SUNDAY October 15, 2006, is going down as a red-letter day in our household. Or perhaps I should call it a red bottle day. That was the day our ketchup-addicted daughter finally gave up the sauce.

I could have wept when I heard her say, "It doesn't taste right with that any more". For years, the only way I have been able to get her to eat vegetables is by dipping them in tomato ketchup. She had ketchup with carrots, ketchup with broccoli, even ketchup with roast chicken and gravy, which is a truly vile combination.

I don't know where it all went wrong with the veg. She was weaned exclusively on Annabel Karmel recipes - I considered writing my own guide to motherhood at one point, provisionally entitled Pureeing Peaches At Midnight - but as soon as she could say, "I hate that mush", the green beans went out of the window. Literally.

Since then, no amount of me chomping though bowls of salad or going, "Mmm, lovely spinach" has swayed her.

She is perfectly happy to sing songs about cauliflowers and rap about vegetable soup at the school's harvest festival (it was that time again this week) but the reality - me negotiating her consumption of peas, forkful by drawn-out forkful - has always been fraught.

Until Sunday, that is, when the whole vegetable-eating thing suddenly turned a corner. It may be that she's a little more mature now - she's certainly willing to at least try different foods - but what seems to have produced this unexpected result is that we've just ordered our first organic veg box.

I've resisted veg boxes in the past, on the grounds that (a) I like to go out and choose things myself, and (b) they seem to look a little, well, uninspiring. The result is that I go out to the supermarket, buy far too much over-packaged stuff in plastic trays and find slimy courgettes, hairy tomatoes and a black lettuce in the back of the fridge three weeks later.

However, the new eco-Katie has made a commitment to changing her ways, and not before time. It was reported this week that the Mothers' Union, a Christian pressure group with 3.6 million members worldwide, has just issued its own Ten Commandments to help alleviate poverty and fight climate change, one of them being to eat seasonal, locally produced organic and Fair Trade fruit and vegetables.

So, in the interests of taking up one of my eco-challenges (you may have read in this paper a few weeks back that I'll be reporting on the progress of these lifestyle changes from time to time), I ordered our first veggie box.

We went for a local supplier, to cut down food miles as much as possible, and placed the order on-line. You can customise your order (although I chose not to), but if you prefer the supermarket browsing experience, York's first organic supermarket, Out Of This World, opens today in George Hudson Street.

Unpacking it all was great fun, just like Christmas, but without all the packaging (hooray!). The fruit box contained black grapes, English plums, apples, pears, kiwis, oranges, a lime and a grapefruit. The veg - I went for an extra-large box - comprised lettuce, watercress, spring onions, chillies, runner beans, a bag of alfalfa and radish sprouts, sweetcorn, peppers, a cabbage, a cauliflower, courgettes, cucumber, onions, potatoes, beetroot (quite a lot of that) and three mystery vegetables that I could not, for the life of me, identify. Surprisingly, there were no carrots.

The mystery veggies were pinkish coloured and about the size of hand grenades and one of them looked like two bottoms stuck together. I canvassed my friends, including one of York's top chefs, and eventually discovered they were bizarrely shaped sweet potatoes. Lesson number one: organic produce does not grow to supermarket specifications.

Regardless of their odd appearance, they were jolly nice mashed with regular potatoes on top of a cottage pie, and both father and daughter had seconds. In fact, they've been eating almost all of the veg with gusto (I had the alfalfa sprouts; one can't expect miracles) because it really does taste nicer. So nice that the tomato ketchup level has not gone down since. Result!

The husband even ate his cabbage, which he normally tries to hide under his spoon (like father, like daughter). Until, that is, I told him about the organic slug I'd washed off it earlier, which put him off a bit.

I don't mind scrubbing off mud and removing critters if it gets the family eating healthily. And I liked the challenge of having to be creative with what I'm sent. They're getting borsht next, ha ha; I've still got four beetroots to use up.

Read more about Kate's eco challenge in her blog, blog.klockworks.co.uk