WHAT'S THE STORY WITH GROWING YOUR OWN FRUIT AND VEG?
THERE'S MONEY TO be made in trend spotting, once you're good at it. US futurist Gerald Celente has been making predictions with Mystic Meg-like zeal for more than 20 years and has had some notable successes. He was years ahead of the game in predicting the popularity of bottled water, organic food and gourmet coffee in the 1980s, so it's worth listening to what he says today about tomorrow.
Surprisingly, one of his latest predictions looks more to the past than the future. Earlier this year, he expressed the conviction that kitchen gardens will blossom in the next five years. He believes patches of land once reserved for lawns and low-maintenance trees will soon be converted into food-producing plots by people seeking to grow their own, not because of any economic downturn, but because they want access to the freshest food possible. "Buy a bag of fertiliser and grow your own greens. This sense of self-sustaining is on the rise," he has said.
Judging from the interest on the faces of the 60,000 people who filed passed the beautifully maintained vegetable plots at the Bloom garden festival in the Phoenix Park recently, he's right on the money. The garden sector, already worth in excess of €2.2 billion to the economy, looks to set to bloom as a recession bites and people look for cheaper pastimes and ways they can save themselves a few bob.
Irish gardening expert Gerry Daly has seen "enormous growth" in the horticulture sector in recent years and has watched an evolving pattern. "Before the Celtic Tiger came along, people were more actively involved in gardening themselves, but as they grew more wealthy, they started employing professionals to landscape their gardens and do the manual work for them," he says.
He believes that, in the face of growing economic uncertainty, the pendulum might be swinging back to the DIY model, with more people turning towards their gardens with a view to prettifying their external living space.
The number of parents pushing buggies around the displays at Bloom suggests that younger people are taking a renewed interest in gardening, with many of them keen to grow some of their own food, not because they have to, but they want the freshest tasting food possible.
"If you look back at the 1940s and 1950s when vegetables couldn't be got or were very expensive, people used to grow food out of budgetary necessity. The difference now is that people are growing not because food is expensive but out of a desire to have quality, fresh produce," says Daly.
Fresh herbs are increasingly popular, economically sensible and, critically, not difficult to grow. "You can grow a lot of herbs in one square metre and it does save money," he says.
ONE OF THE MOSTpopular potted herbs is basil. It looks and smells gorgeous but soon after it leaves the supermarket or garden centre, it starts to look and smell a whole lot less tempting.
The trick to keeping the plant going for the whole summer is to re-pot it as soon as you get it home, Daly says. To get the basil looking leafy, between six and 10 small plants are used. The pots are too small to accommodate all the roots, so they die unless they're quickly re-potted.
"A lot of gardens now are very small but you can still do a lot in three or five square metres, particularly if you grow quick turnaround crops such as salad leaves and radishes."
It is, says Daly, best to start on a small scale, with French beans or lettuce or white turnip rather than plan to cultivate loads of bulky crops immediately.
"Start very small and get used to the idea. It can be fatal to start with a big area which you are soon not able to cope with. People need to develop their skills with a few metres and get an idea of weed control."
US-based writer and IT expert- turned-gardener William Alexander would surely agree. He started growing his own food several years ago and recently published a book chronicling his difficulties. The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, has been glowingly reviewed in the US press. It documents, as may be clear from the title, the writer's constant struggle with his garden and suggests that it might not be a route for penny-pinchers. He echoes Daly's advice about staying small.
"I would say a four-by-12-foot bed is plenty of room to have a lot of fun with. Don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach," he cautions.
Aileen Morrison is living the good life in Galway with her husband and four children. She is a whole lot more ambitious than that.
In her comparatively small garden on a rocky hill-top three miles outside the city, she is growing all manner of berries, and vegetables. Right now she is looking forward to a harvest of red and blackcurrants, gooseberries, strawberries, spinach, potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, mangetout, beans and more.
"The berries are easy to grow and are very low maintenance. You do need to give them a bit of space though and as long as you keep the birds off them when they start producing fruit, then it is really very simple," she says.
"Potatoes are very easy to grow as well. I've tried broccoli but my chickens ate it, and the asparagus and the sweetcorn didn't really take too well either."
GROWING YOUR OWNhas been a way of life all her life. Her mother grew her own vegetables at her childhood home in Switzerland and even when she was living in small apartments throughout her 20s she was always growing herbs or tomatoes in window boxes.
The food she grows herself "tastes much, much better than any supermarket produce and you simply can not get that kind of quality unless you grow it yourself. I'm very happy to just wander into the garden for my salad leaves or vegetables."
Just as she had Pricewatch all set to dig up the small patch of grass it calls its own to sow a cornucopia of summer vegetables, she warned that it could "be very hard work, particularly at the beginning of the season with the turning of the soil and all the weeding. But as the season progresses and the plants become sturdy, it does become a lot more relaxing."
It is, she says, ultimately a hobby and "not something that I do for economic reasons. It is certainly cheaper, but I don't think vegetables are where you spend most of your money when you're shopping. The kids love it as well."
They don't have to do any of the weeding or digging, mind you.
