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BACK IN the 1970s of Tom and Barbara, The Good Life was something of a hippie joke. Though John Seymour's classic book Self Sufficiency had been published in 1970, the environmental movement was still nascent and "grow your own" was a furrow few people wanted to plough. Then as now, most favoured the supermarket fruit and veg aisle, or perhaps the local greengrocer's. Today, however, the credit crunch and carbon footprint anxieties mean that not only are more and more people doing it, but the subject has developed a moral flavour. If you want to be good, get on your wellies and dig.

Dirt is decent and honest. The virtuous meat-eater rears his own and from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to Gordon Ramsay, television cooks are getting in on the act. So mainstream has the ideal become, that a recent McDonald's commercial features a commune of woolly-jumpered families working with wheel-barrows and hoes to create a garden, topped with a giant floral "M". The message? That McDonald's are working together "with farmers to ensure that only whole cuts of British and Irish beef, top-quality potatoes and farm-assured white chicken breast go into our Happy Meals". The subtext seems to be that if you haven't an allotment or croft, buying a Happy Meal is not a bad alternative.

Whether the media idyll reflects the reality is open to question. The recent 60% increase in seed sales proves that growing your own is certainly popular. Meanwhile, a new wave of self-sufficiency books is on the shelves.

But can you really beat the credit crunch by growing a few tomatoes? In the absence of subsidies, can small organic, low-input ventures really be sustainable - or is the good life a dream realisable only by a privileged few?

We asked some people who know.

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ALICE ELSWORTH Organic Pig Farmer
MISTRESS is lying in a large heap of straw, her long grey flank rolling with a contraction. Within the next few hours, Alice Elsworth tells me, she will "pig". Her sister Madam has already done so. When Elsworth got up this morning, the sow was stretched out in her stall with a velvety mound of squirming tight-eyed piglets plugged to her battalion of nipples.

Only rarely does Elsworth have to intervene with farrowing. "Occasionally I'll have to pull one out," she says. "But generally they come out easily - sometimes, like a machine gun." Mistress and Madam are two of Elsworth's favourite pigs. And Elsworth truly does love the species. "I like their independence of mind. A pig is a pig and will do what a pig wants to do."

Other favourites include Lettuce and Bess, which she was given as a wedding present at the same time as her husband, Dominic, was presented with two cows. (When they first met, Dominic didn't like pigs.) The plan was that they would get a small farm, settle and rear their animals.

The Elsworths, who now have four small sons, have lived on their 58-acre Whistlebare farm near Berwick-upon-Tweed for four years. She cares for the pigs and he deals with the cows. They also keep around 90 chickens and grow their own grain.

The farm is not a big money-maker. Dominic continues to work as a patent agent, which supports their family lifestyle. "It could support us financially better than it does," says Alice, "but we keep the animals the way we want, rather than pulling out every last penny and perhaps cutting some corners." The couple feel they are a source of amusement to local farmers. Alice was once introduced at a local event with the line: "Alice is a proper farmer. Her husband earns money."

Alice Elsworth grew up a city girl in Birmingham. Her passion for pigs developed during visits to Cornwall, where her grandparents kept a "house pig" called Millicent - not a pampered indoor pet but an outdoor-reared animal fattened purely for the family's consumption.

"I remember being absolutely terrified of Millicent, because it felt like we looked eye to eye. I used to have to go off with a bucket to feed this enormous pig, which was quite difficult and I was always trying to run ahead of her to get to her trough and she always got me lying flat on my back in the mud." Back then, Alice had no real ambition to become a pig farmer. "I just wanted a couple of sows. The trouble is, they have piglets and the next thing you know you've got a herd of pigs."

Alice was once a seal trainer at Blobbyland, the theme-park home of the television character Mr Blobby. She has also worked as an antiques upholsterer.The idea of growing her own food first became real when she lived at a commune in Cheltenham. When she met Dominic, however, she says, "he thought all organic food was poison". Now he is a convert to organic methods. "He wouldn't farm any other way, and knows infinitely more about it than me."

At Whistlebare, they are developing a vegetable patch and hope one day to become self sufficient. The idea of knowing what you are eating and how it came into the world is important to Alice. With her pigs, she feels there is a difference in taste. Supermarket pork now seems to her like "tough cotton wool". It is also important that the animal has a good life. "Our pigs stay in family groups. They live outside, but have housing to go into. We grow all our pig food ourselves. But pigs eat lots of grass, and we grow special pig pastures with various different herbs."

Whistlebare pork is sold by the half-pig, at £9.50 per kilo, which the Elsworths have recently had to raise from £6.50 per kilo "because of the price of fuel and grain". Alice slaughters and prepares the animals herself, "the good old-fashioned way without using any nitrates or chemicals, with secret mixes of herbs and spices".

At the moment, the farm doesn't produce enough pork to supply all the people who want it. Might it be possible to feed a nation through this form of farming? "I think we could to a much greater extent than we do," says Alice, "because once an organic system has been up and running for a number of years there's no reason why it shouldn't be as productive as standard farming - or even more so in the long term." Meanwhile, Whistlebare continues to rely on subsidies and Dominic's income. Could the farm ever support the family as an independent business? "You could do it without subsidies and without another income," says Alice, "but you'd probably be very thin. And you wouldn't have a family as big as ours."

