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.