The best way to ensure that your children eat healthily is to grow your own vegetables - and it also helps the environment immensely. Here are our green tips on growing vegetables for any aspiring green family.

Getting started

• Designate a "children's garden". Set aside a couple of containers or a small area of your garden or patio. As a parent, you might take on most of the planting, weeding and watering, but let your child take pride in selecting which vegetables to grow and how the plants will be positioned. If you don’t have a garden, there are many vegetables that can just be grown in containers.

• Choose vegetables that produce something to eat quickly, such as radish, spring onion, baby carrot and baby salad leaf. Of course, quick-growing vegetables are the best way to ensure that your child remains interested in vegetables and gardening. Tomatoes are another obvious choice, especially cherry types, as children can pick and eat them straight off the plant.

• Encourage your child and to keep up the enthusiasm, by letting your child choose some of easy to grow vegetables, and you will both be delighted with the results. Find out what vegetables grow in your area, and what time of year each vegetable should be planted. (Check the library for magazines and books on vegetable gardening, look it up on the internet in gardening related sites and forums, or ask a gardener or farmer in your neighborhood).

• Make growing a game: digging can turn into a search for buried treasure, and controlling their environment with water and soil is like creating your own world.

Benefits of growing your own

• Aside from helping the environment, growing your own vegetables with your kids will encourage them to eat more vegetables and be less afraid of what's served up at dinnertime. Let them choose the vegetable seeds or plants, help them plant and tend for vegetables together, and finally harvest the fresh vegetables.

• Your children will also learn exactly what vegetables look like, where vegetables come from and how vegetables grow. Given that more and more children have difficulty recognizing vegetables and knowing what to do with them, you can use the time spent in the garden as bonding time, explaining how to treat the plants: you'll grow closer as a family, and they'll be learning an invaluable life skill.