Yesterday, we had a real treat – bowls piled high with our own strawberries and raspberries, (admittedly we had to resort to shop-bought blueberries because ours aren’t yet ripe), several generous sprinkles of organic sugar and a glug of Tia Maria (Disaronno is better, but that had mysteriously disappeared).

Left to steep all afternoon, and served with more cream than our doctor would recommend, it made for a melt-in-the-mouth, life-affirming plate of kind-of healthy(ish) deliciousness.

Obviously, I’ll need to try it again in a few days - once a few more berries have ripened - just to make sure it’s as good as I think.

After I’d scraped the last drops of syrupy berry juice from the bowl and basked in the feeling of wellbeing and general all-is-right-with-the world, I was reminded of how important it is to get a yield.

The appalling growing conditions of the last few years have made yields pitifully small (and of variable quality) and the supermarkets and international trade seem like Quite a Good Idea. If we’d had to rely on what we could grow ourselves, we’d have been stuffed, and not in a good way.

You can’t work on an empty stomach. Getting a yield (getting something back for all the effort you put in to something) is obviously the whole point of Grow Your Own. It applies equally to everything else you do in your life – there’s no point doing what you do unless it’s somehow good for you, gives you a return, feeds some part of your body or spirit. At home, work or in the garden, you have to have thought about the WIFMs (the ‘what’s in it for me’s). You need to be sure you are getting truly meaningful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.

My strawberries and raspberries are a case in point – my blueberries even more so! Strawberries and raspberries take a year or two to yield their first real crop (and our strawberries should really be replaced with a younger model any day now, which means we’ll be back to scratch). For the first one or two years, we could have been getting zilch, nada, zip from that valuable bit of growing land, which is frankly demotivating and enough to send a girl rushing to the nearest supermarket. (Admittedly, this bit of land is partly so valuable because we made it into a raised bed, from untreated oak sleepers which cost an arm and a leg and paid someone to build it, which cost the other arm and leg).

So getting a yield is always a bit of a balancing act – getting some immediate returns – something to keep you going - while the ‘real’ crop comes through.

In the first year, in and amongst our newly planted tiddly strawberry plants, we grew lettuces, garlic, annual herbs and a few other quick croppers like purple top turnips and beetroot while the berries were getting themselves settled in and ready to do the business. The following year, when it became obvious the strawberries still hadn’t got their act together, we planted more herbs, some onions – anything that grew fast and rooted shallowly. By year three, the strawberries were going full pelt to the point where we were actually moaning about having too many!

Balancing annual planting with permanent planting on your plot really is getting the best of both worlds.

Growing annuals is intensive, often hard work, that gives you a return within that growing year, but leaves you knowing you’ll have to do it all again, from scratch, next season. Not easy if the day job suddenly gets busy or you don’t have the time, energy or hard cash to do it all again.

Permanent planting can be more expensive to start with (an apple tree generally costs more than a packet of lettuce seeds, unless you buy them at Tesco, where I’ve managed to pick up an apple tree for 79p and a packet of seeds for £2.19!), takes time to get its roots down and a number of years to start producing, but once it does, it should require less maintenance, be more resilient to weather shocks, cost less and mean you have to do a lot less digging and weeding.

We need regular and ongoing yields to sustain us. We don’t just eat once in our lives – we eat regularly – three or more times a day (or we should). So every day, three times a day, you are voting with your plate for the sort of world you want to inhabit.

By mixing it up a bit and designing our growing spaces with a blend of annuals and permanent plants so that they produce continuous, reliable and tasty yields, we make it easier to become more self-reliant and wrest back a little bit of control over our food system.

Meanwhile, I’m off to find some more raspberries, I may be gone for some time ….