Method: Buy one packet of red mignonette lettuce seed. (They tolerate more heat and drought than most other lettuce). Plant a pinch of seed every fortnight as soon as any frosts are over.

Result: one or two lettuce a day for salads and sandwiches.

Value: about $300 in a good salad-rich summer. Add health benefits from eating your greens, or ‘red brown’ in this case, plus exercise, as lettuce needs regular weeding, feeding, watering and mulching or it becomes bitter. You might like to add the money saved in gym membership to that, too.

Method: Buy one packet of seed. Plant as soon as any frosts are over.

Result: enough silverbeet for soup, quiche, ‘spinach’ triangles, steamed or stir-fried veg every day, plus bunches to give away.

Value: anywhere from nothing, if you’re not a cook and don’t enjoy boiled silverbeet, to about $600 if you are the kind who’ll be creative with whatever is growing in their garden. The more you use, the more you save.

Method: Plant lots. Now.

Result: An enormous amount of parsley.

Saving: This also depends how creative you are. We save about $600 each summer, but then we eat large amounts of parsley in tabouli or chopped into soups, stews, mashed spuds, macaroni cheese or even scattered on pizza. Others might save possibly $2.50 on the bunch of stuff they leave in the fridge till it wilts, then throw out.

Our chooks are pretty fond of parsley, too.

Result: Complete deliciousness.

Method: Plant one bush of cherry tomatoes, one bush of yellow pear tomatoes, one bush of Roma tomatoes, two bushes of Grosse Lisse for pasta sauce, tomato sauce and chutney, one bush of Black Krim and Green Zebra to add interest to salads, plus any others that takes your fancy.

Saving: This depends again on your cooking ability. If you just want a daily tomato salad, then maybe four months of tomatoes (Let the green ones ripen, spread on newspaper over winter) you might save $3 a day. If, like us, you eat casseroles based on extremely good chutney, or tomato kasundi, or tomato-based pasta sauces, then that will go up to at least $10 a day, or over the 100 or so days of our tomato harvest, $1000, which doesn’t count the jars of chutney et al consumed the rest of the year, or given to friends who then press cakes or jars of jam on you in exchange.

Result: A fruit or six every day all year round

Method: Plant in the warmest, most sheltered spot you have, and feed, water and mulch as well as possible. Nearly all backyard lemons are underfed, under watered and under mulched.

Saving: Absolutely no idea, as I haven’t bought a lemon or even looked at how much they cost for half a century. We use at least two a day in salad dressings or to add piquancy in everything from soups to soufflés, cakes or casseroles, as well as the homemade not-very-sweet-at-all lemon cordial available here all year round, plus lemon butter once a year to give away and to fill tarts, the lemon pudding that must be made at least once a fortnight, lemon mousse, lemon slices and Bryan’s favourite, lemon poppy seed cake that keeps well for a week or more. Make your own calculations.

And then keep planting. I love home grown spuds as much as home grown tomatoes. Spring onions will become perennial and a standby whenever you need a touch of onion. A harvest of fat pumpkins will be the envy of everyone you show them off to. Home grown melons are so fragrant they scent the garden. And then there’s …

Whatever you love most, from peas to artichokes, passionfruit to pears. You can literally live on the produce in your garden - I have, in various years, though that was poverty as much as choice. Total self-sufficiency is not enviable when you have pneumonia and need to crawl out to pick the corn, beans and tomato for dinner in the rain.

But almost self-sufficiency? It’s deeply satisfying, definitely delicious. And if you have the ingenuity to use what you grow instead of buying frozen pizza, it will save you a great deal of money indeed.