops you should grow to cut your food bill. What are the biggest money mistakes to avoid and how can you get stuff for free?

The best way to save money is to figure out which fruit and vegetables you regularly buy from the supermarket can be grown successfully in Britain, then prioritise the most expensive to purchase by the kilo.

“Often, people grow food like carrots and potatoes that is very cheap to buy – and spend a lot of money doing that,” the RHS’s horticulture expert Leigh Hunt says.

Instead, he recommends growing salad leaves: “A pillow packet of lettuce is going to cost at least £1. But lettuce and rocket are the kind of crop you can get cheaply and grow readily.”

At harvest time, you can simply trim the top off these plants. “And they will then regrow and you will get another crop out of them.” You can do this two or three times, he says.

Jane Perrone, who presents the gardening podcast On the Ledge, recommends growing fruit bushes. “If you look at the price per pound of fruit like blackberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, gooseberries and redcurrants, they are quite expensive at the supermarket,” she says. “You can buy them quite cheaply as small bushes and they will, without much effort on your part, produce pounds of fruit every year.”

An advantage of growing currants and berries is that if you get to the point where you have too many to eat fresh, you can freeze the rest. “Then you will have a supply through the winter,” she