One step closer to The Good Life

The American humorist Kin Hubbard once said "In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it".

The last four weeks have been a terribly busy, but rewarding time at River Cottage Croydon. The many months of toiling over fragile seedlings are paying dividends with a constant supply of food. On the menu at the moment are: tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, beetroots, celery, green beans, courgettes, pink chard, chillies, apples and sweetcorn.

From what i can see Mother Nature’s primary downfall is the inability to stagger a harvest, which requires you to adopt cunning ploys such as freezing and pickling to keep up with the glut.

Take the courgettes for instance. They are like the terminator – they absolutely will not stop producing no matter what you do to them! When I first started gardening I saw a book entitled ‘What will i do with all these courgettes?’ and couldn’t believe anyone would need such a thing. Two years on and I wish I’d brought that bloody book when i had the chance. Anna very kindly gave me a recipe for courgette muffins, which despite most people's initial reservations eventually went down a storm. Nigel Slater published a courgette frittata recipe in last week’s Observer magazine, so clearly he’s having similar issues.

Despite all this success I have to confess to a huge gardening faux pas. I planted what i believed to be calabrese (broccoli to the uninitiated) in my brassica plot only to realise this week that they look very similar to the chili plants growing in the greenhouse.... I expect to have my RHS membership revoked with immediate effect.

By far and away the most exciting news is the expansion of my self-sustainability experiment to include chickens. The girls – Margot and Jerry (a nod to the Ledbetters, long-suffering neighbours of Tom and Barbara in ‘The Good Life’) will hopefully be with me by the end of October. More on this later.