‘April is the cruellest month’ wrote TS Eliot.

At least his April had something happening, even if it was only ‘stirring dull roots with spring rain’. There’s not a lot of stirring going on in our plot, and not a lot of rain either. The ground is still as hard as stone and I can’t remember the last rain shower we had.

Yesterday, I was looking round the smallholding, searching for signs from nature that spring was coming. Apart from a few leaf buds and a peely wally attempt from the grass at growing under my feet, we may as well have been in February.

Welcome to the slowest start to the GYO season I can remember - and to the beginning of what looks like it could be yet another difficult Scottish growing season. ‘Difficult Scottish growing seasons’ mean higher food prices later in the year, so now really is a good time to hone your Grow Your Own abilities and try and find cost-effective ways to put food on your table.

Why ‘cost effective’? Because it’s easy to spend a whole lot more on pots and seeds and compost and the latest whizzy GYO gadget than you ever save on buying fruit and veg!

For those with no growing space of their own and with no prospect of getting an allotment before 2113, then getting really good at growing all those green and leafy plants indoors is a must. To be honest, it makes sense for all of us to be growing our mustard and cress, potting up our leaf herbs and sprouting our bean sprouts in the comfort and privacy of our own homes.

The advantage of growing in the home is that we’re heating our living spaces anyway, so there’s no extra cost from bunging a few edible pot plants in here and there and no extra carbon emissions either – in fact, your carbon foodprint will probably drop considerably if you’re sprouting your own and using house-trained mustard, cress and herbs rather than shop bought stuff from continental Europe.

If you’re lucky enough to have a bit of outdoor growing space, it makes sense to plan for a future with at least some growing under cover – whether the protection you need is from winds, rain, ice, snow, or all of them on the same day! Ask around on Freeshare/Freecycle or Gumtree to see if anyone has an old greenhouse or polytunnel they no longer need.

Use unheated (so you’re not spending money on energy) and properly ventilated (so you can avoid nasty diseases like botrytis) both are great ways to extend your growing season. I tend to prefer greenhouses over polytunnels – mostly because the plastic sheeting needs to be replaced regularly with the latter and I like to avoid using plastics where possible.

The only things that are holding out against the frost and cold on our plot are the plants and seedlings in our unheated greenhouse. Everywhere else, the early crops we would expect to be harvesting from sweet cicely, wild garlic and other spring salad leaves are looking distinctly rusty as wave after wave of frost has nipped them in the bud. But we’ve got trays full of seedlings in the greenhouse, all in need of potting on. Because they are not ready to go out into the open yet (even if the soil were warm and soft enough to dig), they need to be potted on into plant pots for their next growth spurt. In previous years, we’ve potted plants on into 3 inch pots – and written off many an expensive 40 litre sack of compost by doing so.

Like everyone, we’re watching what we spend a bit more carefully, so this year we’ve added a new twist to an old trick to get free plant pots. For years now, we’ve filled the cardboard tube from old loo rolls with compost and planted our peas and beans in there – you get a free pot which rots away harmlessly in the soil once you’ve planted it out and the peas and beans get the undisturbed and long root run they love. Only trouble was, as soon as you picked up the loo roll tube, all the compost fell out of the bottom, leaving very unhappy peas!

This year, we’ve cut four equal ‘flaps’ into the bottom of the loo roll tube and have tucked them in (as you would on a cardboard box you’re closing without tape). For some of the smaller seedlings, we’ve cut the tubes in half first, making the perfect mini-pot that gives them just the space they need without wasting huge amounts of compost. It’s a perfect ‘craft’ activity for our daughter, a new home for our dill and caraway seedlings and I didn’t have to ‘spend a penny’.

So even if there’s nothing to do outside except yet more ‘tidying up’, there’s lots we can do in the warmth and shelter of our greenhouse to get the growing season started.