If I Could Only Grow 10 Crops, I'd Choose These...

16 April 2022, written by Benedict Vanheems

Everything’s costing more these days – the price rises are relentless! But gardening can come to the rescue, if you know what to grow for the best returns.

The veggies, fruits and herbs below are all high-value crops, meaning they’ll save the most from your grocery bill. What are they? Let’s count them down!

10. Beans

Beans of all types are remarkably prolific, but awesome runner beans and slender green beans offer the most value. You can pick them fresh for their pods, or leave them until later in the season to produce dry beans for storing. Sow them into plug trays or small pots, or plant them direct.

These beans like to climb and they get big – very big! – so I have some tall garden arches that I like to grow them up. I love traditional bean supports too. A bean teepee is really simple to set up using bamboo canes. Use a wide-diameter circular pot or trash can lid to mark out where your canes will go, then tie them all together at the top with string. Wrap the string in two horizontal bands around the canes too. This will both help make the teepee sturdier, and give the beans something to grab on to as they climb.

Why do beans earn their spot in our top 10? Because the more you pick them, the more they’ll keep producing, giving many, many generous handfuls of beans throughout the summer. Any gluts can easily be frozen, canned (dilly beans are awesome!), or dried.

9. Tomatoes

We can’t not have tomatoes on our list! Decent-tasting, vine-ripened tomatoes command a premium in the shops, probably because they need to be grown for longer and then transported with extra care. But gardeners needn’t worry about things like food miles!

Plant seedlings deeply, up to the lowest leaves. Tomatoes can produce more roots up the length of their stem, so doing this to helps it to produce more roots and a sturdier plant.

Growing tomatoes outdoors can make them susceptible to a serious disease called blight. If your plants do get blight, remove the remaining fruits and ripen them indoors, or turn them into green tomato chutney or fried green tomatoes, and next time consider growing a blight-resistant variety.

In my cool climate tomatoes always seem slow to start cropping, but I’ll be pulling out all the stops to speed things up, including artificially pollinating the flowers with an electric toothbrush. Any excess will be turned into all manner of tomato sauces. I can’t wait!

8. Courgettes

In my local grocery store courgettes are pricey, even while in season. It’s a mystery as to why, given their fame for being outrageously productive – so much so that most gardeners have to give them away!

These will really keep food inflation at bay! Set them out into soil enriched with loads of nutrient-rich compost. Keep them well-watered, and help the early plants along with a spot of hand pollination if necessary. Oh, and pick, pick, pick, and pick to keep those fruits coming!

7. Garlic

This breath-bashing bulb makes it into 90% of the dishes I cook. Too much??

Garlic can be started in the fall, and they will sit quietly over winter before taking off in spring. I keep them in the greenhouse over the winter to keep them a bit drier, as my soil gets very wet. I like to plant potatoes next to them, as garlic is a great companion to the humble spud.

You can use garlic fresh as soon as you harvest, but make it go even further by not just curing them to store in sacks or strings, but also making your own garlic granules of garlic powder. Peel individual cloves then cut them into thin slices. Spread them out on a tray and dehydrate at 150ºF (65ºC). Once dry, whizz up in a spice grinder or food processor then store in airtight jars. They should keep like this for a year at the very least, quite possibly two!

6. Potatoes

So I mentioned that my garlic is in place ready to sit next to the potatoes, and that’s because their pungent pong helps repel aphids. And potatoes – conveniently – are next on our list!

I read a news story just last week that favourite British staple meal, fish and chips, is set to spiral in price because all the ingredients that go into it – including the humble spud – are skyrocketing in cost. Who’d’ve thought that this would become a precious commodity! Potatoes are no longer as cheap as chips!

Chit (sprout) your seed potatoes for about a month to give them sturdy little shoots. This will give them a slight head start until the soil is warm enough to plant.

