Everybody is banging on about growing your own. But the more I grow my own – and we have harvested over 1,100 pounds of fruit and vegetables from the garden and allotment this year – the more I appreciate it. It saves money and that’s important to a Yorkshire girl like me. It tastes better. It’s fresher and therefore more nutritious.

It’s also good for your carbon footprint and this was brought home to me after one of our Sunday lunches, when we had harvested and eaten our own squash, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, leeks, kale, sage, cooking apples and onion. The only part of the roast meal we brought in was the pork and that was locally sourced.

The best beloved decided to price out these items in the supermarket so that we could gloat. But he got side-tracked when he found that many vegetables came from a long way away – the squash was from Morocco, for instance, and the sage came from Israel. A further recce revealed the full of extent of where much of our fruit and vegetables comes from. There were no British apples and pears, except for Bramleys, so the B.B. calculated air miles per pound for the meal instead.

If bought from the local supermarket, he estimated that they would be over 19,000 pound miles. Our home-produced roast dinner used up only 3,000 pound miles – and there was no packaging. The almond and pear pudding accounted for over half. It contributed 1,700 pound miles because, although it contained our own ‘Glou de Morceaux’ pears and our eggs, the four ounces of ground almonds came from nuts grown in California. It was all so different once. The chief executive of Garden Organic, Myles Bremner, came up with an interesting statistic recently. In the years during and following the Second World War, half of all food eaten in Britain was produced in gardens. So perhaps we should all grow more edible food. Garden Organic go further and say that 82 per cent of households still have a garden or outside space for “a sustainable food supply” and they see their challenge as being “to encourage the 60 per cent that don’t currently use their gardens for home food production to take a more active role.” The National Trust and Landshare are trying to marry up landowners and potential growers (www.landshare.net).

In recent weeks, I have started to see growing your own in a more serious light, so perhaps you could begin by growing more vegetables or by buying seasonal produce grown in this country. The Vale of Evesham and eastern counties of England are still growing many vegetables. Admittedly, that would mean missing out on the asparagus flown in from Peru, the tasteless strawberry and it would also mean abandoning the Kenyan bean which is with us all year round.

John Walker, an environmental writer and friend, is very concerned about Water Footprints. Apparently it takes “four litres or seven pints of ‘virtual’ water to produce one green bean”. Most packs contain 100 beans and that makes 400 litres of ‘virtual’ water to grow, process, package, spray and transport. He also points out that a third of the world is short of clean water.