I should have had more faith in the potatoes. I was worried they might have had blight after brown patches appeared on the leaves, and although I suspected those patches might equally have had something to do with slugs or butterflies nibbling them, I wasn’t entirely sure.

So Sunday’s great unveiling was undertaken with some trepidation.

They’ve been growing in a dustbin, a trug and four dedicated potato bags, the latter of which have better drainage, so we picked the bin batch and dragged it over to the earthy patch on the lawn that’ll be turfed over in the autumn, and tipped it over to empty the soil.

The earth spilled out and, with it, the first three potatoes of the crop. They were perfect beauties; well shaped and with smooth, blonde skin.

We pulled on gloves and dug through the damp black earth, and the deeper we dug, the more we found. Potato after potato after potato, until ten minutes later we had a crop of 55 spuds of all sizes, tipping the scales at 2.75kg (6lb).

We rubbed off the soil and left them in the greenhouse to dry while we had some lunch, then wrapped them in three lots of newspaper, sorted according to size, and put them in the fridge to start eating tomorrow.

There are six batches of potatoes in total, and if we have a similar number of spuds in each then that’ll be 16.5kg (36lb) of produce.

The closest equivalent to these at Sainsbury’s right now are Charlotte potatoes, which are £1.79 a kilo, so all being well the whole crop should be worth about £30. Today’s output, would have cost about £4.48, which more or less covers the cost of the seed potatoes from which the whole crop of six containers was grown, so anything else from here on in is more or less free.

With all this wet weather and warmth, the garden is heading for overdrive. I did a little stock-taking tonight, and was pleased to see that the beans are having a mini renaissance, although there’s still not enough there for more than a few plates, and of course the dwarf French beans we planted at the weekend aren’t popping any heads up above the soil just yet.

I have one solitary red tomato in the greenhouse, but it’s amid a veritable forest of green ones. I hadn’t really thought through the implications of hanging on to so many good plants rather than throwing out all but three or four when they all germinated, and now I have a dozen sturdy specimens simply bristling with fruit.

If each plant were to produce only 40 tomatoes (and believe me, there are far more than that on some of them) then I would have almost 500 fruits. Can you imagine how many quiches, jars of tomato chutney and pots of tomato sauce that would make?

Reckon I’m being over-optimistic? Not at all. Here’s a truss hanging from just one branch of the least-developed plant at the cooler end of the greenhouse.

The carrots are now tall and tufty, with their green leafy stalks waving around in the breeze, just below the cultivated bramble, which is pumping out fat juicy berries almost as quickly as they can be picked. Tonight I plucked off 52 of them to add to the sizeable bag I’ve already thrown in the freezer.

And the last real development of note, not already mentioned here somewhere else, is the pepper trees, which although small are now starting to flower. I had thought that the buds were actually small peppers already starting to form (which, I suppose, they are), but now that they’ve beefed themselves up a bit it’s more obvious what they are. From this picture, though, you can see why I got it wrong.

A busy day in the garden. I mowed the lawn while Rich disposed of the remnants of the unproductive strawberry plants, then we got down to the planting.

The French beans, as I’ve already written here, seem to have thoroughly exhausted themselves, so we bought some dwarf French beans and dug them into the plot, then opened up the pack of squash seeds I’d bought at the agricultural college two weeks ago and dropped them into pots of manure-mixed compost. I was quite shocked to find that the £3.50 pack contained only 12 seeds. At that rate you’d better hope they all take, but considering how many times we’ve cut open a squash for baking and scooped the seeds into the bin it’s a bit galling.

I’m telling myself these were probably cultivated for better growing, and the ones we disposed of might not have taken, but I’m having a hard time convincing myself.

They should all start to germinate in six days or so, like the cabbage, which is already poking out of the pots in which I sewed them, despite having been in for only a week or so. They look like dark green cress.

Most exciting, though, is the small olive tree to which I treated myself. I had cash-back vouchers from Homebase, so it was effectively free. It’s quite small, but two years old and already sporting a healthy crop of olives, which have yet to fatten up and turn black.

Whether I can wait until they’re black or end up eating them green, though, remains to be seen.

No sooner have the broccoli plants started to show some promise, than we have a storm so spectacular the papers are calling it a monsoon. You can see why. Torrential rain that overloaded all the gutters, in which two months’ supply fell in nine hours.

The outcome was as predictable as it was unwelcome. The tallest and leafiest plants - the broccoli and sprouts - took a heavy battering and I came home to find several of the plants knocked flat, their stems badly bent, if not entirely broken.

I’ve staked them up, but I worry that the vegetable patch may have suffered its first few casualties.

Silly to get excited, I know, but I was weeding and watering the garden last night and spotted the first broccoli floret was already forming in the tallest of the broccoli plants (where else).

It’s clearly getting ready to take over from the beans when they’ve finally exhausted themselves.