Cut costs by growing your own

IF you’ve read this column before, you probably know how much I love to talk about food. It’s incredible that food is absolutely essential to our survival, but we’ve become totally disconnected from the knowledge of how to feed ourselves. In previous generations (and indeed in many parts of the world today) people ate what they were able to grow on the land they had, with the crops they relied on seasonally. Now we all rely on large commercial entities to provide foods transported from very far away with no regard to local seasonality.
According to Project Drawdown, 24 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity can be attributed to agriculture and land use. Climate change is already impacting our food supplies, and we don’t have to look past Europe to notice that. The record temperatures and droughts across Spain, France, Italy and other central European countries in summer 2022 reduced crop yields for several important crops, including grain maize (to feed animals raised for meat), sunflower, soybean, and various grains including wheat, as well as tomatoes, olives and other fruit crops.
Additional threats to foods include the proliferation of pests and types of fungus that thrive in warmer climates and can affect monocultures, such as the Cavendish banana, which is the main supermarket banana and is currently threatened by the Panama 4 fungus. Our modern supermarkets offer only one variety of most fruits and vegetables (when tens or hundreds of varieties exist for tomatoes, apples, potatoes, beans, etc) supplied by large-scale producers usually growing monocultures.
Last summer I took my kids to visit Glasrai Farm in Hollymount to see their farming in action, and we were all impressed to see the effort they put into selecting varieties that grow in the wet and sometimes wild Mayo climate, as well as covering crops, planting companion plants and other non-chemical based strategies for mitigating damage from pests. We love getting our weekly box of fresh veg and often a bit of the healthy soil it is grown in. It starts a lot of conversations about the vegetables that grow best near us, and also why food is most delicious when it’s the right time for it to grow.
In the past two years we have started growing what we can, which is a great opportunity for everyone to choose varieties of foods we love from a heritage, open-pollinated seed supplier like Irish Seed Savers, Brown Envelope Seeds or The Organic Centre. We won’t be able to produce all the veg we need, but it gives us the chance to grow things that can be expensive (or that would normally be packaged), like the kilos of cherry tomatoes or fresh peas that the kids can eat straight from the plants, or salads and herbs (cost comparison: a packet of seeds for €3-€4 that yields kilos of food, or several euros per hundreds of grams each time you buy the item in the supermarket). We can also try some exotic favourites, like sweet corn.

McKinley Neal co-runs PAX Whole Foods & Eco Goods, a minimal-waste shop in Westport offering bulk organic toods, reusable goods, household products, eco-trendly personal care Items and gifts.