I’ve got a garden that looks like either a field mown for a campsite or the rough at Muirfield depending on how charitable we’re feeling. It’s been totally neglected for the whole of this year as I’ve said before.

So, I’ve stolen a corner of another garden and planted it up with veggies. I’ve been harvesting peas and chard for a couple of weeks now – today we have home-grown peas in the salad with our meal and there is a dish of chard in the fridge waiting to be used over the next couple of days. There is little to gladden the heart like home-grown peas, picked, shelled and eaten within an hour or so. In the words of Birds Eye “fresh as the moment when the pod went pop”.

Today I noticed that the sweetcorn I planted there is now flowering and with luck and a following wind we’ll be eating it fresh off the plants soon too. I had an interesting conversation with DM about the difference between maize (sweetcorn to us gardeners) and peas today…other than the obvious. I explained about the electron transfer chain and C3 and C4 plants and how they photosynthesise. I’m a scientist now and fully qualified to discuss such things! He confessed later that all he could think about in the conversation was C3 pea - he wanted an O so badly!

I am one of life’s problem solvers – I couldn’t spend time in my own garden so I’ve been gardening by stealth. It makes me feel as if I’ve achieved something this summer, however small.