It’s been a good few months since we established our veggie patch here at Corner Cottage, and I’d hate for anyone to interpret this silence as indicating failure. Quite the contrary – the two tubs of carefully-prepared earth have spent spring and early summer erupting with greenstuff. A froth of vegetation has risen in its multifarious glory, prompting delight and amazement on the part of the gardener.

In the interests of full disclosure, though, it’s not exactly been a bed of roses either. Some things have worked, while others have decidedly not. And even the successes have sometimes been somewhat limited. To put it all in perspective, let’s just say that we haven’t yet stopped buying in most of our veggies.

So, like a band at the height of a pumping live set, let’s break it down and give everyone a moment in the limelight to show off their chops. As it were. All pictures are our very own produce.

The shining successes were undoubtedly rocket and spinach, both of which found their way to our table in decent quantities. Daniela worked her magic with the spinach in particular, in the form of a mouthwatering spinach and feta pie, several times over. If you’re good I’ll share the recipe at some point. But these healthy and handy leafy foodstuffs just made it harder for the underachieving members to shine.

Now, our chef continues to make good use of the thyme, sage, marjoram, dill and basil we planted, but it’s not as if these provide us with much in the way of calorific sustenance — despite their very meaningful contributions on the flavour front.

I’d call the next group the good-but-not-enough: successful crops in themselves, but in amounts too small to move the needle, as they say. The strawberries and broccoli both gave of their best, putting forth admirable exemplars of their delicious goodness, but if you only plant two strawberry plants, you’re not going to be trucking the fruit to Wimbledon to be consumed by corporate bigwigs with cream.

The broccoli was perfectly formed, but small. And it soon fell prey to the Cabbage White caterpillars, which reduced the leaves to a doily-like consistency in a matter of days. If I’d known that would happen, I’d have squished that one I took so many pains to photograph.

And so we come to the bottom of the class: the out-and-out failures. If they were children we wouldn’t label them in this way, but come on, they’re vegetables with no feelings to hurt. And the failure is mine, after all, not theirs. Thus it is with an unjudgemental heart that I summon carrots and radishes: root veggies with developmental issues that spring from identical conditions — overcrowding which led to undernourishment and underperformance.

Not terrible-looking radishes, right? But tthese are really weedy specimens, and that’s the entire edible crop. The others were pea-sized or smaller, entirely due to the amateur error of planting the seeds too densely and, horror on horror’s head, failing to thin them out when they sprouted. The carrots remain pictorially unrecorded: they looked like pale little roots — hardly compelling image material.

Membership of this bracket also goes to the snow peas, which failed to thrive from the outset. They were showered with love, water and fertiliser, but remained limp, pale and listless. A couple of flowers briefly sprouted, only to press their faces into the mud as if under artillery fire. The vines turned white and died. Food for worms, quite literally.

Now I was very careful to hedge my bets right at the start by claiming this was an experiment and that the chief fruit of this garden would be experience, even wisdom. So what have we learnt? Well, in a word, I think what must be taken into account is scale. No matter how well your veggie garden grows, if your plantings are of a modest scope to start with, they aren’t going to contribute much to alleviating world hunger – or in our case, feeding an elegant circle of dinner guests.

What’s in there now? Well, the successes remain, so we’re in for more leafy veggies, but the root crops are out — as are the snow peas. And in the spirit of scale, now a good half of the real estate is given over to tomatoes, which are showing early signs of promise.

Anyhoo, the great thing about all this is that, pass or fail, we’ve done one cycle of sowing and reaping; we’ve eaten what we could gather and, as predicted, ploughed back what we couldn’t consume so it can fuel the next cycle. And that one will be better.