If you are up for trying your hand at a little Grow Your Own this year, we have just added a whole new category to the website which includes Raised Bed Kits, Patio Raised Beds, Tomato Planters, Strawberry Planters, Potato Planters and Grow Bag Covers – a whole plethora of goodies to ensure that even those of us with the smallest of outdoor spaces can reap a crop of home-grown veggies and herbs this year.

Here’s our Top 10 reasons why we like growing our own food!

1. Saves money – a packet of £1 seeds goes a long way compared to shop bought herbs and veg.
2. Helps bring our carbon footprint down. Food grown at home doesn’t travel anywhere.  Compare this to food flown in from all around the planet and driven round the country in lorries.  Home-grown wins hands down.
3. We don’t add any nasty chemical or pesticides so we know exactly what has gone into the food we grow at home.
4. Lots of shop-bought veg and herbs come wrapped in plastic packaging. You can avoid more of this landfill fodder by growing your own.
5. Growing stuff chills us out!  There’s nothing nicer or more relaxing than spending a couple of hours tending to plants.  Garden work brings those stress levels right down.
6. Its good exercise – digging, lifting, moving, sweeping – even in small outdoor vegetable spaces or working with planters you can burn off lots of calories.
7. You can be adventurous.  Take the humble tomato.  There are around 7500 different varities grown so you can experiment and try out something you would never be able to buy at the supermarket.  It’s exciting to see what the results will be.
8. It’s a brilliant lesson for kids.  Getting them involved shows them the food on the plate doesn’t just come from a shop shelf and that actually it’s from the ground and we need to look after the land.  We’ve also managed to turn a couple of fussy eaters on to more vegetables by getting them to pick their own.
9. It’s super healthy. Freshly picked vegetables are packed full of nutrients.  Transfer veg straight from the garden to kitchen to plate and you benefit from all those freshly picked healthy vitamins.
10. Sharing is caring.  Growing your own means you can share your home-grown crop with friends, family and work colleagues.