The Independent was yesterday asking ‘Is it time to dig for victory again‘. This is a bit of a trend: the media is getting quite interested in the whole idea of self-sufficiency of late, probably spurred by the looming credit crisis (although the Indie is taking a green tack instead). PM, the other day, ran a story on the booming industry for fruit trees, which are being bought up like never before. The vendor they spoke to said it was a sure sign of impending recession. Not good.

Anyhow, the Independent report threw up some interesting stats, like the fact that the whole dig for victory campaign was spurred by the fact that blockades meant Britain could no longer rely on the 55 million tons of food it had previously been importing. My impression was that this pretty much fed the population – albeit frugally – but in actual fact it only provided around 10% of the country’s food needs.

So perhaps this 10% is the magic number for which we should all be aiming – to produce a tenth of our annual consumption of vegetables in our own homes, gardens or allotment plots.

It doesn’t sound like much until you realise that the campaign focused on growing only the speediest crops with the highest nutritional value, not the wide variety a home farmer might use today. And even then it required a certain amount of going beyond the minimum and eating the parts of plants that these days we would rarely touch.

“Little things once commonplace like pinching off the tops of broad beans – a fabulous spinach substitute – or trimming the tops from radishes and serving them as a vegetable are worth reconsidering,” says garden historian Caroline Holmes. (Source: Independent)

I’ve often wondered how much of what we cut off our food and throw away we could actually eat. Like the stem on a head of broccoli, for example, which makes up a great part of the weight for which you pay in the supermarket. It probably wouldn’t be very nice if you boiled it, but could you blend it into a soup?

I almost trimmed down the leaves from the tops of the sprouts at Christmas as they’re supposed to be like a slightly stronger cabbage, and I read the other day about drying the leaves from your raspberry canes to make fruit tea, which is very tempting.

As for the broad beans suggested above, though… well that’s a ‘hmmm’. Looking at them in the plot last night they looked far too much like sage to make them tempting as a stand alone vegetable.

But maybe I’ll give it a go. For old times’ sake.

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self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, vegetables

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