***

TIM BREMNER Allotment keeper
TIM Bremner was in his early 30s and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis when, after four years on the allotment waiting list, his name came up for a plot off Warriston Road in Edinburgh. It felt, he says, "like a gift". "For a while I hadn't been able to do anything. I could hardly walk."

Medication helped and when the allotment came up, he was fit enough to "potter around" in it. By now Bremner - whose father was a keen gardener - had been thinking for some time about the grow-your-own dream: about producing vegetables from his own soil, jam and wine from his own fruits.

Initially Bremner was allocated an overgrown "half-plot". Littered with glass, metal and rusty nails, its only viable produce was some rhubarb and apple trees, and Bremner himself was hampered by lack of horticultural knowledge. "When we were young," he says, "our friends' mums and dads were all keen gardeners. But our generation aren't. We don't have the opportunity. We don't have gardens. We can't afford them."

However, he was surprised to discover how easy much of it was. "A lot of it is common sense," he says. "My fruit bushes were tiny and three years later they're huge." He points to a clump of gooseberry bushes which, he says, "produced many carrier bags of fruit".

Now, as the end of the growing season approaches, there is little left to see on this patch of land. Jerusalem artichoke plants tower by the fence. Apples cling to branches. Bremner stoops to remove the netting over a cluster of Savoy cabbages. Next year he plans on buying a freezer so he can store more for the winter.

Meanwhile, although he hasn't stopped going to the supermarket entirely, there are many items he will no longer buy there. "Some things are really ridiculous. For instance, you can't actually get a handful of carrots; you have to buy a bag. You get runner beans for 10 people and waste half of them. Things like rocket: you get just a couple of handfuls in a plastic container, yet that's one of the easiest things to grow. You throw a few seeds into the ground and three weeks later you've got loads of it."

Does growing your own create real financial savings? For Bremner, it has done. The site itself costs him around £40 a year and each spring he spends £60 on seeds. Most of the rest of his needs are bartered for and scavenged, the trick being to avoid shopping at garden centres. Fertiliser is sourced from the same stable in Balerno his father once used, where he trades a bottle of wine for a bag of manure. At the top of the Warriston allotments, piles of wood chippings are often left to be taken away.

"Of course," he adds, "if you were to count work hours it would be more expensive. But I don't see it that way. This is all part of a hobby." And it is one of the cheapest hobbies available.

It is also one that allows Bremner to share with others. His plot produces too much: too many gooseberries and redcurrants and not enough time to make jam from them.

This in itself is often a joy. He takes enormous pleasure is being able to drop off a box of vegetables at a friend's door. "It's so satisfying when people say it tastes great."

***

ANTONIA INESON Market gardener
ON a brisk autumn day the sun smiles back from the sunflowers near the entrance to Antonia Ineson's market garden. This year's harvest is nearly over and it's the end of term in one part of her double life. By winter, she will be Edinburgh-based: a food adviser working in public health. Through spring and summer, she lives and works on her Perthshire plot, sleeping in her static caravan.

On a day like this it seems like a season spent here would promise a slice of the good life. It's possible to imagine Ineson, the floppy-hatted former historian, sitting out the back of her trailer, feasting on her own freshly picked bounty. She laughs off the idea. "The problem is that when you're really working hard at this it's difficult to prepare any meals. Of course, I do eat a lot of salad."

Ineson has always liked growing things. It was part of her family upbringing. Her mother worked for the Birmingham parks department during the second world war, when the public parks were turned over to vegetable production. As a teenager she read Richard Carson's seminal environmental book The Silent Spring, and was profoundly affected by it. And for years she kept an allotment. But only recently has she attempted to make a living on the land.

Ineson's journey into larger-scale food production only really began five years ago, when at 49 years old, she decided to take a sabbatical from her job in public health. During this 13-month break she travelled to New Zealand, did some volunteer work on organic farms, signed up for a course on biodynamic agriculture, and began to immerse herself in the world of organics.

For the past two years she has been renting this two-acre plot off local farmers. Her guided tour takes us straight to the polytunnel. Inside its warm blue cocoon, leafy necklaces dangle from the ceiling, beaded with end-of-season cucumbers. Here, Ineson concentrates mainly on growing produce for salad bags. In one corner is what appears to be a tiny resort of mini palm trees. They are lettuces, in fact, which Ineson is harvesting by an alternative method. "Rather than picking the whole lettuce you pluck leaves off from the bottom. This way they go on for ages. It's a really productive method."

Ineson tastes as she works, like a chef assessing the flavour of her dish, crunching on beans and chewing on rocket fronds as she passes. "I'm seeing if it's good and fresh. It's important to me that this stuff is tasty as well as local and organic." The rocket is "hot", she says. I try it. It fires up the mouth like it has been dipped in chilli pepper.

For Ineson, the joy of the past few years has been being able to combine the personal love of "developing a garden" with a small crusade of "providing people with really good food". The issue of how sustainable it is, however, remains a concern for her in a financial sense. Currently she would not be able to do this without her six months working as a food adviser. And given she wants to make it "work forever", she is keen to balance the books. "It's very difficult." And the main problem, she says, is that "people are expecting cheap food". Though some organic box producers can match supermarket prices, Ineson says they tend to be large-scale businesses, which are fairly reliant on machinery.

"But I'm trying to do something which is very small-scale, minimal input, not using machinery much. And I don't want it just to be a hobby. I'm serious about this type of market garden as a way of providing local and environmentally sustainable food, so it needs to be financially and socially sustainable as well. It needs to pay me and potentially others a living wage for the hard work."

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