Salad days and saving a packet on those greens
Growing your own grub is all the rage, and you don’t have to be green f ingered to get in on the act
YOU probably know Michael Kelly. He’s ‘yer man on the telly’, the guy who presents the show Grow
Cook Eat on RTÉ... the Dermot Bannon of broccoli.
When not showing us how to grow – and cook – tasty veggies on TV, Michael is chief executive of the GIY (Grow It Yourself) enterprise, a retail website and Grow HQ, a sort of café, farm, garden centre and green-fingered college all rolled into one.
He’s a man on a mission: to get more of us, in fact everyone in the country if possible, to grow at least some of their own vegetables.
Along with Energia, he has just launched an initiative to give away 1,000 GROWboxes filled with green goodies – with another three exclusively guaranteed for Irish Mail
on Sunday readers.
One of the silver linings to the Covid-19 crisis is that so many people are growing their own food – and business is up fourfold at gardening websites like www.giy.ie.
‘There’s a massive surge in interest since the lockdown. It’s a mix of people trying to stay sane and heathy and wanting to get back to basics,’ says Michael.
So how much can we save by growing our own produce?
Well, how long is a piece of string (bean)? One green-fingered guy with a tiny garden told Michael he saved €700 a year.
You can even save by investing in a readymade herb and salad garden – as I can testify.
Two years ago I bought basil, mint, parsley, rosemary, bay, chives, lettuce and thyme all for around €1.49 apiece. If you leave them in the tiny pots they come in, they will soon die off.
So I put them in large pots (the ground is even better) they bloom into bushy plants that can be harvested repeatedly and are still providing nice fresh produce.
Chives were a real surprise. They grow like wildfire, spruce up a salad, are a handy onion substitute and are topped with edible purple flowers in season. These not only look nice in the garden but really add class and taste to a salad. Parsley is also a sturdy and very much under-rated plant.
So for little in the way of effort, money or gardening skills I had a tasty supply of fresh salads and herbs for three seasons, saving a couple of hundred euros a year.
This summer, like many people, I got the gardening bug and decided to go one better and grow stuff from seeds as well as plants. I planted spinach, lettuce, Asian greens, courgettes, potatoes, tomatoes, French beans, blackcurrants, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries.
Only the leafy plants have grown to maturity so far (in a matter of weeks) but already we have tasty salads on tap and no longer on our weekly shopping list.
In our table (right) we give a selection of the cost saving of popular fruit-and- veg plants I planted to get an idea of savings.
A packet of lettuce seeds costing €2.50, for example, would produce 50-100 heads of lettuce, which grow back when cut. So let’s say you get 100 heads that would cost around 79c each in the shops. That alone is a saving of around €75.
Courgettes are famously prolific and will produce again and again when harvested – up to 80 per plant, which again, gives you a tidy saving. Spinach costs more than lettuce and it too will grow back when cut and it can be cooked too and used in curries.
Blueberry plants cost €8.50 and produce an average of 5kg-10kg of fruit when mature.
At €2 per 150g punnet, you will soon get your money back. And that 5kg-10kg of fruit is every year, remember, paying for the cost of the plant several times over annually.
But it’s not about the money. ‘If people grow only 5 per cent of that they eat, they become much more conscious of where the other 95 per cent comes from – and its quality,’ says Michael. This is a huge environmental issue. The latest climate change report concluded that we must change the way we consume food or our planetary goose is cooked.
Ireland incredibly also imports most of our food. Some 14 per cent of our veg comes from the UK and will only go up in price after Brexit.
The GIY and Energia initiative will give a free large GROWbox worth around €40 to 1,000 people in a free draw (not first-come-firstserved!).
HERE’S WHAT YOU GET:
5 seed packs: beetroot, carrot,
Bag of Irish wildflower beebombs;
Get Ireland Growing tips and recipe cards.
Just register at getirelandgrowing.ie/register. As an added bonus exclusively for our readers, we will also give away three GIY GROWboxes ourselves. All you need to do is email bill. tyson@mailonsunday.ie and get growing! peas, mixed oriental greens and basil;
9 litre compost block;
Fibre seed trays; Biodegradable pots;
Plant labels and pencil;