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Coming up roses? Not any more as UK gardeners turn to vegetables
John Vidal, Guardian
Call it the new dig for victory. Rising food prices and television lifestyle shows are turning Britons into some of Europe’s leading home vegetable growers, with increasing numbers of gardeners digging up their flowering borders to replace them with veggie patches.
Leading seed companies yesterday said that UK buyers were shunning their traditional summer orders for flowers such as sweet peas and cosmos in favour of tomatoes, lettuce and other crops to grow at home.
“Five years ago the split between vegetables and flower seeds was 60:40,” said Tom Sharples, the technical manager of Suttons, which distributes nearly a third of seeds in the UK. “This had switched by last year to 60:40 in favour of vegetables and now in some places it is at 70:30 vegetables.
“There has been a pattern building for a few years now. The growth in vegetable seeds used to be related to health concerns, especially about chemicals. It’s shifting. Now it’s care for the environment generally, and people wanting to take control back of what they eat and [reduce] food miles.”
(22 March 2008)
Self-sufficient living
Harriet Lane, UK Telegraph
Simon Saggers and his family risked everything to realise their dream of turning their farm into a self-sufficient smallholding, complete with wildflower meadow, orchard, vegetable beds and bees. Now he plans to set up a village farm network.
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… It all sounds jolly romantic, the idea of taking a little corner of East Anglia back in time and restoring it to its ancient status as a five-acre smallholding (albeit accessorised with 21st-century green technologies), supplying the needs of its inhabitants and the 25 local families who subscribe to Simon Saggers’s box scheme. It looks gorgeous, too: the bees weaving to their hive, the laundry flapping from the line in the open-sided barn, the wildflower meadow illuminated by dazzling bursts of sunshine. But life on the Saggerses’ smallholding is extraordinarily hard work.
Financially, things are tight (‘There’s no debate, it’s definitely a tough existence in terms of the amount of money you can expect to earn from a smallholding,’ Saggers says). Physically, it is full-on; there is not much time for lolling back and admiring the view. And Jacqueline worries that as she endlessly bottles and stews and Simon endlessly digs and plants, they are providing their 21st-century children with some rather retro role models. So, there are anxieties. But on the upside, Saggers says that in comparison to the business of getting the planners to accept their proposals for turning a few empty fields into a small organic farm, the matter of running the smallholding is simplicity itself. Nothing has been more difficult, nothing has demanded more time, money, effort and bloody-mindedness, than getting that official thumbs-up.
Judging by the statistics, increasing numbers of Britons share the Saggerses’ green dream. In 2002 the Smallholder and Garden Festival attracted 5,000 visitors; last year there were 25,000. According to the Horticultural Trades Association, recent years have seen a 31 per cent increase in sales of vegetable seeds to householders, while flower seed sales have dropped by 32 per cent over the same period. In the past decade, the nation’s perceptions about food, about production methods and transportation, have shifted quite dramatically.
(22 March 2008)
Long article.
India’s debt-ridden farmers committing suicide
Jason Motlagh, SF Chronicle
… While India’s economy surges forward on the crest of globalization, thousands of farmers are taking their own lives every year to escape mounting debt and an uncertain future. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, at least 87,567 farmers committed suicide between 2002 and 2006. In Maharashtra state, there were 4,453 suicides in 2006, the last year for which statistics were made available, an increase of 527 compared with 2005. Sharp increases have also been reported in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states.
… Analysts cite several factors for the suicides, including crop failure due to agrochemicals and climate change, lower prices due to U.S. farm subsidies, state restrictions on export trade, and the dumping of surplus crops in an oversaturated domestic market.
(22 March 2008)
