Still, there were the highs.  Like the surprisingly fecund cucumber plant, the plentiful salad leaves and the treasure trove of potatoes that I unearthed to cheers from the kids.  Last week, I picked the one fully formed squash to be produced by the monstrous plant and roasted it with thyme.   Although I stubbornly polished off every last bit myself, the truth of the matter is that it was absolutely disgusting.  Why? After so much love and organic compost?

And yet, I already find myself drawing up more ambitious plans for next March – maybe jerusalem artichokes this time, maybe a different type of courgette to the bizarre and strangely tasteless yellow fingers that I’ve been proudly stir frying.

It’s time to face facts: I’m a vegetable-growing anorak.  I can pinpoint the exact moment when this realisation dawned on me.  It was at a newsagents in Cornwall, where I was stocking up on light reading to enjoy while sunning myself on the beach (Ha!).   I’d passed quickly over the Heats and Hellos, lingered over Eve and Red – and then I spotted it …Kitchen Garden!!!!  Maybe it was the picture of the windswept woman inhaling worm-ridden compost, or the headline that screamed “Reaping the rewards – time to bring in the harvest!” but I just knew that this was the magazine for me.  And so it was that, huddled behind a straining windbreaker, I read up on the latest compost shredders, commiserated with Lesley’s problem of rusty leeks and marvelled at Des’s impressive squash.

Now where’s that organic seed catalogue…

We’ll have to wait another few weeks for them to start laying the much anticipated eggs, but we can already report unexpected benefits.  Our two boys – who regularly fail to summon the strength to flush the loo after a visit – have surprised us by throwing themselves into collecting chicken poo at every opportunity for depositing in the composter.

Begging them to get out of bed in the morning is also a thing of the past.  They can now be spotted at 7.00am (even in the rain) diligently clearing poo, topping up bowls of food and water and offering the hens ‘treats’, such as remnants of last night’s stir fry.

Alas, the two-year-old – true to character – torments the hens by relentlessly whacking their home.   Peppa beats a hasty retreat to the safety of the coup whenever she spots her approaching. Minty, meanwhile, has fought back by pecking her defensively on the finger.  Definitely a hen with attitude.

Having installed ‘raised beds’ (replete with rotting manure) in our once attractive garden I’ve been raising little seedlings indoors. The good news is that, after an anxious two week wait, I’ve finally been greeted by an array of little seedlings on my lounge window. The lounge window, in the absence of a greenhouse, seemed like a good place to put them. That was until I discovered that my two-year old had stuck her grubby little fingers into the pots and left a trail of compost over the cream curtains. Worse still, she’d removed all of the labels I’d carefully written and stuck onto each pot and deposited them in a pile. I’m now confronted with a series of unidentifiable seedlings that may or may not be sweetcorn, courgette, onion squash or pumpkin.

Still, I’m optimistic of a more extensive crop than last year. Despite nurturing my tomato plants throughout the waterlogged summer, I managed to produce a single edible specimen which – even with the addition of balsamic vinegar – tasted of kitchen roll. Even this, however, was more successful than my dwarf beans which I proudly watched snaking round my cane edifice for a full two months, convinced that they would burst forth at any moment with an abundance of beans. I was gutted when Jean-Philippe finally broke the news that the foliage so beautifully entwined round the canes was in fact nothing more fruitful than ivy.

Meanwhile the pressure to produce is mounting. I’ve discovered that Louis – already precociously entrepreneurial at seven – has been touting our (as yet, non existent) home produce to one and all. He’s drawn up a price list for an alarmingly broad range of vegetables, produced a flyer and started taking forward orders. Alan Sugar would be proud.