HOW can you reduce your impact on the environment in the simplest possible way? By growing your own organic produce, you will be providing fresh food for yourself and your family as well as helping the environment.

Picking your own produce also cuts down your food miles. Food miles are calculated from the distance the food has travelled as well as the subsequent transport emissions.

You will be surprised at how little room you need to make a start. Window boxes provide a great location for a herb garden. Rocket and other salad crops can be grown in pots on a patio and a small raised bed (even as small as one metre by three metres) can produce plentiful produce all the year round with careful planning.

Involving all your family, including children and young people, helps them to understand our impact on the environment from a young age and if given their own small plot, they get the chance to watch things grow from seed. They may even be more likely to eat more vegetables if they have a helping hand in growing them.

From watching seeds grow to understanding when to prick seedlings out, when to pinch out, when to water and learning how to keep an eye out for pests and diseases, this all helps to make the final process of eating our fresh produce appealing.

Salisbury Allotments Association held a special oneoff Dig Together Day on Saturday, offering demonstrations on ‘potting on’, propagation and other growing related subjects.

Advice was also given on making bug boxes to encourage good wildlife into the garden and allotment to kill off the notsogood wildlife that eats crops.

If you cannot grow your own for whatever reason, markets are a great source of locally-produced food, especially the farmers’ market section of Salisbury market on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

And on Sunday, Salisbury Market Place is being transformed for the annual food and drink market, where there will be more than 70 different stalls offering an array of local produce, from bison burgers to honey and wine. The market runs from 10am to 5pm.

* Green Living is published on the third Thursday of every month.

If you have any greenthemed news or features, email anne.morris@salisburyjournal.co.uk.