You’ve decided that you’d quite like to garden in your concrete surroundings. You might even have joined Grow Your Neighbour’s Own and have access to some land. Perhaps you’ve inherited an area of green in a community project.

Now you have to make that most important of decisions: what do I grow?

Growing is a very personal thing and that’s the key to buying your first precious packet of seeds. There’s no point in sowing, hoeing, weeding and harvesting beetroot if, like my other half, you can’t stand the stuff.

If, on the other hand, you can’t get enough of carrots, then go wild! Growing should be about you and your own relationship with the soil. After all, you’ll be spending quite a bit of time out there doing more jobs than you ever thought existed.

You might as well enjoy your time in the sunshine and torrential rain, and it’s a good idea to enjoy what comes out of the ground.

The next thing to consider is your pocket. There are a staggering array of vegetable seeds on the market, ranging in price from the equivalent of a store bought bag of veg to something you’d order in from Fortnum and Mason.

Money is the Root of All Vegetables

It’s easy to go a bit mad and blow your weekly grocery budget on a lorry load of seed packets when the luscious photos on the front seduce you. Try to start simple: carrots, tomatoes and beans are popular vegetables to eat because they also happen to be rather foolproof to grow.

The other thing to remember is that not everything you plant will be a success. Even the most experienced of gardeners fall foul of Mother Nature from time to time and the newbie gardener is no exception. It’s better to buy a budget packet of seeds from the garden centre to begin with, than fork out for an expensive variety whilst you are still learning.

If you’re lucky enough to have a friendly gardener in the neighbourhood or in the family, you could persuade them to let you have a handful of spare seeds to get you started. Our great friend Freecycle also has spare seedlings plants on offer every now and again and they’re a great way to get your garden growing.

You can also harvest seeds from your dinner. I confess to sowing my first pepper plants a few months ago and a stunning revelation struck me.

“Wow,” I said to myself. “They look exactly like the seeds that are in the middle of the peppers you buy from the supermarket.” When you grow up divorced from the food chain it’s easy to forget that the vegetables on your plate come from the same pesky little seeds that you happily throw away.

Don’t put them in the bin next time! Wash them carefully and let them dry and you’ll have some free seeds to plant out. A caveat to this is to splash out on some organic vegetables. Supermarket vegetables contain growth retardants so that they don’t spoil on the shelves. These growth retardants do exactly what it says on the tin. No matter how hard you nurture them they will never turn into vegetables.

So, take a look at your dinner plate and go out there and grow it!