MYHarvest (Measure Your Harvest) is your opportunity to participate in an exciting research project that will estimate the contribution people who grow their own fruit and vegetable crops are making to UK national food production.

At present, there is a recognition that own-growing in the UK makes a really important contribution to food security, healthy diets and general well-being, but we currently have a poor understanding of how much own-grown food people are able to produce.

This will be key to providing the vital evidence base to support the use of land for growing spaces within our cities and towns, at a time when people are becoming increasingly interested in growing their own fruit and vegetables.

The opportunity

The research team at the University of Sheffield are working with members of the public growing food in allotments, gardens and other own-growing spaces across the UK to understand the yield of typical UK staple fruit and vegetable crops.

By providing the team with the area of land you use to grow a crop and the weight of the crop you harvest you would be:

1. Contributing to a first national estimate of own-grown food production in the 21st century.

2. Helping us to understand how much allotment and garden space we need in the future to ensure sufficient access for the growing number of people living in our cities and towns.

It is really easy to take part in MYHarvest. For details on how to participate click the button below for the guidelines.

GUIDELINES

The challenge

The global population is now more than 7 billion, and that figure is projected to rise to 9 billion by 2050. In addition, more than half of people now live in cities and towns, and in the UK that figure is far higher at around 80% of the population.

As a consequence of this, the environmental footprint of a city or town greatly exceeds its physical footprint, and there is a heavy reliance on imported food and energy. Understanding ways to reduce this environmental footprint, by using some of a cities greenspace for own-grown food or woody (short rotation coppice) biofuel production, could greatly improve the sustainability and resilience of our urban ecosystems.

MYHarvest is a really important part of a five year research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council that aims to answer several key research questions, including:

1. Does urban own-grown food production make a significant contribution to UK food security and what is the potential within the existing urban greenspaces to increase own-growing space?

2. What is the potential for biofuel production using short rotation coppice, in urban greenspaces across the UK?

The Science

Urban soils underpin the potential for the production of both a fruit and vegetable or a biofuel crop. Research conducted by members of the MYHarvest team has recently demonstrated that these soils are of better quality that agricultural soils.

However, urban soils in greenspaces co-exist in our cities and towns with roads, industry and domestic housing. As a consequence, these soils can contain high levels of pollutants, for example heavy metals such as lead (which was historically used as a petrol additive), which can pose a risk to human health if they enter the food chain.

As part of the wider project we will also be seeking to understand the processes within soils that control the uptake of these pollutants into own-grown food crops. This, in combination with a soil sampling campaign across urban areas in the UK, will enable us to understand how heavy metal contamination in urban soils may limit the potential for use of existing greenspaces for own-grown food production.

Although those areas that may not be suitable for food production could potentially be used for the sustainable production of a woody biofuel. The focus of this research is to understand how to make our cities and towns more sustainable and resilient in the future and protect our vitally important greenspace resource.

Guidelines

For full guidelines on how to participate, how to measure and weigh your crop, and
information on which crops are included please download our MYHarvest guidelines here:

GUIDELINES
CONVERSION CHARTS RECORDING SHEET

Submit your harvest

To submit your data, please click the below link:

SUBMIT YOUR HARVEST

FAQs

1. How should I record intercropped fruit and veg?

Intercropping is a great way to make best use of your growing space, but unfortunately it makes measuring your growing areas a little more tricky than if you grew your crops separately! If you grow two or more crop types alternately in the same bed, please record the cultivated area for each crop as the area you think that crop would have taken up if it was grown on its own. Don’t worry if this means that the sum of the individual growing areas you record adds up to more than your actual intercropped area (this can easily happen if you had an efficient intercropping system)! You might also get different area figures for your different intercropped crops, depending on the size and number of plants you have and how densely you could plant them.

Example: you have a 2m x 3m growing bed (i.e. 6 square metres) where you planted runner beans and Brussels sprouts in between the bean poles. You estimate that if you had grown the two crops separately each would need about 2m x 2m, so you record the growing area for each as 4 square metres.

