This is all about reducing your carbon footprint by reducing your food miles to food metres. There are plenty of ways you can reduce your carbon footprint, installing sustainable energy sources such as biomass boilers or solar panels for your home as well as growing your own food. My garden is not huge, and some of it does not have the sun in the early part of the year until the sun is high enough in the sky to show over the neighbour’s fence. This had to be taken into account when growing my own vegetables and soft fruit, when I started a few years ago.

I have a 12ft long raised bed (which warms up quicker in these northern latitudes especially when covered with black weed control to soak up the sunshine in the early part of the year –I have to make the most of the short growing period. I either plant my veggie seeds out on my windowsills in February or buy seedlings from the garden centre of those vegetables I never have managed to germinate successfully (like cauliflowers and broccoli). Some, of course, like carrots I plant directly in the ground when it warms up.

In my raised bed I grow cauliflowers and carrots, broccoli and beetroot (but not turnips as they grew to the size of woody dinner plates before we got around to eating them).

I also plant my favourite crop – shallots, which when tied onto strings hang in my porch and last us until after Christmas. We eat the vegetables fresh all through the summer and into autumn and I freeze cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli and then we can have them into the winter.

I am no expert gardener and I have learnt to grow and preserve the wonderful vegetables and my other crops through looking up on the internet. If I can do this, anyone can!