Growing your own is also chic for urban dwellers whose horticulture is limited to the patio or window box, although industry data reveal that most kitchen gardeners live in a suburban semi.

The green-fingered foodies are more likely to be women; tomatoes are the favourite starter plant; and the sale of food seeds and plants is worth almost £35 million a year compared with £29.8 million in 2001.

The figures were released by the Horticultural Trades Association to coincide with the May Bank Holiday weekend. A fifth of all UK plant sales are made in May, and as long as the weather is good the industry is banking on sales valued at £500 million. Lee Appleyard, the association’s marketing director, said: “We’ve not seen sales of seeds and plants for edibles like this since the 1970s and we are convinced it’s because TV shows have inspired people to grow their own.”

Guy Barter, chief horticulture adviser at the Royal Horticultural Society, said: “Kitchen gardens suffered a lapse after the 1970s when food got cheaper and people were busier at work and had less time for gardening. Now we get lots of inquiries and people are queueing up to get allotments.”

Vegetables are now so fashionable that they are even blooming this year at the Chelsea Flower Show. Displays will include traditional root crops and grow-your-own herb salad bags.

The highlight in the food plots, however, is likely to be the exotic edibles paraded by Raymond Blanc, the French proprietor and chef of Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, in Oxfordshire, and Stephen Hendry, of Newington Nurseries, in their Malaysia Garden.

They have recently returned from a three-week trip to the Malaysian mountain area of Kinabalu, where they identified herbs and vegetables that can be grown in the British climate.

M Blanc believes that many of his finds could become staple crops for British farmers and that people will plant the new range of gingers and other herbs in their gardens.

His own organic garden at the Manoir is the experimental laboratory for Malay greens and he is considering how to include these in his quintessentially French dishes. M Blanc is confident that, just as Europeans have acquired a taste for foreign crops such as tea and coffee, they will adapt to the new vegetables.

GROWING GAINS

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