Sheffield study highlights impact of home-grown food

MYHarvest – measure your harvest – is described by the university as ‘exciting research that will estimate the contribution people who grow their own fruit and vegetable crops are making to UK food production’.

Sally Edmondson and her 71-year-old husband Mike are among those taking part, having been inspired to grow their own food by Sally’s grandparents Walter and Dorethea Goodall, who had their own plot near Endcliffe Park.

Sally, aged 69, mum of Dr Jill Edmondson, an environmental scientist at the university, says: “Maybe it’s because I am a post-War baby brought up with tales of my grandmother feeding eight children on a very low income in Wartime, but I have always wondered how I would cope if I didn’t have the ready access to food from shops that I have been fortunate enough to have throughout my lifetime.

“I have also grown vegetables all my life, increasingly so when we first moved to a house with a bigger garden and then later in life acquired an allotment (as my grandparents had during the war).

“In addition, we do forage for wild food.

“We have always tried to use as much of the food we grow as possible.

“This requires considerable time and effort in harvesting as well as careful storage and preservation – a large freezer and access to plentiful jars, sugar and vinegar are luxuries that my grandparents didn’t have.

“Our meals are planned around what we have grown, for example we buy very little fruit as when we don’t have fresh fruit available we have plenty in the freezer.

“We are self-isolating because of the coronavirus pandemic, so now we are finding out just how effective our home-grown fruit and vegetable supply is.

“It is a challenging time of year, what I call the hungry gap, when many of the winter vegetables are used up and the current year’s crops are largely still seeds in packets or seedlings at best.

“However, our meals have been planned around our homegrown food and we have eaten well.

“It is two weeks since we last shopped, apart from an on-line delivery of powdered soya milk – I confess we do have a very well stocked store cupboard.

“We are eating harvested vegetables from storage, such as squashes, but are still harvesting fresh crops.

“In the next few months, we will increasingly rely on frozen vegetables particularly beans and peas.

“Every meal has used our own food, many almost exclusively, and an extra focus on using our own food has led to some creativity in recipes.”

In the first two weeks, the couple used 12 types of freshly harvested vegetables plus herbs and rhubarb, six types of stored vegetable plus the last of their stored apples, and eight types of frozen fruit and vegetables – with Sally, of St Helens, Merseyside, saying they still have plenty of their own food in store and in the ground.

Fresh harvest: beetroot; cabbage; celeriac;; herbs; Jerusalem artichokes; kale; leeks; parsnips; purple sprouting broccoli; rhubarb; spinach beet; watercress; and wild garlic.

From storage: apples; carrots; garlic; onions; potatoes; shallots and squashes;

Frozen: blackberries; broad beans; damsons; redcurrants; stewed apple; sweetcorn; and tomatores.

Sally says: “Keeping a food diary also highlights what shop-bought food we rely on.

“Without, flour, oil and other fats, seasonings, spices and sugar, we would struggle to make interesting meals; we also use grains and pasta.

“The fresh foods we most rely on are cheese, milk and eggs; we have used these sparingly and have not yet run out but when we do they will be our first post lockdown fresh food purchases.”

The couple have been collecting the own-grown crop yield data for MYHarvest since 2014.

Sally says: “This has highlighted to us just how much we grow – the mean harvest of fruit and vegetables per annum in this time has been 420 kilograms.

“I remember when we just had a yard – we still produced food in pots and planters but with more land now our harvest is substantial and is genuinely sustaining us now in times of adversity.

“Now is the time to realise the importance of providing land, especially allotments, so that more people are able to grow their own food.”

MYHarvest is open to growers across the country.

A project spokesman said: “MYHarvest is your opportunity to participate in an exciting research project that will estimate the contribution people who grow their own fruit and vegetable crops are making to UK national food production.

“At present, there is a recognition that own-growing in the UK makes a really important contribution to food security, healthy diets and general well-being, but we currently have a poor understanding of how much own-grown food people are able to produce.

“This will be key to providing the vital evidence base to support the use of land for growing spaces within our cities and towns, at a time when people are becoming increasingly interested in growing their own fruit and vegetables.”

For about MYHarvest, see myharvest.org.uk