Looking over the plot at the weekend, it occurred to us that we have hardly bought any vegetables this summer. Considering that one of us is a vegetarian, that’s not bad going.

With a little bit of finger-counting, we totted up our food bills for the season, and reckoned on having bought a kilo or two of carrots, three or four heads of broccoli, and some potatoes since the end of spring.

Plus, of course, limes for gin.

The rest of the time we have been feasting on more beans than we can cope with and starting on the tomatoes, which are taking an age to ripen in the weak and feeble sun we have had this summer.

Totting them up, we’ve harvested around £44.92-worth of vegetables so far, with more to come. Apart from picking off the feathery tops to feed to the chickens (they love them) we’ve done nothing with the maturing carrots - either early or late varieties - and we’ve yet to touch this year’s potatoes or beetroot.

The runner beans are still going strong, six weeks after we picked the first ones. There are new red flowers on the vine, so I’d guess we’re going to get some more come along in the next few weeks, but the ones that are still there, waiting to be used, are getting a bit stringy and sharp now, so perhaps we’ll make a batch of bean soup with those so they can be blended and we won’t notice that they’re past their best.

Can you think of anything else we can do with the runners, other than steaming and eating them au naturelle? Leave suggestions - clean ones, please - in the comments below.

Our first cucumber

We had family around this weekend, so took in a bumper harvest of tomatoes. We’ve not picked any for a week, so the ones that had been close to ready last weekend were good and red. We made an enormous tomato salad using three different types - moneymaker, golden sunrise and gardener’s delight - and chopped in some home-grown basil, the second red onion and the first cucumber from our slightly disappointing crop of four.

The tomatoes are taking ages to mature this year. Whereas last year we had more than we could cope with from this point on, this year we have 18 plants with just one red tom between them after last night’s picking. Granted we have been grazing on them as they’ve become ready, but I can see us resorting to a green tomato chutney frenzy to use them up at the end of the season.

The red onion was small and a little underwhelming, and the only reason we plumped for the second rather than the first was that the first was rotten. Quite disappointing. The cucumber, on the other hand, was lovely. It had a much firmer texture than the watery fruits you buy in the shops and a crunch like a watermelon. It was succulent and had large white pips, but we had to peel off the skin.

I wouldn’t usually do that. The skin is as much a part of the fruit as the flesh, but it was thick and spiny and didn’t look in the least appetising. So I diced it into a little bowl and put it in the chickens’ coop. They went mad for it and it was gone inside of five minutes.

So at least it wasn’t wasted. Even if the cucumber itself did look like an ugly green slug in the grass.

Two years into growing our own fruit and vegetables, we can start making some year-on-year comparisons. With the price of petrol shooting up, greenhouses being more expensive to heat this year and shortages affecting many products, I had expected that we would have seen a significant hike in the value of our harvest over the last 12 months.

But that’s not the case. The only direcly-comparable produce we have so far harvested are the French and runner beans, and three varieties of tomatoes, and while one crop has increased in price and another held its value, the other three cost less this year than they did in 2007.

All prices are per kilo and sourced from UK supermarkets. Full details of the prices used are shown in the 2007 and 2008 harvests.

I find that truly surprising, particularly when you consider that higher fuel prices should translate into higher food prices as it costs more to both harvest the crops and get them to the supermarket.

This makes very little difference to anyone working towards self-sufficiency because they enjoy the work and want a better handle on where their food is coming from, but for anyone doing it on a grander scale with the intention of selling their products, these decreases are only good news if they are the result of actual falls in the cost of production. Knowing what hard bargains the supermarkets drive, I’m not sure that will be the case.

Our first onion was a lot smaller when we’d dug it up than it looked in the ground. It had been flowering quite impressively, with a fat stem snaking up from the bulb, sprouting from a three-inch wide white island in the sea of earth that makes up the plot. Pulling it out of the ground and taking it into the kitchen, though, it soon became clear that it was all show and no trousers.

The bottom, you see, was flat, which was great for cutting as it sat easily on the worktop, but meant it was only half the size we were expecting. That’s not necessarily a problem as we’d have been trimming it in half anyway, but it does mean that our onion crop - if they’re all like this - might yield only half of what we were expecting.

Either way, it was a lovely mild onion that you could happily slice without your eyes watering and, as the base of a Quorn lasagne, a good start to a great evening meal.

When we picked all those beans a week or so back and said we had a lot of cooking coming up, what we didn’t mention was that we were taking them away to a Yorkshire cottage where we’d be spending a week self-catering with the rest of the family.

Well, that’s what we did, and of course it raised a bit of a self-sufficiency dilemma: what do you do with your plot and your crops when you’re away?

Even absent weekends can be testing on some of the fruit. Particularly the tomatoes, which are very picky about having regular waterings. Andrew’s tomato harvest was ruined last year when his plants developed blossom end rot, which can result from irregular dousing in the hot weather. Tomatoes are creatures of habit, you see.

Fortunately we’d already earned ourselves a favour by watering next door’s beans, raspberries, tomatoes and aubergines while we were feeding their cat a few weeks ago, so we could ask them to do the same for us.

And what a job they did. We came back to find ripened tomatoes, a profusion of tiny white chillies waiting for the sun to give them some colour, and cucumbers that had swelled so much they were starting to look like vibrant green potatoes. As a bonus, they also got very excited about the chicken coop in the garden, so we already know we have a couple of hen sitters eager to step in the next time we go away. We’ve already promised them free eggs in return, and gave them the pick of the ripening beans on our vines when we were gone last week on the condition that they weighed whatever they took.

The moral of the story? That the ’self’ in self-sufficiency is true only to a degree. Unless you’re willing to devote each and every day to your goal, it helps to help out your neighbours in the hope they might return the favour the next time you need a break.