It's that heavenly time of year when the freshness and greenness of spring positively bounces around, and you know it's time to think about planting salads, herbs and summer fruits. But not just for eating – my friend Jane is a bit overexcited about the potential of her strawberries this year because she's just been on a Make Your Own Natural Skin Care workshop at SenSpa, a gorgeous Thai spa based at Careys Manor in the New Forest.

For the many people who prefer to eat organic food, like Jane, it doesn't make sense to put lots of synthetic chemicals on your skin. The 90-minute workshop showed her that it's simple and fun to make your own products – and you know exactly what's in them.

Here's Jane's report:

Set in a lovely room overlooking a small Zen garden, the workshop began with head therapist Tina Kennedy highlighting the chemical 'nasties' used in many commercial beauty products. These include paraffin (mineral oil), which makes the skin feel soft but can also clog the pores and affect the skin's ability to eliminate toxins, and foaming agents such as sodium lauryl sulphate, which can cause irritation and dryness.

Then came the hugely enjoyable 'back-to-school' bit, where the 16 participants conjured up cleansers, exfoliators, face masks and a body polish using common kitchen ingredients such as avocado (rich in essential fatty acids to nourish the skin), lemon juice (an excellent astringent and antibacterial), bananas (nourishing) and strawberries because they contain salicylic acid, which is great for exfoliating and helps clear break-outs. You can make your own moisturisers but they need 'cooking' so we were given instructions for making these at home.

Everything smelt divine…and of course is literally good enough to eat. I loved the scent of the strawberry and banana cream cleanser for normal to dry skin. You just combine one teaspoon each of plain natural yoghurt, unwhipped double cream, mashed banana and mashed strawberries to make enough to last three or four days. Another delicious cleanser, for normal/oily skins, is made with one teaspoon of honey and half a teaspoon of plain yoghurt, both of which are antibacterial and nourishing, and contain natural acids, which gently exfoliate. Apply the cleansers with clean fingers, massage in for a minute, then rinse off with warm water and pat dry.

For a perfect scrub, you just add one tablespoon of ground almonds to either cleanser, or two tablespoonfuls for a lovely thick face mask. Tina tells us that honey is
a natural humectant, which attracts moisture and holds it in the skin, so this mask will nourish and soften. Leave the mask on for 20 minutes then wash off with warm water. We took our concoctions away in plastic containers: just remember all these recipes need to be stored in the fridge.

I'm now planning to use my own strawberries in a face mask later this year. The baby strawberry plants I planted last year put out runners, and are already coming into leaf. The strawberries, along with a selection of salad plugs, came from Rocket Gardens, a great little organic mail-order company, which I really recommend.

PS Josephine Fairley has written a whole book on this subject, which is a must for anyone wanting to go further into DIY skincare: The Ultimate Natural Beauty Book: 100 Gorgeous Beauty Products to Make Easily at Home by Josephine Fairley is published by Kyle Cathie, £8.99.

The Make Your Own Natural Skin Care Workshop costs £35 and runs from 6pm until 7.30pm (with free smoothie; participants can use the spa facilities until 9pm, including the gorgeously warm hydrotherapy pool).

For more details/dates, visit senspa.co.uk, tel: 01590 624467. Rocket Gardens, rocketgardens.co.uk, tel: 0845 603 3684