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Save yourself from those stressful trips to the supermarket by growing your vegetables at home. Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

With bad weather disrupting supermarket vegetable supplies, the high cost of fresh food at this time of year and the increase in GST I want to be more frugal. In the supermarket I noticed broccoli at $3.75, old cabbage for $3, silverbeet for $2.50 and six spring onions in a bag for $2.99. I went home, picked a large bunch of silverbeet for dinner, and checked my row of plump spring onions. I now regard them as a cash crop. Although the onions, once pulled and eaten, are gone, the silverbeet, loose-leaf lettuce, peas, and herbs, are the sort of plants that will happily grow more after you pick from them.

For $3 you can buy a supermarket lettuce, or a packet of salad mix seeds.

If you sow small amounts of these each week, you could be eating $3 worth of salad greens for a whole year. Seedlings are easier to grow than sowing seeds.

The best value seedlings are from Awapuni Nurseries, where a bundle of 20 seedling spring onions are $2.99. Other $2.99 bundles, from their website (awapuni.co.nz) include nine cabbages, four sweet basils, six tomatoes or nine silverbeet.