Ping! One yellow pepper, 79p. Ping! Eight small, tasteless tomatoes, £1.98. Ping! One avocado flown in from Spain, £1.19. Ping! One bag of soon-to-be- flaccid rocket, £1.75. That's the sound of money being spent like running water at the checkout: it's already cost you more than a fiver, and there's only just about enough for a salad.
Add in another six main meals and a couple of pieces of fruit a day, and it's clear that for students who are keen to eat healthily but cheaply, buying fresh produce at a supermarket can be a swift exercise in busting the weekly shopping budget.
Local markets provide much better value, but they're usually only held once a week and stallholders pack up around noon: the window of opportunity for buying decently-priced fruit and veg is therefore pretty tight. Grow your own, on the other hand, and you're no longer in thrall to plastic packaging, high prices and ridiculous food miles.
The financial benefits can be considerable, says Charlotte Long, a fourth year medical student at St George's, University of London. She planted her first vegetable seeds last summer, "just for fun", after being inspired by a newspaper gardening supplement. As someone who had never gardened before, the supplement's simple planting guides are now her reference bible.
"We made such a saving on our food bill that there wasn't any question about going for it again this spring," she says. "For the price of a few packets of seeds and compost – probably 20 quid all told, and we were given some old tools – we cut our shopping bill by around £10-£15 a week on fresh veg. If you're looking at £60 a month, that's quite a lot on a student budget, and nutritionally and taste-wise it was much better than anything we could have bought."
It's unlikely that anyone without at least an acre of land can be truly self-sufficient, but if you think it takes a huge space to grow your own food, think again. Living in the capital, Long has only a thin sliver of a garden, so she has planted out her border, which runs 1m by 20cm. She grows what she can in the ground and uses pots when she runs out of space.
A small plastic pop-up greenhouse is used for starting seeds off before planting them out. She's got carrots, spring onions, tomatoes, peppers and lettuce on the go this season and plans another round of sowing as the soil warms up over the coming months.
A 3m x 3m plot has been enough to see her family through summer on the vegetable front says Lisa Jones, a final-year HNC horticulture student at Duchy College-Rosewarne, near Camborne, Cornwall. The thrill of pulling her own food out of the ground is the primary motivation, she says: "It's almost like doing sport, that sense of achievement!
Popping a basket of squeakily fresh veg round to a neighbour when there's too much to scoff on your own is another pleasure. "I think we should grow our own veg and fruit and flowers and share it out, that's what community is all about," says Jones, whose family, though mostly appreciative of her horticultural efforts, was apparently all too glad to see the back of a glut of courgettes and beetroot by the end of the season.
You can do more than you might imagine on a small scale, but if you want to really undercut the supermarkets by producing a wider variety of fruit and veg, searching out a bigger plot is the only way. Duchy College runs a 10-acre market garden as a training resource, and all its produce is used either to supply campus kitchens, or is sold off at a knock-down price to students and staff.
At the University of Gloucestershire, environmental policy and management MSc student Sarah Taylor has secured a big-enough gardening plot for fellow students to grow an enormous range of soft fruit and seasonal vegetables – though to get it in a fit state to plant, she had to clear brambles covering a site the size of a tennis court.
"Although I'd never grown food before, I heard that the students' union had got hold of an abandoned piece of land that used to be allotments, and thought it was a great opportunity to give it a go," says Taylor.
She launched the university's Allotment Society at last September's fresher's fair, and around 30 students signed up to lop, clear, dig, rotivate and sow the first winter crop. It took a fair bit of help from the university's estates staff to get to grips with the derelict site, but onions, garlic and broad beans ("good for putting nutrients back into the soil") have been harvested, and silky pink rhubarb stalks – perfect for crumble – is being pulled up.
Twenty-three varieties of potato have been planted, together with runner beans, pak choi, radishes, sweet-corn and squash. Anyone who helps will get to share in the harvest. "Given the times we're in, and climate change, I think it's really important to have these kinds of skills," says Taylor. The problem facing many students contemplating a stab at The Good Life, however, is that many will have no idea of what should be planted when, or how to look after it once it sprouts. Taylor cheerfully admits she was exactly the same, but in true student spirit she headed for the library and spent the fallow winter months reading up.
Paying for specialist help to start you off on the right track can also be a good idea. There may be grants available (Taylor has secured £1,000 from the Higher Education Funding Council for England) but in any case, an afternoon's worth of advice needn't be expensive, and some charities will even show you the ropes for free. At the invitation of the Allotment Society, the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust did a composting workshop while an organisation called Garden Organic ran a session on how to manage the land without toxic chemicals.
