Cash Crops
Friday, September 26, 2008 by Jeremy Dore  - Categories: gardening selling
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 For most people, vegetable gardening is done largely for the enjoyment of producing great-tasting food for their tables. If there’s an excess of one fruit or vegetable then it is either preserved, given away to friends or neighbours (more courgettes...how kind!) or perhaps swapped for someone else’s excess. But what about growing extra crops to sell at a profit? Is it a great idea or can it be more trouble than it’s worth?
I have written before about Value to Space Rating – the idea that it is worth considering which crops are the most valuable to grow given the space you have available. This works really well for small gardens where you can only grow a small proportion of the food you will consume during a year and so need a system for prioritising the ones that give the best returns. But for people with larger growing spaces, the question of whether to sell the excess they produce becomes relevant.
Of course, there may be restrictions that prevent you selling your excess crops. In the UK for example, there are usually regulations limiting what you can do with the produce you grow on an allotment rented from your local council. The last thing that local governments want is for commercial growers to apply for allotments as a cheap alternative to acquiring land and paying taxes. As many areas now have an extreme shortage of allotment plots it would also seem unfair for people on the waiting list to be denied a plot because someone was using theirs for small-scale farming. So many tenancy agreements state that produce cannot be sold – although how they can trace what you do with vegetables when you get them home is another matter! As with many things it is a question of balance – selling a small surplus of a crop is very different to running a profit-orientated business.
But the common experience of many gardeners who produce an excess of some wonderful freshly-picked crop is that people just love to buy it from them. In times gone by a gardener who produced fantastic tomatoes would often sell them to the local vegetable shop – I remember Mr Simmons’ cauliflowers being famous in the village where I grew up. With the rise of supermarkets this opportunity rarely exists now. Far more common is selling to people at work or to neighbours. I have friends who grow fantastic raspberries and turn them into the best ever tasting raspberry jam – so good that work colleagues get their orders in early each year to buy it. Their three 5m (16ft) rows of raspberry bushes yield about 20kg (44lb) of fruit. Overall they produce about 50 pots of jam a year after taking all the pickings they want for themselves. They ask you to return the jars from last year (a nice bit of recycling) and will refill them at not much more than the price of your very-average-tasting organic jam. It’s a great little supplement to offset the costs of buying seed, compost and general gardening materials.
I think it’s a great idea if you have the space to think about incorporating a ‘cash crop’: not because I believe in gardening for profit but because it’s such a great way to spread the benefit of good growing expertise. People are crying out for the ‘real food’ that comes from locally grown sources – just look at how organic vegetable box schemes have taken off despite all the perfectly packaged supermarket fair available. If you can grow broccoli or plums to perfection then go for it. Cash crops are a great way to specialise in what you grow well, giving you a little income to buy what you don’t. A growing number of people will love to support your skill and be happy to recompense you for the experience of taking home some real local produce. The market is once again ready for fresh, zero food-miles, interesting local varieties and gardeners are the best placed to supply the demand.
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