Grow your own veg: first-time veg grower

3 reasons to grow your own

1. Health
Gardening is good for you - it's physically active, all fresh air and freedom. But as well as the exercise, it's good for the soul. Dealing with the soil, plunging your hands into it and enabling seeds to grow into mature plants that you can harvest and eat is such a rewarding activity. What's more, if you garden organically, the crops you harvest are as nutritious as they could be, full of vitamins and minerals, bursting with goodness and absolutely fresh.

2. Money
Growing your own saves money too. A packet of seeds will give you a summer of crops, yet costs less than one portion of its shop-bought equivalent. You can also exchange seeds with other gardeners, as most packets contain far too many for one family. And you can use surplus seed to grow your own baby leaves, sowing batches in seed trays and harvesting them young.

3. Seasonality
When you grow veg, you eat with the seasons, enjoying what each one has to offer. There are no food miles involved, just food inches. The only distance your veg travels is from your plot to the table. Food is fresh and the taste is beyond compare. In spring and summer, concentrate on picking fresh. In winter, rely on stored roots, pumpkins and hardy crops such as leeks, kale, sprouts and broccoli.

How to grow

Raising young plants
Once upon a time, seed companies just sold seeds, but now their catalogues are full of young 'plug' plants (so named because they're raised individually in modules in seed trays). The great advantage of these young plants is that they've come through their infancy and already have a good root system. If you plant them, spaced the right distance apart, they're almost bound to grow. However, while they are time-saving, they're also expensive and they take away some of the thrill of growing from seed. But they are very handy when you want to plant crops regularly to provide a non-stop supply (known as succession planting). As soon as one crop is finished, the next can be put in the ground to replace it, already half-grown.

There is no reason why you shouldn't grow your own plug plants. Suitable module trays are cheap and, after a wash, can be reused for years. First sow your seeds in a regular seed tray - try cabbages, sweetcorn or beetroot - spacing them a centimetre or two apart. Then, once they've germinated and sprouted their first or second pair of leaves, carefully transfer each seedling into its own compartment of the module tray. You can use a pencil to help lift the plants, supporting their roots, from one tray to the other. And don't worry, you don't need a greenhouse - just put them on a warm, sunny windowsill until they're large enough to plant out in the vegetable plot.