2. Do I still weigh my crops if they are damaged/inedible?

If you plant out an area with a crop, we want to hear about what you harvest – even if the crop fails or it’s a poor harvest! If some of your harvest goes mouldy, is eaten by slugs or is damaged/lost in another way, please just weigh the part of the harvest that you can eat. If, for example, half of a courgette is severely damage by slugs, chop that half off and weigh the good half that you can still eat.

It’s really important that the data is representative and realistic, so please be honest and submit data for your crops that fail as well as those that flourish.

3. How can I submit the area for a cordon-trained / espalier fruit tree?

There are two crop categories that can be selected for apple or plum trees:

Apples / Plums – this is for non-trained fruit trees. Submit the average radius of the tree’s canopy (see Guidelines for details) and the website will calculate the area based on this
Trained Apples / Trained Plums – this is for all types of trained fruit trees that don’t have an obvious average radius to measure. The area (m² or ft²) is entered as with other crops – just multiply the width by length of the bed to give the area (see Guidelines for details)

We appreciate that this doesn’t account for the height of the trees or their maturity, though it does give us enough information for our calculations!

4. I only grow a few plants, can I still take part?

Yes! Whether you grow in a couple of pots on your patio or in a huge allotment, we´d love to hear from you. If you´re growing one of the 40 different fruits and vegetables we are collecting data on, and you can measure the area it is growing in and the harvest weight, there is nothing to stop you from getting involved.

5. How can I find out the results from this project?

You can find links to the studies we have published so far in the Publications section on our website, and read updates and stories about what we’re up to under News. You can also sign up to our occasional newsletter by emailing myharvest@sheffield.ac.uk, or follow us on Twitter (@MYHarvestUK) or Facebook (/MYHarvestUK) to keep up to date on how the project is developing.

6. I grow potatoes in two separate beds, do I submit them together or separately?

This is entirely up to you. You can either:

Add the areas of both growing beds together, then submit the harvest weights for both beds
Enter the growing areas separately and enter the harvest weights into their corresponding growing area

If you choose to submit the growing areas separately, it is important the weight of the crop harvested is added to the area it was grown in.

7. I grow crops that aren´t on your list, can I submit them anyway?

We are focusing on 40 of the most commonly grown crops in the UK (see Guidelines for full list). However, we appreciate that people grow a much more diverse range of fruits and vegetables, so there is an option for you to record data on other crops, which you can add as Other and then put the crop type in the Crop Name or Variety boxes.

OUR PARTNERS

USEFUL LINKS

www.nsalg.org.uk
p3.sheffield.ac.uk
grantham.sheffield.ac.uk
www.sheffield.ac.uk/aps/staff-and-students/acadstaff/edmondson

Latest Posts

Publications

Nov 09, 2020

It’s about so much more than food…

Nov 03, 2020

Take part in the new MYHarvest Diary project!

Jul 10, 2020

Meet the team

Dr Jill Edmondson

Jill is an ecologist and a soil scientist. Her research focuses on the interactions between soils and the provision on ecosystem services in urban and agricultural ecosystems. She set up an earlier version of MYHarvest in 2011, and is leading the current MYHarvest project.

Prof Hamish Cunningham

The MyHarvest data collection tool was developed by Hamish Cunningham and his team. Hamish is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. He believes that open technology has a contribution to make to sustainability and resilience, and that political democracy is proving incapable of saving the planet due to our complete lack of economic democracy.

Boglarka ‘Zilla’ Gulyas

Zilla graduated from the University of Sheffield with a MBiolSci in Plant Sciences, and is now doing an interdisciplinary PhD in urban agriculture. She is managing the day-to-day running of MYHarvest and will be your main point of call if you have any questions about the project.

Dr Darren Grafius

Darren graduated from the University of Iowa with a PhD in Geography, and is now a researcher with the University of Sheffield. His role with the project involves mapping and modelling the data to better understand how crops, yields and practices vary across the cities of the UK.

Miriam Dobson

Miriam joined the University of Sheffield in 2016 after completing her MSc at the University of Edinburgh and spending a year in New Zealand working on various growing projects around the country. She is a second year PhD student studying the environmental benefits of urban agriculture.

Marta Crispo

Marta graduated from the University of Wageningen with a MSc in Environmental Sciences. Throughout her studies she developed a great interest for soil. She is now in the first year of her PhD studying the bio-availability of heavy metals in urban agriculture.