Where Jamie Oliver has gone before Alan Titchmarsh should follow, if a new study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association is anything to go by.

Results of a 12-week study of 99 children aged 10 to 13 indicated that those who started their own school garden doubled their fruit and vegetable intake compared with their previous consumption. And they ate twice as much of the produce as youngsters on a classroom-only nutrition-in-the-garden course.

The fruit and vegetable intake of the gardening children rose from 1.9 servings to 4.5 servings a day — almost making the five-a-day goal that is encouraged in the UK. Not surprisingly, the amount of certain nutrients they consumed increased too. The children also had significant gains in vitamin C, beta caro-tene and fibre.

They grew strawberries, herbs, potatoes, corn, peppers, peas, beans, squash, cantaloupe, cucumbers, broccoli, tomatoes, spinach, lettuce and kohlrabi. They weeded, watered and harvested over the three months. In the classroom they also made dishes such as salsa, wrote a class cookbook and held an “add a veggie to lunch day” as part of their work.

The vegetable patch

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Background

• A year in the garden: tasks for every season

• How to start a vegetable garden

• Twenty vegetable catalogues

• Eight great vegetable gardening books

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The study has its limitations — it is possible that the children afterwards went back to their poor fruit and vegetable consumption, so that long-term behavioural changes cannot be implied.

Kirsty Gavin, the head cook at Corpus Christi Primary School, in Brixton, South London, feels that the effects may be longer lasting.

She is responsible for overhauling the school lunch menu over the past four years and, as far as I know, is the only dinner lady to be given a special menion in an Ofsted report. She says: “The school has a garden in which children plant and grow their own vegetables. Seeing them bring potatoes, carrots and green beans to our kitchen is wonderful. They understand the cycle of life, but it also makes it easier to encourage them to eat them.

“In my experience, once you get children eating more fruit and vegetables they are hooked. This kind of intervention can make a real difference not just to their immediate health, but their future food choices.”

A US website, kinderGARDEN, has some practical step-by-step advice for starting your own garden at school.

But children’s gardening does not, of course, have to be restricted to schools. Whether you have a small piece of garden, a patio or a window box, you can still start the process at home.

The BBC Gardening with Children website has lots of tips and advice for the best plants to grow to eat.

Getting children gardening is potentially not just good for their nutrition but gives them a chance to become physically active and can, say scientists from the department of horticultural sciences at Texas A&M University, simply make them feel more positive.

As they point out, we all can sense that we feel better when we are surrounded by greenery and research in this area is growing. Which is perhaps what we should be thinking of doing — so get growing.

KinderGARDEN: aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/ kindergarden Gardening with Children: bbc.co.uk/gardening/

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