Superfoods are natural, unprocessed foods, low in calories and packed to the brim with anti-oxidants and masses of essential vitamins and minerals. They punch well above their weight when it comes to healthy eating.

Hardly a day goes by without some new superfood being lauded in the press but few receive more accolades than the berry family. From your common or garden strawberry to its more exotic cousins the acai and goji - berries get top billing every time.

One research study showed that women who ate more than three servings of blueberries or strawberries a week had a 34 per cent lower heart attack risk than those who ate less. The high concentrations of anthocyanin, an antioxidant found in red and blue fruit and veg, are thought to help lower blood pressure and improve blood vessel function. The same anthocyanins seem to inhibit the development of a whole range of cancers.  Another study found that women who ate lots of blueberries and strawberries experienced slower mental decline with age than women who consumed fewer of the fruits.

All berry good. But with somewhat desiccated and squidgy blueberries coming in at an absolute minimum of £12 a kilo, you’re looking at a quick remortgage on the kid’s inheritance to be able to super-size your diet with berries.

Which is all the more reason to grow berries on your plot.

Fortunately, berry growing is something we do particularly well in our soft, Northern climes. Delicate berries can’t cope with blistering heat (and let’s be honest, they’re unlikely to find it here!) but our longer summer days and cooler climate are perfect for a whole range of berry superfoods.

Commercial berry production is concentrated in Tayside and Fife, with pockets in the Borders, Clyde Valley, Arran and Ayrshire and in the far northeast. But, provided the soil is suitable you can succeed in growing berries just about anywhere in Scotland. If you don’t already have berries in your garden, you could always plant some pot grown berries for crops next year – or wait until the autumn to plant bare-rooted stock. But with a whole range of berries that ‘do’ in this country, it’s well worth making space for a few bushes.

Take your pick from raspberries, strawberries, tayberries, blackcurrants, blueberries, brambles, redcurrants and gooseberries – all of them thrive in Scotland. Ring the changes with jostaberry (a cross between blackcurrant and gooseberry), highbush blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum), aronia (aka chokeberry) or any of the North American berry fruits. Live dangerously and try goji berries – though our chilly, wet summers have put paid to several of my attempts to grow goji, you may be much more successful.

There are so many ‘wins’ with berry growing, it would be daft not to try:

- Because it’s mostly using permanent planting, once they are established, there’s not a huge amount of work and almost no cost to keep them producing year after year.

- You’re producing a high value crop that can be hard to find and always costs a small fortune in the shops.

- You can grow organically – berries are amongst the most sprayed crops in chemical farming – shop bought strawberries can have up to 36 types of pesticide residues; shop-bought raspberries have up to 39 different pesticides applied and the ‘fuzzy’ skin makes these almost impossible to wash away; 91% of cherries tested had high pesticide residues.

- You can eat them as soon as they are picked – making sure you and your family get the maximum nutrition from your crops, unlike the limp and mouldy specimens you’ll find on the supermarket shelf. In fact, some berry fruits are so delicious straight from the plant that children eat them in huge quantities without you even nagging!

- They are really good for wildlife. Insects love to pollinate the flowers and birds love to beat you to the berries – watch out for little patches of purple poo in your garden that tell you when to fight off the blackbirds for the harvest!

- Your diet will not only be massively healthier, it will also be incredibly on trend.

On trend? Well yes, because like every other area of our lives, from lager all the way through to crime and political dramas, the Scandinavians have beaten us to it. They now have probably the best diet in the world.

What is known as the New Nordic Diet is taking the world by storm. They have shifted from a diet based on dairy products and farm-raised beef, poultry, and pork fed huge amounts of antibiotics to the New Nordic Diet based on:

1 wild fish, game and free-range lamb;

2 ‘cold climate’ vegetables such as beets, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, turnips, Brussels sprouts, and potatoes;

3 native berries like lingonberries, cloudberries, blueberries, wild strawberries, elderberries, black currants; and

4 hardy wholegrains like rye, barley, and oats.

Sounds familiar? It should. Because the key elements of the New Nordic Diet are part of the traditional Scots diet too –before deep fried Mars Bars became embedded in the national psyche.

The New Nordic Diet is delivering many health benefits including much lower cholesterol levels, reduced levels of coronary heart disease and significant weight loss in the population.

With our own health record and high incidence of heart disease, there’s clearly even more to learn from our Scandinavian neighbours than how to knit a cool jumper.

But isn’t it good to know that Grow Your Own has potentially such a big part to play in changing the health of our nation?