Do your children think vegetables come from the supermarket? Get back down to earth and see how quickly greens disappear when your children have grown them.

Not everyone has a garden, but there are still a lot of vegetables you can grow successfully indoors in pots.

Pots of flavour
Tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and herbs are easy to grow: simply sprinkle seeds on pots of compost and cover with a light sprinkling of compost. Place in light/sunny position and keep compost moist. To give your seeds a kick-start, place a clear plastic bag over the pot and secure. When seeds begin to germinate, remove the bag and keep watered.

Look out for seeds designed for hanging baskets – trailing tomatoes, for example, are great fun to grow. You don't need to buy expensive containers and your children will enjoy making and decorating recycled planters from old plastic buckets, large plastic ice-cream tubs or family-sized yoghurt pots. As it's warmer inside, you can enjoy summer veg crops right through the autumn - a cheap and delicious alternative to buying food which has flown thousands of miles to get to your dinner table.

Outdoor projects
If you have a garden, why not create a small section that ‘belongs’ to your child? A very easy vegetable to grow successfully is the runner bean, and children love them because they grow so rapidly and become so tall. Simply poke runner bean seeds into the soil. Once the plants get over about a foot, you’ll need to poke bamboo canes next to each plant/secure for them to climb up.

In a few weeks the red flowers that appear will have formed beans. The key to a regular crop is frequent harvesting – which the kids will love: they will need to keep checking to see if the beans are big enough to harvest and, of course, eat!