The health benefits of eating fresh fruit and vegetables are well documented, and our shopping baskets increasingly reflect our desire to eat a healthy diet. Food labels reiterate the ’5-a-day’ mantra, and influence our shopping choices and weekly menus.

Last year, Gardeners’ World magazine ran a campaign called Grow Yourself Healthy, encouraging readers to grow their own fruit and vegetables. The campaign was so successful that we’re bringing it back, with renewed vigour, this year. We’re aiming to show that home-grown crops are more nutritious than shop-bought produce, and that raising your own fruit and veg will save you money, too.

To help you grow yourself healthy, we’ve prepared a downloadable starter pack, and a choice of five growing plans. Each plan contains an easy-to-follow growing calendar for 10 recommended crops. Simply choose which profile suits your circumstances best, and start sowing:

• Allotmenteer

• Container grower

• Gourmet grower

• New to the plot

• Weekender

It’s the ‘Gourmet grower’ and ‘Allotmenteer’ packs that I’m finding most useful. Early potatoes planted this week will have produced tasty new potatoes for harvest in June, while broad beans sown outside into warm soil should have their first pods for picking by early July. I can’t wait! Celeriac is one of ten crops recommended in the ‘Gourmet’ pack, and as I haven’t grown it before I’m keen to have a go this year.

I’ll be coming back to my productive growing plans over the coming months, and along with fellow blogger Kate Bradbury, will hopefully be inspiring many more people to grow themselves healthy in 2011.

The campaign culminates with a Harvest Week in September, with advice on storing and cooking those bumper crops I’m sure you’ll all be enjoying.

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