Is it actually cheaper to domesticate your individual fruit and greens?

It’s an article that appears to return round yearly: the promise that the typical household can get monetary savings by rising their very own fruit and greens. Whether or not they echo “dig for victory” wartime nostalgia or romantic pioneer spirit, the writers by no means actually reference how they arrived on the stats they use. So can your common dwelling gardener actually compete on value in opposition to the economies of scale of commercial agriculture? Let’s crunch the numbers.

Say you need to begin with a kind of bucolic, wood potato-growing planters you see in gardening catalogues. Within the UK, these…