Gone to seed

Over at The Guardian, they’re noticing a lot more people are growing their own vegs:

Call it the new dig for victory. Rising food prices and television lifestyle shows are turning Britons into some of Europe’s leading home vegetable growers, with increasing numbers of gardeners digging up their flowering borders to replace them with veggie patches.

Leading seed companies yesterday said that UK buyers were shunning their traditional summer orders for flowers such as sweet peas and cosmos in favour of tomatoes, lettuce and other crops to grow at home.

“Five years ago the split between vegetables and flower seeds was 60:40,” said Tom Sharples, the technical manager of Suttons, which distributes nearly a third of seeds in the UK. “This had switched by last year to 60:40 in favour of vegetables and now in some places it is at 70:30 vegetables.

“There has been a pattern building for a few years now. The growth in vegetable seeds used to be related to health concerns, especially about chemicals. It’s shifting. Now it’s care for the environment generally, and people wanting to take control back of what they eat and [reduce] food miles.”

Thompson & Morgan, another major seed merchant in the UK, said there was “a definite shift” towards vegetables. “We are selling more vegetables than flowers now and there is a real boom in the grow-your-own effect. Sales of seed potatoes are already up 10% on the year and sales of other vegetable seeds continue to grow year on year,” said Clare Dixey.

The burgeoning slow-food movement and growing interest in local, seasonal produce are factors in the rise of the vegetable patch. But the seed supply firms also say that food and fuel price inflation is helping to drive the shift to vegetable growing. Following last year’s poor summer crops and a doubling of many commodity prices, food prices have risen 10%-20%.

Which is nice if you actually have a substantial garden or allotment, but that’s largely a middleclass priviledge these days. For those of us with a postage stamp for a garden, or living in a council flat, growing your own is really only possible for herbs and such, not so much substantial crops. Of course, you also need both the time and inclination to garden properly. So in part this trend is just another consumerism fad, “The Good Life” v2.0, but as the article also mentions, community gardening projects are also on the rise.

In a way Britain here seems to follow the example of Cuba, which driven by need started large scale urban gardening projects in the late eighties/early nineties following the collapse of the Soviet Union and accompanying loss of subsidies. As Monty Don shwocased in the first episode of his Around the World in Eighty Gardens show, Cuban gardeners have transformed vacant spaces in Cuba’s cities into vegetable gardens to feed themselves and their neighbourhoods. There isn’t of course the same urgent need to do this in rich western Europe, but communual gardens like this might be one part of a post-cheap oil future.