I'M thinking of packing in my job and living off the land. Hugh-Fearnley Whatsisname seems to get along okay doing it.

All right, he's got his own TV series and a few highly lucrative book deals. But apart from that he appears to survive by being creative with home-grown vegetables, edible fungi and berries of all description.

I fancy that sort of life for myself, especially as, for the second year running, we seem to have a bit of a harvest festival raging in our garden.

For the past few weeks we have been reaping the rewards of my husband's endeavours - picking and eating our own potatoes, onions, broad beans, French beans, courgettes, and chard.

Almost every day I stick some in a pan with some curry powder and a tin of tomatoes (as my husband keeps stressing, we would have had tomatoes had it not been for the weather), and, amazingly, the result is a tasty, and virtually free meal.

I feel like Ray Mears as I pluck the crops from the soil one minute and chuck them in a hot frying pan the next. I've even begun to make apple and bramble crumble - unheard of in my former supermarket-freezer-cabinet-dependent life - using my neighbour's apples, and brambles from our hedge.

I haven't gone so far as to stir-fry puffballs and saute Japanese knotweed, or forage for edible undergrowth in our local woods, but I'm moving in that direction.

A couple of years, that's all I reckon it would take, for us to be living a self-sufficient life, visiting Tesco only when we run out of Coco Pops (you can forfeit some things for a better life but never Coco Pops).

Trust my husband to put the dampers on my dreams. "We need to dig up the whole garden and that still wouldn't be anywhere near enough space," he said. "What about the times when our vegetables aren't in season?"

As a final nail in my plans, he added: "And what about meat?"

If we had room, I'd love a few pigs and a couple of goats - but the idea of sending them to their deaths to line our stomachs would be unthinkable.

I remember an episode of Jimmy's Farm where pigs to be raised for meat were delivered. "Don't give them names," advised a local farmer.

Chickens too would be pets rather than poultry. I could no more kill a hen than cross the Andes in flip flops. If my dream has any chance of becoming reality I would have to turn vegetarian.

I'm consoling myself with the thought that TV programmes always give a rose-coloured view of people eking a living off the land.

I'm sure Hugh Fearnley-W isn't as wholesome as he makes out. I reckon once the cameras have stopped rolling he's straight on the phone to the local pizza delivery company.

And whatever you say, however much effort you put in, and whatever recipe you follow, curries are rarely as enjoyable as they are from a brown paper carrier collected from a decent take-away.