Oregano — Herbs like this oregano are expensive to buy, but simple to grow

5. Herbs

The cost of herbs is insane! Why, why when you can grow them so easily?! In my compact herb bed I have parsley grown from seedlings split up from a pot of living herbs from the grocery store, oregano from sections taken from a mature plant elsewhere in my garden, and mint and rosemary raised from cuttings. Joining them later on will be some basil, also split up and grown from a supermarket pot of living basil to make it go much, much further.

The great thing about growing herbs is that they’re so easy to grow and will dramatically improve mealtimes with their boost of flavour. They’re terribly good for you too of course! I also love how easy it is to store herbs to use later on, whether by freezing them in ice cubes, drying them then flaking them into airtight jars, or creating delicious-flavored vinegers and oils. Grow a mix of herbs and save more than just a few pennies!

4. Mushrooms

Mushrooms? Really? Well, yes – and especially oyster mushrooms, which aren’t cheap – particularly if you want lots of them! I like to cook oyster mushroom steaks by layering them with a marinade then rendering them down into a caramelised and bubbling deliciousness. It’s yum – just try it!

The easiest way to grow them is to use an indoor mushroom growing kit. I reckon I get three times what I spend on the kits back in mushrooms, as they keep coming over two or three flushes, but if you want to save even more money, add mushroom spawn to buckets of pasteurised straw.

Like my garlic, I’ll be dehydrating some of my mushrooms to grind into a powder – perfect for adding a depth of umami flavour to savory dishes.

3. Corn

Who doesn’t love sweet corn? Fresh-picked cobs, smothered in butter and pepper – oh yes! But I’d like to propose a different type of corn – for drying and grinding into cornmeal. If you’ve got plenty space, this is a great way to fill the pantry with another staple that can be turned to so many dishes – from homemade tortillas to cornbread to corndogs.

Some varieties of corn can be both eaten fresh as sweet corn or left to dry for grinding. Look for ‘dent’ varieties of corn, or just check the variety description to make sure it’s suitable for grinding.

Sow corn into warm soil, and grow plants in a block formation to aid wind pollination. If you want to grow corn for grinding, you’ll need to leave it on the plant to dry out to a crisp, then bring them inside to continue drying before shucking and storing in an airtight container til it’s time to grind into cornmeal for your recipes.

Black raspberries — Super-productive berries make is easy to eat healthily and cheaply

2. Berries

Okay, so berries aren’t strictly speaking one crop, but the concept holds across all of these versatile fruits: they’re abundant, they cost a fortune at the supermarket, and once you’ve planted them, they’ll crop for years to come.

The cheapest way to buy berry plants is bare-root, when the plants are dormant in winter. Out of season the plants will be available in containers. Most berries like sun, but raspberries won’t mind a bit of dappled shade.

Like many of the most generous crops, be sure to pick berries often as they ripen. They’re so easy to freeze – just spread them out onto a parchment-lined tray, pop them in the freezer till they’re frozen solid, then decant them into labeled freezer bags or containers to go back into the freezer to use as needed.

1. Salad Leaves

Salad leaves of all types should comprise a regular feature of any diet, but prebagged salads are far from good value. They need careful treatment to extend their shelf life, and the air inside the bags is often modified, replacing oxygen with nitrogen or carbon dioxide to keep the leaves fresher for longer. But grow them yourself, and none of that matters. You can just pop out to your own personal salad bar whenever you need a hit of fresh!

Salad leaves are ideal for growing in containers. Mixes of leaves are fun to sow too. You can buy ready-mixed packets or mix your own to recreate that variety you get in bagged mixed salads. When picking salad leaves, remember to take the outside leaves – the biggest ones – and let the remainder to grow on. That way you can extend the harvest of individual plants over many weeks.

I know I have a habit of banging on about chard, so I’ll keep this brief, but don’t forget to include a row of chard too, because they’ll keep producing their fresh spinach-like greens over many, many months.

Have I mentioned what you thought I’d mention or is there another inflation-busting crop you reckon we should be growing. Tell us all about it in the comments below!