It’s hardly surprising home-grown fruit and vegetables can taste a million times more flavoursome than their shop-bought counterparts.

It’s fresher, as it doesn’t have to go through the often lengthy transportation process that supermarket produce does, and growing your own gives you complete control over the use of pesticides or fertilisers.

Taste factors aside, growing your own also harbours many additional benefits, from promoting positive mental health to helping you to keep active. It’s no wonder many of us have chosen to embrace the greener sides of life, particularly since lockdown.

While the idea of growing your own can be exciting in principle, it can equally be daunting, particularly for beginners, which is where well-researched guides, written by experts, come into their own.

Here, we’ve tested a variety of gardening and growing-your-own books, compiled by gardening writers, bloggers and industry experts alike.

Quite simply, we were looking for books which laid out the main tenets of growing fruit and vegetables clearly and simply. While we were after informative titles, we were also keen to avoid text-heavy tomes in favour of at-a-glance reads which can be consulted as and when.

Finally, we were interested in finding books which were illustrated with high res imagery and diagrams because, let’s face it, when growing your own, nobody wants to eat weeds!

You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections, which are formed from real-world and expert advice. This revenue helps us to fund journalism across The Independent.