There is nothing like a personal crop. In this second year of allotmenteering, my eldest son has been in charge of the potato patch. The potatoes had great names: Desiree, Pentland Javelin, Red Duke of York, Picasso. In early June, we pulled up the first plants, and yellow and pink potatoes the size of oranges and marbles rolled across the earth. We ate them boiled with butter; later we mashed them, skins on, with allotment chives. They tasted not just delicious, but in some way utterly satisfying: work well done.

Somehow, whoever plants something remains the owner of that vegetable, even kids on the garden-labourer playdate, so we have Joey's beans, El's purple sprouting broccoli, Molly's radishes, Finn's carrots and my weeds. I tried to grow crops the children would eat ­ what was the point otherwise? — and my daughter does eat peppery radishes, straight from the soil, with a pained expression. It's not that she likes them; it's because she planted the seeds.

For two months in summer, we grow most of our vegetables, but we don't have enough to store, not like the Irishmen on the Cricklewood site who are always putting "20lb of peas in the freezer in the garage". Ours is an ill-kempt "six-pole" allotment, but this summer it should give us — slugs willing — small amounts of the following: runner and yellow beans, fennel, sweetcorn, lettuce, perpetual spinach, broccoli, blueberries, cherries, tomatoes (ugly, tasty varieties unavailable in the shops), peppers, cucumbers, courgettes, peas, nasturtiums for salad, garlic, chillis, mint, chives, Jerusalem and globe artichokes (adults only), rainbow chard and, later, pumpkins and butternut squash. Plus precisely two figs (the tree is new).

We don't go up to the allotment every long summer evening, but when we do, that dictates dinner, sometimes there and then on the portable barbecue. There's always salad, a lot more robust-tasting than the shop-bought variety, and more prone to holes. Although the allotment costs £60 a year to rent, I've made that back after 30 salads, discounting my back-breaking labour. As for food miles: a pleasing one and a half, sometimes by bus.

Mine’s bigger than yours

It’s shovels at dawn at the village hall, as the vegetable showing season reaches its peak

BACKGROUND

• Vegging Out: how to start a vegetable patch

• Enjoying the fruits — and veg — of your labour

• Get plotting

• Your midsummer sowing guide

Related Internet Links

• How to start a vegetable garden

The vegetable patch

Have you grown a prize parsnip or a trophy tomato? Send us a picture - we'll showcase the best

BACKGROUND

• Growing kinds of chilli. . .

• Go ahead, pack it in

• Seeds of change

• Dolce vita on a plate

• Salad days that last forever

BACKGROUND

• Salad days that last forever

• Grow your own meals

• Dolce vita on a plate

• Go ahead, pack it in

• Seeds of change

Like buses, vegetables all come at once. Particularly during the two weeks you are on holiday, when giant courgettes take over the earth. Last year, I wrote about dumping marrow-sized ones on my neighbours' doorsteps like unwanted babies. This year, I read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her year living off her own produce, where she was reduced to chocolate-chip courgette cookies and Disappearing Zucchini Orzo, in which the courgette is grated, then fried with onion, herbs and parmesan so it becomes invisible to small eyes.

In winter, leeks were the problem. "Not leek-and-potato soup again," a child would whimper, shying away from the bags of green slime in the freezer. Sometimes, in summer, I'd arrive back with a basket of produce and leave half of it to rot in the fridge, unable to think of new ways to cook it. Now, however, I have Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook, which tackles each fruit or vegetable in a seasonal chapter. I just did this recipe, where you boil skin-on new potatoes, put a head of garlic in the oven until it's soft and caramelised inside, squirt it over the crushed potatoes, top with grated pecorino and roast. Oh yes, it's good. Worth the toil in the soil.

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