So, yesterday no beans. Today… six beans, the tallest a good 10cm out of the pot. Wonder plants.

Apart from that early update, when the first shoot of the leaf salad popped up above the compost, I’ve barely written a thing about the garden since planting began.

It’s going great guns.

The tomatoes are poking through now, although they took longer than I thought they might. Two or three weeks for the first shoots to appear, and another week or so for them to get to a centimetre high. They’re quite weedy compared to the tomato plants on sale in B&Q, and still far too small to handle yet. The chives are doing well, and the onions are quite long and stringy, although what’s going on under the surface, I’m not entirely sure.

Beyond the chives, I’ve planted another four herbs: basil, coriander, lavender and mint. Admittedly lavender is more of a flower than a herb, but you can bake with it, although the last time I did that the consensus was - in the office at least - that the results tasted of old ladies’ talc.

Beans. No sign yet. I planted French and Runner a couple of weeks back, but they’ve not yet put anything up through the soil, so I don’t know what’s going on there.

Rich and I planted sunflowers, mushrooms and strawberries on Sunday morning, and already - after just two days in their pots - the strawberries are starting to flower. They’re also about half as big again as they were when we put them in, and one has a white bloom on it, an inch across, from which I presume it will eventually give fruit. That’ll be weeks away yet, but it still looks promising.

And that brings me to the last crop of the year so far: potatoes. I’m growing them in a large black dustbin, as an experiment, as the garden is still in no fit state for planting out. You can apparently get 50 or 60 potatoes from just five tubers growing them like that, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for home-grown Charlottes, which I’ll eat with the mint, assuming it grows.

Here and there, the rest of the garden is starting to spring some surprises. Flowers that went unnoticed in the overgrown beds are now coming into bloom, and I’m starting to notice quite how extensive the bramble is along one of my borders. I’d like to find some way to keep it so I can make blackberry jam in the autumn, but it does tend to spread quite a bit, so it’ll have to be trimmed if nothing else.

I find it all very relaxing, and the experimentation is quite exciting.

OK, so it’s small, but this is the first of two shoots already popping up in the greenhouse. I didn’t expect to see anything so soon (we only planted them on Sunday) but as I briefly dropped in last night to squit them with water, there they were, poking their heads up through the soil.

It’ll be leaf salad when it’s fully grown.

Rich finds the switch that turns on Lucy’s mouth

The crashed van has now been moved into the street, and the electricity is back on. I know that because all the lights came on in the middle of the night and woke me up.

Anyhow, even before I’d exchanged on the house I knew I wanted to grow my own fruit and veg. There’s a greenhouse, and a handy corner of the garden that’s just right for cultivating your own food; neither too hot nor too dry, and with a fairly even spread of sun and shade throughout the day. Except this year - my first - it’s too much of a mess to use productively, so I’m resigned to growing things in the greenhouse for my first season, and moving out into the garden proper next year, or in time for the winter crops.

So this morning we took propagators and seeds and a big bag of compost left behind by the vendor and laid them all out in the greenhouse, ready for planting. I’m starting with salads.

So, while Rich planted out three different kinds of yellow and red tomatoes, I started on the sweet peppers, onions, chives and leaf salad which, if the packet is to be believed, should be ready to harvest in three weeks or less.

It’s stupidly exciting. After all, it’s not like I haven’t had home-grown tomatoes before. This is the first time they’ll have been my own, though, and although the house is still more of a house than a home, I do like the fact that they’re growing in my own greenhouse.

Mum, Andrew and Viv arrived soon after we’d covered them over and dropped the lids on the propagators, for olives and Pimms in the sun. Viv took us all out to lunch, and then we headed back home for an afternoon of games, simnel cake and playing with the horses. Rich managed to find a hidden switch on Lucy’s nose that made her turn up her lips. We thought it was a fluke at first, but every time you touched it she would gurn like she’d just sucked a lemon, and stick out her neck and head.

I don’t think I did so well at the games. I won Newmarket, lost the pick-up game, and claimed one victory out of four at Rummikub.

It was late and dark when we got back to the house, but still not cold, and so we poured some wine and went out to look at the seed trays. One of the most enjoyable Easters for years.

I discovered at the weekend that you don’t have to buy from eBay to get your hands on recycled furniture. You can actually buy recycled new.

On a trip to Braintree to buy a new mattress for the spare bed (the last one got thrown out after eight years’ use and a further year of being slept on by my tenants) I dropped into a furniture store on the off-chance it was selling anything that might be right for the house.

My expectations were low: I’ve spent the last few weekends looking at furniture and the suitable items are few and far between.

And yet there in the foyer was just the thing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was clearly what I’d been after all along.

A table, four chairs and a bench, all made from reclaimed teak. On a fairly good offer, and ready for delivery in a month or so when the house will hopefully be in some kind of order. The chairs were comfortable, the table just the right size, and the bench could be swapped for another two seats for a premium of just £50.

What really appealed, though, was the wood. Teak is a hardwood, and as such it’s slow to grow and you shouldn’t really go chopping it down. Using reclaimed teak, though, gets around that issue, and as a bonus you end up with a wonderfully irregular and slightly worn piece of furniture. The colours are slightly random, and there are a few little bumps here and there, all of which add to the character.

It wasn’t cheap, so buying reclaimed wood clearly fails on one half of the blagger charter (low-cost living), but as it didn’t cost any trees their lives it has green credentials by the bucketload.

And here it is: