Ad | Back To The Garden - Indoor and Outdoor Gardening With Children

This month we've been working with Sudocrem to encourage everyone to grow something. The time is right to plant all kinds of seeds for food and flowers, and you don't need a big garden or expensive equipment to do it. 

We've been sent a simple outdoor growing kit, but even with no specialist equipment, and no big garden, you can plant things and watch them grow. 

We started by saving some old potatoes. They were the green ones at the end of a bag of spuds, but they aren't entirely useless. You can buy seed potatoes which are designed to give great crops of specific varieties and will definitely have a better result, but I hate waste and someone once told me you can't grow fresh potatoes from inedible potatoes chucked in the garden, and I always like a challenge. It turns out you can. 

I throw them in the hedge border, cover with a layer of soil and dead leaves and forget about them. Every now and again I spot a big strong potato plant, dig it up and we have some free, no-effort food. Don't eat any potatoes which are green - they'll give you tummy ache. Throw them back for next year. 

If you don't have a garden with available soil, you can grow potatoes in any deep bucket or hessian bag filled with compost. Keep covering any which grow and peep out from under the soil/compost, so they don't turn green. 

You can also split up garlic bulbs and plant the cloves to create new garlic plants - and they'll deter greenfly, so they're great round your roses and pretty flowers. 

We also bought some seeds to grow indoors. We have a lot of slugs, so little plants outdoors don't have much luck. We've started with miniature pumpkins and nasturtiums, and we have a very fancy greenhouse for ours. You don't need a fancy greenhouse. 

The inside from advent calendars is a brilliant container for growing seeds until your plants get too big, and you can leave it in a sunny spot or cover it with a glass bowl, or even a transparent storage tub or bucket, to keep it damp and warm inside and perfect for your seedlings to get a good start. Make sure they don't get too dry, and don't let them sit in a puddle - anywhere in between is ideal. 

We have chilli seeds coming hopefully within the next few days - they make excellent indoor plants and can really encourage your children to try some exciting new foods! There's more than just biology to be learned from growing plants - and the huge sense of pride. 

Sudocrem is excellent for gardeners because it helps all those scratches and cuts heal. It's also brilliant for windburned skin, or skin that's a bit dry and pink from the sun. 

Don't forget to enter to win the Back To The Garden growing kits!! And get growing.... !

We were paid by Sudocrem for some of the time taken, and we were sent our growing kit.