Tweet
Can you save money by producing your own eggs, growing your own fruit and veg, and making your own honey? Hilary Osborne is cock-a-hoop at the prospect
Chickens
Fed up with paltry returns on your cash? Think poultry instead. Buying some hens and a coop for your garden starts at about £350 but will repay your investment in just a few years. The drawbacks are plenty - including lots of cleaning, noise and foxes - but it's probably the best way to grow your own in your backyard.
"You can save money keeping your own hens once the initial outlay for the coop, hens, feeders and so on has been taken into account," says Val Moody, founder of Swindon-based Chicken School (chickenschool.co.uk). The biggest cost is housing and this can vary enormously. You can spend anything from £120 to £1,000 on a home for your feathered friends. A classic hut on legs for six to eight chickens costs around £240. Eglus (£333) are popular for town gardens - try omlet.co.uk, which also supplies organically reared hens. It recommends you set aside at least six by eight metres of your garden for two chickens.
Perfectpoultry.co.uk offers a starter pack at £353 which includes an "easy clean" coop with five hens plus telephone support for first-timers. Or you can save a battery hen from slaughter at LittleHenRescue.co.uk which proclaims it is "working with the farmers to retire these working girls into a wonderful free-range life". They may look scraggy, but once they find their freedom, they can be good egg-layers.
On top of lodgings for your birds, they will need a run so they can stretch their legs and feeders. Ongoing costs include food, mite and lice treatment, supplements, cleaning products and straw. "The house will need to be cleaned weekly and all bedding material changed," Moody says.
The cost of this will depend on the size of the house and the number of hens you own - go for at least two so they won't be lonely. Moody says each chicken should provide six eggs a week, so if you buy four you will get 1,248 a year - a collection that would cost £172 a year if you bought a supermarket's basics range or more than £340 if you opted for large, free-range eggs. However, beware of foxes which can wipe out your flock - and your savings - in one fell swoop.
• Set up costs (assuming mid-range house, four hens, feeder and first year's upkeep) £475
• Costs after first year (for four hens) £125 a year
• Cost of each box of six eggs in first year £2.28p
• Average cost of six eggs in later years 60p
• Sainsbury's Golden Yolked free-range eggs £1.65 for six.
Fruit and veg
Turning an unused bit of your garden into a vegetable patch needn't cost the earth, and with a bit of application can provide enough veg to feed a family of four, for most of the year.
Jane Perrone, author of the Allotment Keeper's Handbook and the Guardian's gardening editor, says it's hard to make a financial case for growing fruit and vegetables. "You should see it as a hobby that might occasionally get you something nice, not as a money-saving exercise," she says.
That said, vegetable growers inevitably end up eating more veg - not least because they are so good. Compare the costs of growing your own with the cheapest carrots, and you'll conclude you are losing money.
However, contrast your expenditure with the most expensive organic vegetables, and you'll more than cover your costs. Some restaurants and local greengrocers may even barter for your spare production if you are good. So what's the veg that offers the best value in the back garden?
A packet of lettuce seeds will set you back just 79p and give two summers of successional (staggered) sowings. Rocket, at £1 a bag in the supermarkets, is so easy to grow even novices can't mess up. Dwarf french beans are a great alternative to the runners that may have blighted your childhood. They are high yielding and fantastically tasty.
Beetroot lovers will enjoy another low maintenance crop; shallots, chard and spinach are all easy to grow, yet are expensive in the shops. Home-grown broad beans are a taste sensation compared with frozen beans. Just make sure you keep the slugs off them - particularly when the plants are young.
Courgettes (grown from seed at £2 a pack or 80p a plant) are high-yielding and delicious. Add in your home-grown tomatoes, and you are soon making ratatouille which can be frozen for later in the year. Mini greenhouses can now be bought for £9, and are a great way to bring seeds on.
Rhubarb is easily acquired, grows well in most gardens, and is delicious fresh. Fruit trees are less cost-effective - the cost of trees buys a lot of fruit - but if you plan on never moving again they will reward your investment with years of fruit, if looked after.
If you are particularly cost conscious, share seeds and tools with fellow veggie growers. Plenty of stables will give you free manure if you are prepared to take it away - just make sure its well rotted down before it's applied. Libraries are full of gardening books. If you live in a low rainfall area and you have a water meter, water butts are a must (an old bath works well).
For free advice, try the Royal Horticultural Society's site at rhs.org.uk/growyourown.
Guardian Money also has five free copies of the RHS/Carol Klein Grow Your Own Veg Journal (Mitchell Beazley £9.99) to give away. Email money@guardian.co.uk by the end of Monday 16 March and put "book draw" in the subject line and tell us your address.
• Set up costs (compost, seeds, slug pellets, etc) £10-£25
• Value of veg from a back-garden plot Around £200-£300 a year
Bees
Interest in bee keeping has boomed in the past couple of years, with the British Bee Keepers Association hearing from around 3,000 prospective new keepers last year.
Chief executive Martin Love says: "Some people are fascinated by bees and by their social structure, other people are interested in the breeding and want to be able to test their skills. Others feel they want to put something back into nature."
Alison Benjamin, who took up bee keeping three years ago and now runs courses for new keepers (urbanbees.co.uk) did so for environmental reasons. "I read that they were threatened and pollinated a third of everything we eat and the berries that the birds and small mammals eat so I thought I'd keep a hive in the garden. The honey was secondary," she says.
She estimates setting up each of her hives in Battersea, London, cost £500. Each year, she buys new frames for the honey, at a cost of £100 a hive. The industrious bees from one hive produce around 20kg of honey each year - a haul that would cost £70 if you bought supermarkets' standard honey, or around £140 if you went for a more comparable organic version.
"If you sell your honey at a farmer's market, or online, for £5 to £10 a jar, you can make a bit of money, as much as £300 in the second year. Economies of scale work to make it cheaper if you had say five hives at the bottom on your garden," she says.
• Set up costs £500
• Costs after first year £100 a year
• Cost of each 454g jar of honey in first year £12.50
• Average over three years £5
Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Orange Blossom honey 454g jar £3.29
Is it really worth growing your own veg
Yes
Don't believe anyone who tells you growing vegetables doesn't work, says Miles Brignall. Using two big flower beds at our Hertfordshire home, I manage to grow enough salad and vegetables to feed our family of four for about half the year.
Last weekend I put in the first lettuces - protected from the frosts. My broad beans, which survived the snow, seem to get an inch taller every time I look, and I'm looking forward to the Easter dig-in, when gardeners spend time preparing the soil.
I favour spinach, chard, beetroot, carrots, a mix of salad leaves, french beans and courgettes. I've had a few failures - my tomatoes have never been great - but it mostly works.
I think the secret to vegetable growing is little and often. Most evenings in the summer I spend a few minutes pulling out weeds, and watering. Most growers who fail, do so because they plant a load of stuff, and then just leave it for several weeks. Slug control is an absolute must - the little *******s will clear a newly planted lettuce patch overnight. Lose too many crops and it's easy to become disheartened. Germinating seeds indoors dramatically improves success rates.
However, get it even partially right and you will be rewarded with some of the best pesticide-free food you'll ever eat.
No
My own experiments with self-sufficiency last year suggest this is something best done for love rather than money, writes Hilary Osborne. Several months of toil produced a handful of carrots, strawberries that were around twice as expensive as those on the menu at Wimbledon and a pile of shrivelled apples that weren't even good for cooking.
My herb garden fared little better - I spent the summer killing thyme. And basil, and mint. The only successes were the cherry tomatoes and rosemary, but taking the cost of seeds, equipment and compost into account these were more delicious than cost-effective.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
More...
