Motivated by the skyrocketing price of groceries, I took a stab at growing my own salad and baking my own bread.

My efforts did not go well. The salad, made from spinach plants that I had nursed through the winter, was meager and tough. The leaves did not seem to have many flavors.

The bread, which I made using a no-knead recipe, was disappointing. It was dense, flat and the crust tasted of cornmeal. I suspect that future loaves would have been better. Bread making, like essay writing, usually improves with subsequent efforts.

My attempts at self-sufficiency were in part a reaction to the rising price of food. Have you noticed that going to the grocery store is starting to feel like paying your Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. bill? You shell out a small fortune just for the basics.

U.S. Labor Department statistics, cited in a recent Associated Press story, say that in the last year, the price of milk is up 17 percent, cheese is up 15 percent, rice and pasta are up 13 percent and bread has climbed 12 percent. Meanwhile, the price of eggs has soared an amazing 62 percent in the past two years.

Nowadays if you drop a bag of groceries, especially one carrying a carton of eggs, your financial profile suffers.

There are, experts report, a number of forces pushing up the price of groceries. A major one is that grain has become more expensive. The wheat harvest in Australia was lousy, pushing up the demand for and the cost of good old American-grown wheat. Wheat that once sold for about $3 to $4 a bushel now brings about $14 to $16.

In addition, there is the ethanol effect as farmers, reacting to government incentives, grow more corn in fields that once produced other crops. As a result, supplies of these other crops - everything from beans to hops - are in demand and are more costly.

Finally, there is the spiraling cost of fuel, which means getting commodities to market is more expensive.

Going to the grocery store, in other words, has become a painful part of going global.

One tactic in the fight against high food prices is growing your own vegetables. I heard this notion being discussed last week when I was buying lettuce and peas at the Meyer Seed Co. in Fells Point. I was so pumped up with the idea of that, I bought an extra packet of peas.

But the next day, when I visited my garden and tried to wake it from its winter slumber, I was less confident that this patch of soggy ground could feed me. First of all, there was the issue of climate. Vegetables, even cool-weather crops, need a certain amount of sunshine and warmth to grow. Around here, the growing season is known as summer and fall.

You can attempt to play tricks with Mother Nature, as I did this winter by covering some spinach plants with a tomato cage wrapped with insulated cloth. The insulated covering kept the cold and frost off the plants. On a recent sunny Saturday, I removed the cloth and looked over the crop. The spinach had grown during the winter, but not very much. The plants looked stubby.

I picked some leaves to make a salad. But it was the kind of salad that only fashion models would order, a few fragments artfully arranged on a plate. There was hardly enough spinach to constitute a real, satisfying dish. Moreover, that was just lunch. If I relied on the garden for supper, I would go hungry.

Later in the year, when the sun is high and the vegetables are abundant, the garden could be a good provider. But now it struggled to deliver more than a mouthful.

It is cheaper to bake your own bread than to buy it in a grocery store. That is what Michael Bittel of the King Arthur Flour Co. in Norwich, Vt., said.

While store-bought bread is running between $3 and $5, a home-baked loaf will cost about 60 cents, he said, not counting the cost of running the oven. That's up from 40 cents from a year ago, but plenty of people are going to the trouble of baking their own loaves, he said.

Home baking is on the rise. Sales of flour are up, the King Arthur staff reported, as are sales of bread machines.

Back when our two sons were eating us out of house and home, I used to bake bread several times a week. Shortly after the guys moved out, I quit.

The other day, I tried to get back in the groove by employing a bread-making routine recommended by cookbook author Mark Bittman. I did not knead the bread dough. Instead, I let it rise overnight in a bowl, then I pushed it down, sprinkled it with cornmeal, and baked it in a 450-degrree oven in a large, covered metal pot.

I did not get it right. I used too much cornmeal and not enough yeast. The loaf was low; the crust was dusty. The experience reminded me how sticky and messy baking bread can be.

But if prices keep rising, it might be worth another try. I might not save that much money, but at least I will feel frugal.

rob.kasper@baltsun.com

See Rob Kasper each Wednesday on ABC2/WMAR-TV's News at Noon.