According to new research released by the Royal Horticultural Society, children who garden are more engaged with their learning and do better at school.

At the Secret Seed Society we believe gardens are full of stories, mystery, adventure, and surprises, keeping young childrens’ minds active, playful and curious.

On the back of this research the Financial Times suggests: “If you want to help your children make the grade this summer, scrap the extra maths-with-Japanese coaching and get them to do the gardening!”

Little Jessica says: “Every night we go to our allotments at the bottom of our garden to see if there are caterpillars on the cabbages and then we tell our dad when he gets home.”

Print out your Veg Hunt

I was excited to receive some books from the Secret Seed Society for review.

We have very much enjoy growing vegetables in our garden, and books that link in to gardening are always going to be off to a good start with us.

The books are designed to be used as an interactive aid to introducing children to vegetables, exposing them to the benefits of vegetables, and how they actually get to the edible form they usually find them in.

“Secret Seed Society takes the whole family on a journey from plant to plate.”

In fact, I am selling them short by calling them ‘books’. They are actually supplied as ‘packs’. Each of which comes with an illustrated storybook, seeds, growing instructions and props, a recipe for your eventual produce and an invitation to join the Seed Agent Club online.

There are several titles that all centre around a character based on a vegetable, such as Rudi Radish, Carla Carrot and Mingo Mung.

The creator of Seed City, Shena Cooper, actually explains it much better. She told me: “Every vegetable has a story, and the other vegetables pop up in the other stories. The main idea is to entice very young children into the garden and kitchen, growing and preparing tasty food as they come to love their vegetables.”

They are designed for supervised play with the three-to-seven age group. My five-year-old son found the stories very enjoyable, notably as he found lots of the names given to the characters, and places in the story amusing.

The illustrations are good fun too. Drawings are colourful and play a big part in telling the stories on their own.

Each book is a handy size, ideal for children, and also for popping in a handbag (not that I have one).

We grew some mung beans, which was fun. And as they mature over a very short period – three to five days – we could return to our sprouting jar regularly to check on their progress, and to give them a rinse.

You are even encouraged to send your sprouting pictures to the Secret Seed Society, so as you can share your successes with others. But we’re only sharing ours with you.

The books make for a very pleasant read, and it is a project that deserves some attention and success.

You can find your local stockist of Secret Seed Society on their website, alternatively you can order directly from them online.

They also have a Facebook group, and you can even follow Peter Parsnip on Twitter.

Check out our friends over at We are What We Do. They say if we lots of us do small things to make a difference, together we make a BIG difference! Pretty obvious eh? One of the small things we can do is grow and eat our own food.

We once saw an orange for sale that was packaged in polystyrene, shrink wrapped in clingfilm, labelled Citrus Snack and sold for £1.50. Plum stir crazy.

Growing oranges might be tricky unless you live somewhere warmer than Wigan. But carrots, rocket, beans and tomatoes are easy. It’s cheap. There’s no wasteful packaging. And no supermarket queues. WARNING: may contain bugs.