What could be better than eating food you have grown?
I've just had a dinner of a tomato, cucumber, lettuce and rocket salad; new potatoes cooked with fresh mint; and an omelette with herbs. It was fairly plain food, but I was excited enough after eating it to open up the laptop and start typing. Why has such a meal got me all worked up (apart from the fact that I get pretty effusive after a few glasses of wine)? Because it is the first time I have eaten a substantial meal where every ingredient was home-produced.
My old friend Hugh Fairly-Longname, in The River Cottage Cookbook, talks about trying to move along the "food acquisition continuum". Being at the far left of the continuum means relying completely on supermarkets for your food. Being at the far right means complete self-sufficiency, à la The Good Life.
He pretty much admits (and you have to agree) that self-sufficiency has become almost impossible. No matter how much you produce in your garden you will probably always hanker after the odd packet of Monster Munch or a Twix. But, as George Bush would probably agree, any shift to the right is good.
To my mind, producing your own food is like giving two fingers to the mediocrity of the modern food chain. I don't like it that food producers inject water into chicken breasts to make them appear larger. Or that most of the herbs in the supermarket appear to come from Israel. Or that a packet of plain old ham sandwiches labelled "fresh" has a list of ingredients about 40 lines long.
So even the smallest contribution from your own garden, be it a morning boiled egg fresh from the hen's nether regions, a handful of basil for fresh pesto or some fruit for dessert, can be considered a little victory in a very large war.
Mrs Kelly taught me an invaluable lesson once. (There were other lessons, I'm sure, but this one stood out.) I was telling her how much I loved flowering cherry trees and thought we should get one to brighten up the garden. She scoffed and told me that flowering cherries were city trees for city gardens. For the quintessential country feel, she reckoned, we should opt for apple or pear trees, which produce equally impressive blooms and also produce fruit in the autumn. She was right, of course (as wives occasionally are).
It's a sound principle. Ornamental flowers, bushes and trees are nice to look at, but they can't hold a candle to the ones that produce things you can eat. These are the superheroes of the garden.
We have ditches around our garden that are full of brambles. A landscape gardener might tell us to replace them with a wall or a fence. But how could you cut down something that produces fruit for the breakfast table?
You don't have to own a farm or even have a lot of land to bring the joys of food production to your life. My brother-in-law, who is a farmer, laughs when I say that four hens and a polytunnel make me a smallholder. But the official definition is beside the point: being a smallholder is a state of mind.
If you don't have much of a garden, or have no garden at all, you can still take those little shifts to the right. Herbs will grow in pots in your kitchen window. Tomato plants will grow in your conservatory. A couple of laying hens will live in even the smallest garden. And you can smile to yourself as a piece of home-produced food replaces something that is processed, mutated, sprayed, overtravelled or generally stressed.
In May I wrote about buying a polytunnel. Now that I have got over the trauma of putting it together, it has been a revelation (and also a steep learning curve). A polytunnel is like a pet: it needs daily care, and you can't leave it on its own for long periods. But why would you want to? As we move towards late autumn the tunnel is at its best, resplendent with greenery, lush vegetables and fleshy fruits.
A crop of spuds that was already in the ground when we got the tunnel did okay, but it was probably a tad warm for them in there, and some wilted. I had never grown potatoes before, and I'm still enthralled by the experience of digging up the plants and rummaging in the clay for the tubers. It's like opening a present at Christmas.
Tomatoes are thriving in the humidity and heat. The plants are more than a metre tall, with thick stems. Sweet cherry tomatoes came first; now the beef variety is starting to ripen. We have so many tomatoes that I have started giving them away, having already made a big tub of puree for the freezer. We found a recipe for green-tomato soup, to use up the ones that fell to the ground prematurely. My pride and joy is an enormous beef tomato still clinging precariously to the plant; it's about the size of a grapefruit. I should enter it for a prize.
The other star performers have been the cucumber and courgette plants. The cucumber is a voracious grower that has produced a steady supply of fruit for about two months. Their skins are kind of hairy, though, and they need a wash before you eat them, to get them as smooth as they are in the shops. They taste great on their own or as part of cucumber pickle or tzatziki.
It was probably a mistake to grow courgettes indoors, as the plant gets enormous. It's like The Day of the Triffids. We have had courgettes up to 60cm long and, frankly, didn't know what to do with them. They are nice in a Bolognese sauce or baked in a cheese sauce. They may be cut from next year's plans.
We have three pepper plants, which have produced about five peppers each. That's not a lot, and, as they are compact little plants, we will grow a lot more of them next year.
We have lots of lettuce in varying degrees of readiness. If I could maintain a steady supply of lettuce, tomatoes and potatoes throughout the summer, I'd be happy. Anyway, the lettuce tastes great. At the moment we are on iceberg. I've also sown a couple of rows of rocket, which has a great peppery taste.
You can sow peas in a tunnel as early as February, but we didn't get started until June. They look unusual, with narrow tendrils that wrap around the support canes. Eating a fresh pea is a great moment for any gardener. You have to marvel at the genius behind the design of a pod, which protects the delicate peas until they are ready to be eaten. It makes a mockery of modern packaging.
Mrs Kelly made a pea, lettuce and mint soup, which was something of a chore to eat but, I'm sure, was spectacularly good for us. We glowed eerily for days afterwards. We also have leeks, celery, onions and garlic planted, and they are starting to come good. I am not a big fan of celery, so I am watching the plants with suspicion. Part of me is vexed they are thriving.
Outside the tunnel we have a small plot for fruit bushes, which started to bear, er, fruit in August: gooseberries, rhubarb, blackcurrants, redcurrants and raspberries. We had to move our strawberry plants at the last minute, so they're struggling this year, but I hope they will come good next year. The raspberries are great; just when you think the plant is finished fruiting, a few more berries come along.
In a few weeks the last of the summer's produce will be gone. We will miss it greatly. The focus will switch to planning and preparing for next year. We will be more clued in, but that wouldn't be hard. Every step in our food-production adventure has been pure pleasure. There is no hardship involved. Only upside. Roll on spring.
Jane Powers is on holidays