Happens fast, doesn’t it? One day you’re typing the following careless words: “All we have to do is wait for them to ripen now.”

Ten days later – dead. All gone. Our beautiful tomato plants, lovingly nurtured for the past four months, black and brown and dead, quite dead. And their bunches of green tomatoes, so long awaited, so bright in the expectation, swiftly turning brown as the blight creeps from stem to fruit: never to ripen, never to go into the red.

You may be able to tell from that slightly pathetic joke that I am trying to put a brave face on it, but in truth I am bitterly disappointed. As bitter as those green tomatoes, I should think… Oh, it’s no good, I cannot even form a rubbish simile with any heart.

The blight that may already have destroyed the last potato crop (we have pulled off the stems but dare not dig up the spuds for fear of discovering that they too are blighted) swept through the garden, one end to t’other, gobbling up the bush tomatoes.

Now it has the climbing tomatoes in its grasp; I see it beginning to creep along the outer leaves. It is small consolation that Sarah Wain, our expert adviser, tells me there is nothing we could have done once it struck. The blight – a fungus called Phytophthora infestans – is airborne and spread by warm, wet weather. Small consolation too, that our 53 basil stems, which held such promise for the tomato sauce, will now be reduced to a very small quantity of fresh pesto.

All that is left, it seems, are the aubergines and the chillies. The former are doing nothing much, kind of growing and flowering a bit but not a lot (you see how I have lost heart; damn vegetables, who cares?). But my first chilli is poking out of its flower, green and cute.

I watch it every day with growing excitement: if the year isn’t to prove a near total wash-out, it is going to be up to these chillies to save the day. Pretty little droplets of hot colour is what I want: so much hope in such a small thing. But I suppose that’s what gardening is all about. Damn that damn rain. Damn it.

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