Home-grown vegetables grow in popularity

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) - Almost 70 years after Britons were urged to Dig For Victory to produce hearty home-grown food to help the war effort, domestic horticulture is coming back.

Across the Atlantic, where mortgage defaults, plummeting property prices and spiraling oil costs have driven the U.S. economy to the brink of recession, home-grown food is also gaining in popularity.

Where for some people, the appeal has been primarily health-driven, for other newcomers to the grow-your-own phenomenon, growing vegetables from seed is being recognized as a cheap way to get healthy food.

According to the U.S. National Gardening Association, Americans spent some $1.4 billion on growing their own vegetables last year, an increase of almost 25 percent on 2006.

Across Britain, gardening virgins are buying vegetable seeds in their millions and waiting lists for allotments -- plots of land which can be rented for a nominal fee and cultivated to your heart's desire -- are stretching for years.

Around 300,000 people hold allotments in Britain, but many thousands more are waiting. And whereas once they were strictly the territory of elderly green-fingered enthusiasts, now everyone from hard-up students to busy young professionals wants a little piece of the country to call -- and grow -- their own.

"We got in just before the rush," said Maeve Polkinhorn, a young mother as her one-year-old daughter Orla snoozed in a buggy beside the plot she has had for three years at the Grange Lane Allotments in southeast London.

"For us it's the perfect antidote to living in London. It's a great stress-buster and the vegetables we grow taste so much better."

A combination of rising fuel costs, greater demand from growing economies in Asia, poor crop yields and the use of farmland for biofuels has pushed world food prices up.

In Britain, the credit squeeze is starting to bite and people are told the going is getting tougher with daily media headlines about rising inflation and slowing economic growth.

"We often find that when pockets are a little tight and people haven't got so much spare change, they tend to buy more seeds," said Clare Dixie, marketing manager for Thompson Morgan, one of Britain's biggest seed companies.

DIGGING FOR VICTORY

Vegetable-growing in Britain declined sharply in the 1980s and 1990s as cheap all-year-round vegetables in supermarkets took prime position.

But both Thompson Morgan and Suttons Seeds -- another major British supplier -- have noticed a rising trend in the past five years and say they have seen a jump towards vegetables from flower seeds this year in particular, with edible varieties accounting for between 60 and 70 percent of total sales.

Britons spent around 62 million pounds ($122 million) on seeds in 2007, 46 million of which was spent on seeds of edible plants, according to the Horticultural Trades Association.