If you are tired of imported fruits and vegetables so bruised and battered they could qualify as afternoon talk show guests — try growing your own.

This week The Royal Gazette met with Sally Godet, past president of the Garden Club.

She and her husband grow everything from starfruit, guava and bananas to beans, eggplant and borage in their backyard off Middle Road in Paget.

Mrs. Godet often teaches gardening courses for the Garden Club showing people how to improve their self-sufficiency.

She also makes homemade jams and jellies and sells them locally.

"We began fixing up our property when we came back from living in England in the early 1990s," said Mrs. Godet. They had been living in Guildford, Surrey.

"We spent hours and hours fixing up the yard," said Mrs. Godet. "The yard was covered in weed trees."

The Godets planted peach trees, longan, locust and wild honey, pomelos, coffee, guava and many more exotic trees.

"Because I have a large garden, people give me interesting trees," she said. "I have a longan tree. It is called 'tiger's eye' in China and it has a cluster of fruit, like lychee."

She said to start your own fruit orchard, you need space and perhaps patience.

"I would start with peaches," she said. "They grow really well here. It is quite shaded in our yard."

She pointed to an orange tree that was conspicuously free of fruit.

"This is an orange that hasn't had one fruit and I have had it in about ten years," she said. "Citrus is very difficult, which is sad because it used to grow very well here.

"The pomelo tree came from [property owned by] the government, but some of my other trees came from a friend."

The weather can play havoc with any gardener's pride and joy, she added.

"The weather this year has been very very difficult being so dry for such a long period," she said. "I lost one peach tree and the other is on the way out."

Some of her plants are there just for ornamental reasons, such as her coffee bush.

"The beans turn red," she said. "They have a very pretty flower, but this bush likes to be in the shade."

But there are still plenty of other things to choose from. That morning she ate a homegrown banana for breakfast and was expecting to eat half an avocado for lunch. There would also be backyard vegetables for dinner.

Mrs. Godet grew up in England and started helping her mother in the garden at five years old.

"There was food rationing in England until 1952 so it wasn't easy," she said. "If you didn't grow it yourself, then often you didn't have it.

"We use to eat a lot of purple sprouting broccoli. On one occasion my mother was eating some and there was a crunching sound, and she was actually eating a small snail. That put me off it forever. I remember eating a lot of vegetables and apples."

In the back garden the Godets grow red cabbage, carrots, peppers, broccoli, beans, eggplant, strawberries and more. Some of the vegetables she buys as seedlings from local farmers.

"Beans are the easiest thing to grow," she said. "They really are. Get them right and they are fine. You can get good packets of seeds from Animal & Garden House and they grow very well."

She said that fruits and vegetables grown at home definitely taste better than imported varieties sold in stores.

But she still buys some fruit and vegetables from the grocery store, because everything isn't in season all the time.

She said, growing it yourself is not always easy. It takes a lot of hard work to maintain a garden, and pests can be a problem.

"Gardening is a toss up between what is going to get the produce first, the bugs or the weather," she said. "I don't use anything for the bugs. If I am going to eat it, I don't want anything sprayed on it."

She is currently waging a battle with horn worms on her tomatoes.

"The horn worm is the caterpillar from a large moth," she said. "If you find them pick them off."

Ultimately, she thought one could save money by growing one's own vegetables.

"I paid six dollars for my six tomato seedlings, and I got pounds of tomatoes out of them. It is a question of looking after them. If you want to give them loads of fertiliser it might cost more. I only use compost."

Her herb and vegetable seedlings are planted in bought potting soil.

"It is sterile so there are no weeds in it," she said. "Otherwise you might find weeds in there and you don't know if they are good to eat or not."

She said the Garden Club is very concerned about the number of poisons used by Bermudians in their gardens, particularly weed killer.

The group recently successfully campaigned to have one brand of weed killer banned locally, because of the health hazards.

In her garage she had growing a number of potted herbs and vegetable seedlings including cilantro, garlic chive [a chive that tastes just like garlic], and borage.

"Borage is a very a pretty herb," she said. "The flowers are edible. You can put the flowers in drinks, freeze them into ice cubes or put them in dips. They taste like cucumbers.

"I grow all my herbs in pots, because they grow better that way."

She said it is also useful to grow herbs and keep them near the house.

"Keep it on the patio or outside the back door," she said. "If you have to go down in the garden to pick cilantro or parsley, you might not go."

The Garden Club offers flower arranging competitions, gardening courses, plant sales, lectures, and a horticultural scholarship. They have also extensively participated in environmental preservation schemes such as Buy Back Bermuda.

"We raise most of our money through the Open House programme which we do every May," said Mrs. Godet. "The real problem is finding someone to commit to allow their house to be shown.

"Last year we just did one open house, 'Mayflower in Bloom'. We actually made $40,000, about as much in one day as we made in four weeks in the previous years."

Funds raised go to horticultural scholarships.

Anyone interested in joining the Bermuda Garden Club has to attend one meeting to be eligible.

Meetings are always the second Friday of every month, October through May.

For more information visit www.gardenclubbermuda.org or telephone 232-1273.