Growing your own food: can you save on fruit, vegetables, eggs & more?

Given the sky-high supermarket prices, growing your own produce could help you save a little extra cash.

Soaring supermarket prices

The cost-of-living crisis continues to be a major headache for most families.

Supermarket prices have seen some of the biggest increases in the last two years.

So could you offset some of those dramatic rises by producing some of your own food?

My husband has grown his own fruit and vegetables for nearly 20 years and even has three Guinness World Records for doing so.

We have also kept chickens on and off for 18 years.

But does the ‘Good Life’ really save or actually cost you money?

How much does it cost to keep chickens?

Last year, I got fed up with not being able to get eggs in the supermarket due to the shortages caused by bird flu, so I dusted off our chicken housing from the garage and got four hens from a farmer in Norwich.

The hens cost me £40.

I purchased them at what they call point-of-lay age – around 20 weeks – and it took a little while for them to get going.

I also had to keep them inside their run and not let them free-range due to bird flu regulations.

The original chicken housing – a classic Eglu house and small run – cost about £350 when purchased.

It’s now much more expensive, but there are cheaper alternatives.

I also ended up buying a new run to give them more space, which cost £200.

Eggstatic…

However, within a week or two we were getting four eggs a day – so 28 eggs a week.

Now and again one hen might have a rest but that is a lot of eggs.

We can’t keep up with production, so I have ended up giving boxes away and now am going to install an honesty box outside our house to sell them.

Locally, the going rate is only about £1.40 for half a dozen, although in the supermarket they would fetch about £2.20.

The girls are producing about four and a half boxes a week.

They are hybrids and will produce roughly 300 eggs a year for the first year and then slow down in years two and three.

Sadly, hybrids don’t tend to live very long, so in a couple of years I’ll have to introduce some new birds.

The feed costs about £20 for a 20KG bag and they go through roughly a bag a month.

They also get some leftover food treats – pasta and couscous are popular.

Even if we had the hen housing for free and sold all the eggs instead of eating them, at £1.40 a box and 120 eggs a month, we would make just £8 profit a month after the cost of the feed.

Gross profit on 300 eggs a year is £276.80 at a price of £1.40 a box.

The cost of the feed for a year is £240, so we’d only make a £36.80 profit a year and that’s if we don’t actually eat any of our own eggs or take any other costs into account.

Producing your own eggs at home won’t really save you money.

You also need the space to have hens.

But viewed as a pet with benefits, hens are a lot of fun and very useful creatures who certainly won’t let you go hungry.

Growing your own potatoes, tomatoes & more: costs and savings

My husband Douglas Smith has been growing his own vegetables for about 18 years.

He holds the UK record for the heaviest tomato, two Guinness World Records for most tomatoes on a truss (stem) and one for most on a plant.

He has grown all kinds of fruits and vegetables but tends to focus on giant ones for his hobby-related projects and tomatoes, courgettes, French beans, squashes, lettuces and cucumbers for the kitchen.

Again, we have so many courgettes and cucumbers at the moment that I am planning to sell them via the honesty box.

But is growing your own – assuming you have space to do so – worth it financially?

That depends on what you grow.

Things like potatoes, courgettes, lettuces, French beans and runner beans can be grown for the cost of a few packets of seed, normally around £2.50 a pop.

But many gardeners grow more than they need and may give you plants or seeds for free.

Then you just need to get a few canes for the beans to grow up and the time to take care of them.

Tomatoes, peppers, chillies and aubergines, however, do best in a greenhouse, which obviously comes at a cost.

They need the heat and tomatoes grown outside tend to get blight sooner.

However, even greenhouses can be picked up for second-hand for a couple of hundred pounds.

Homegrown vegetables and fruits are convenient, greener and often, especially in the case of tomatoes, taste much better than supermarket equivalents.

Considering the many kilos of cucumbers, courgettes and tomatoes we are already enjoying, doing so is definitely value for money.

Our courgette plants will produce at least £26 of product over the summer – that’s six courgettes a week.

Last year Doug managed to grow 5,891 cherry tomatoes on a single plant, which, at a price of £1.20 per punnet of 16, would have cost about £442 in the supermarket.

Admittedly, not all gardeners can do that!

Making your own bread: costs and savings

For years we owned a breadmaker until it blew up recently.

Of course, you can also make your own bread in the oven.

A breadmaker makes it easier as you just throw all the ingredients in, put it on overnight and, in the morning, there is a lovely loaf ready for you – no kneading required.

The breadmaker cost us around £70.

To make a medium loaf we used yeast, butter, strong white bread flour, sugar, milk powder, water and, of course, electricity.

The ingredients cost roughly the following:

• 400g flour – 34p
• Yeast – 10p
• Sugar – 10p
• Milk powder – 9p
• Butter – 12p
• Energy to cook – 6p

So a loaf costs roughly 81p to make. We made a couple a week and owned the breadmaker for 17 years before it died.

That’s potentially 1,768 loaves over that period, which cost £1,432.08 to make in the breadmaker, aside from its purchase cost.

If we’d bought similar loaves from the supermarket priced at around £1.50, we would have spent £2,652 on bread – £1,219.92 more.

Obviously, you can get a basic loaf for much less – around 45p – but the quality is a lot lower than that of a homemade loaf too.

Can you save by growing your own produce?

Living the 'Good Life' will give you some fun productive hobbies, good quality produce and hopefully a healthy diet.

What’s more, as long as you stick to growing cheaper vegetables outside that don’t need a greenhouse, or you can get a greenhouse for free or second-hand, you will definitely save some money.

And, while keeping hens won’t necessarily save you cash, using a breadmaker instead of buying bread could.

So why not take the plunge and follow Tom and Barbara’s lead?