It first happened a couple of months back. “Next year,” I found myself saying to myself, “we need to…”

Next year… now how did that happen? This gardening thing was supposed to be a one-off; a horticultural adventure; a strictly six-month challenge, with a column to keep you up-to-date with my progress. And it has been lovely at the age of 38 to be inordinately proud of learning something new.

There they stand: our rows upon rows of beans and peas and carrots and fennel, and the great sprawling vegropolis of squashes. Some of them I cannot remember having anything to do with, but I did, I really did. I planted those seeds, dug in that manure and transplanted the okra. Come to think of it, where is the okra? I haven’t seen it for weeks. It must be buried beneath the suddenly burgeoning tomato plants.

There are plenty of things I didn’t do, such as tying up peas and building hazel arches for the beans. Some things in the vegetable garden are just too fiddly or too dull – sowing carrots, tying up peas and pricking out lettuces, for instance. Next year – there I go again – I won’t bother with some of it. But other things have been quite simply a joy. The courgettes and the French beans in particular – nice big seeds and they just shot up and out, hello boys. And, of course, my lovely fennel, but that isn’t ready yet, and I’m not counting any chickens… although, it is very good with chicken.

Which brings me to another discovery: there aren’t enough vegetable recipes. Does anyone else feel the same? Somewhere between the grotesque “nut roast” and Delia Smith’s How to Cook a cabbage, there is space for a good, imaginative book on simple things to do with vegetables: I’m talking soups, sautés, risottos. What else is there? Handful of spinach and an egg: meal. But that wouldn’t make it into the great cookery books, and I’m not sure why not. With all these vegetables spilling out so generously around me, I am learning that there is a real art to cooking good vegetables well and when you do, it is truly a delight.

When I started this adventure, I wanted to know whether you can just do what it says on the packet and it will turn out OK, or whether you had to possess those mythical “green fingers”. I think I have my answer: it’s not about green fingers. You buy the seeds, you put them in the ground, water them, weed them, they grow. A book is useful – try the Reader’s Digest The Complete Vegetable Gardener. It’s simple, digestible, pretty and includes lots of things you don’t realise you need to know until you suddenly really need to know, such as when to pick and how to store a broad bean.

Above all, the art of gardening is, I think, about application, and that has been the biggest challenge for me, as I possess an attention span the size of a pea. And yet, bored as I am even of weeding, which I used to love, and rapidly losing interest in the beans – been there, seen that – I still find myself thinking about next year. Because next year I’ve got bigger plans…

I can pinpoint the precise moment when my life swivelled. The turning point occurred, quite literally, on the A272 between Trotton and Rogate, mid-afternoon in mid-May. With a rare hour and a half free from work and children, I had decided to go and buy a car – a long overdue promise – and headed off to a garage I had seen on the road to Petersfield. Rattling along, I noticed a garden centre on my right. Nothing more. Just noticed it. I’d never been in one. On I drove to the garage.

And somewhere in the two miles between that garden centre and that garage, something changed in me: I lost all interest in the new car. When I reached the garage, I performed a barely perfunctory scan of the vehicles lined up on the forecourt, then turned my car around and drove back to the garden centre. I spent my precious hour sifting through seeds and poking at propagators. What I wanted was something they apparently couldn’t provide: a round, deep pot in which to sow lettuce on a patio. I know now that garden centres never have the thing you want.

So I know when it happened: what I find harder to pin down is why. The vegetables taste great, but that’s not it. There are plenty of straight-from-the-earth vegetables I can buy around here. The exercise is good, but I could get that on a bike. Ditto, fresh air. And it’s satisfying and fascinating to see your little seed grow into a sweetcorn, true, but only once, surely?

So I think the key is in the challenge. I thought I might compete with my co-growers, Sally and Nicola, but it’s far worse: I am competing with myself. There is so much I still don’t know – like the rules of crop rotation – and next year I want to do it all better.

For next year… we will be better prepared. Next year will pit itself against this year. We shall turn the earth in time, weed it, and mulch it. Next year no puddles will form around the parsnips. Next year the carrots will not have to fight for space with a load of old Jerusalem artichokes lurking around from 2005. Next year our compost will have red worms. Next year we’ll check the broad beans before the black fly hobbles an entire row. Next year, I shall have a timetable. And a gardener’s diary. Next year I will buy a “dibber”.

Next year? Oh dear. The last laugh of the garden: next year, it turns out, begins in October.

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