You can’t go fresher and more local than food from your own garden. Most of us don’t have big enough gardens (and enough time for gardening) to feed ourselves exclusively from our own soil, but even the smallest space will accommodate some potted herbs or rocket. However, this is not a DIY guide, so I’ll focus on food gardening as a local buying exercise instead.

To start your food garden, you can either buy seedlings at your local nursery (consult the yellow pages) or you can buy seeds. The fabulous thing about growing your own food is that you are not limited to the fruit and vegetable varieties sold at the shops. The products on supermarket shelves, ‘pret-a-porté’ fruit and vegetables, have been chosen for their looks and travel stamina. Local variety or, lo and behold, taste, are secondary considerations. Heirloom varieties, on the other hand, are being propagated for exactly those reasons: superior flavour, local variety, hardiness against pests and often wonderfully unusual colours and shapes!

For choosing and buying heirloom seeds visit the Livingseeds website.

For organic seeds, you can order from the Ethical Co-op (they are worth bookmarking for all organic offerings, not just seeds or food). Ethical stock seeds from Soil for Life and Tierhoek Organic, and from the long established bio-dynamic Camphill Farm. You might also get some seeds directly from Sandveld Organics farm.

If you are looking for inspiration on growing your own food and buying local food, you can try Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle which is the entertaining and informative diary of her family’s year as ‘locavores’. Good reads on local food gardening are:

Jane’s Delicious Garden - How To Grow Organic Vegetables And Herbs In South Africa by Jane Griffiths (Sunbird Publishers),

The Garden Guardian’s guide to environmentally-responsible garden care by Johan Gerber (Aardvark Press),

Beginner’s Guide to Earthworm Farming by Mary Murphy (Penguin SA),

Food from your Garden by Jennifer Godbold-Simpson (Struik Lifestyle),

and Grow to live by Pat Featherstone of Soil for Life (Jacana Media).

If you are more the workshop person, you could do a course, for example, with Soil for Life or Seed (the latter also sell books and videos).

Soil for Life offers courses on composting and sells worm farms and compost. For a good online resource about composting, check out the Greenhome website.

And if you are employing someone for gardening services please take a moment to read the paragraph on domestic work here.