I have just picked a big basket of rocket, little gem lettuce, curly endive, mizuna, mibuna, chervil and parsley. If that impresses you(and it does me - I always get a buzz from gathering any kind of harvest from the garden) the truth is that the vegetable garden is a bit bare at this time of year. It is too early for summer stuff, past it for winter, all my spring cabbages were killed by frost and everything in the laden basket has been grown undercover in a tunnel. For half the year we grow enough to supply a busy restaurant and we eat as well as anyone in the world. Buying fruit or vegetables during this period seems laughable. For about a quarter of the year we rely on the frozen surplus from the summer glut and good local shops. But I can scratch together a salad for at least the five of us every day of the year. It will be minutes fresh and organic. Anyone with an allotment or a back garden, an enjoyment in growing things and a love of good food could do the same.

While I have grown vegetables, fruit and herbs for as long as I can remember, it was only about six years ago I began to take organic gardening seriously, partly because of the food thing and partly because I find chemicals a terrible bore. But the food thing was the real issue. I wanted to provide the household with really good, fresh food free from anything that compromised taste or health. Anyone with children is concerned with what they eat and as they get older it is easier for them to live almost exclusively off junk. Just about the only place that they have access to fresh, unprocessed food is at home.

To go to the trouble and expense - and don't pull any romantic wool over your eyes, home-grown food is always going to cost more in time and probably money than cheap industrial food from the local supermarket - of growing food in the garden that is not organic seems madness to me. Why bother? I can understand gardeners going through the motions of raising prize crops with the whole voodoo armoury of science but no one that cares about food should contemplate it. And from the moment I sow an edible seed it is marked down as dinner first, gardening second. I relish seasonal variety and eating ubiquitous, bland food in the permalight of the seasonless zone has never appealed.

I have also always been bewildered by the division between garden and kitchen. Anyone growing food must surely want to cook and eat it and anyone eating it must have some interest in how best to grow it. A garden is an indispensable part of the kitchen and we treat ours like an outdoor larder or fridge and try and keep it packed with fresh, organic goodies. The organic aspect can appear to be a tightrope across an alarmingly deep canyon of failure. Where is the organic border? If you inadvertently do one little inorganic act are you thrown into non-organic hell for ever? For a start there is a difference between commercial organic production and domestic. Commercially every aspect of the plant that is eaten, from seed to packaging must be approved as organic by the Soil Association.

In the garden things are laxer. You can, for example, grow organic carrots from non-organic seed, which would be a commercial no-no. But as the organic movement grows, it is getting easier to find clear organic options at every stage of the growing process. I opened a garden centre the other day which had quite a range of organic seeds, composts and feeds but they were all mingled up with the far greater volume of chemical alternatives. If garden centres would have an organic section, just as supermarkets do, it would make life simpler for the aspiring organic gardener. For too long there was a sense of a righteous inner circle of organic growers: they were like the puritans in 1066 and All That - right but repulsive. I am not a tribal person and do not want to join a group that defines itself by what it will not allow, but I think that the whole organic issue is important enough to try and understand and apply - without the organic thought-police popping up from behind the cabbages if you inadvertently stray from the path. It is simple enough, but I am often proudly told by gardeners that they grow their vegetables or their herbs organically, which is nearly always an indication that they do no such thing. There is a common misconception that you can cherry-pick organic cultivation around different parts of the garden, particularly differentiating between the edible and the decorative plants.

But this completely misunderstands all the principles of organic cultivation. It would be like claiming that your left leg was a strict vegetarian and your right leg a confirmed carnivore. The whole point of organic production is that man encourages and maintains a holistic system whereby the natural balance is encouraged and maintained. The difficulty is that any kind of gardening or agriculture is essentially unnatural, so the balance has to be carefully restored and sustained. This means that you cannot righteously have your veg patch at one end of the garden which is an organically correct zone, and at the other end of the garden have a flower bed sprayed weekly with fungicides and a path between the two where the weeds are controlled with weedkillers. The ladybirds that eat the aphids on your fennel also eat the aphids on your roses, just as the hedgehogs, thrushes and toads that eat your slugs do not differentiate between the poisoned ones in your rockery and their cousins in the so-called 'organic' bit of the garden. The upshot is that if you want organic food from your garden then you must go whole hog and make your entire garden organic.

So there is no boundary between organic gardening and recycling, in not using peat because of damage to wetlands or trying not to waste power. So chuck the half-used bottles of poison in the bin and stop giving your money to the multi-nationals with their hugely profitable global brands. Gardens are private and personal. The food on your plate should relate to that idiosyncratic reality. We want local food for local people and it doesn't get any more local than your back yard. Your soil, your weather and your climate is parochial, even in a big metropolis. By dealing with it on a daily basis you are connecting to the foods of your region.

This is not a retreat from the nasty but unchangeable facts of modern life. Self-sufficiency is impossible for anyone engaged in day-to -day modern life. I shop at supermarkets, buy mass-produced non-organic foods, drive round in a car and waste too much water, electricity and heating oil. There is not much scope for smugness. But there has to be a yardstick, a reference point to return to and measure the extent of one's failure. I am sure that the garden or allotment is the best place for that.

The truth is that none of this is easy. Nature is remorselessly cruel and none more remorseless than the slugs and snails that are currently trying to eat my lettuces before I can. As far as I am aware, there is no organically effective way of stopping them. I am reduced to picking them up by hand after dark, collecting them by the bucketload. What do you do with a daily bucketful of slugs and snails? We salt slugs and, yukky but quick, crush snails. The organic theory says that a glut of one pest will be checked by the influx of its predator which will increase on the extra food supply and in turn be predated upon. This is why it is important to have a good cross-section of indigenous plants that will host predators, such as umbellifers like fennel and dill that attract hoverfly larvae that eat aphids.

But the secret is not to see everything as a battle. I don't believe in trying to grow exotic foods that really don't want to be in my garden. The only way that they can survive - let alone flourish - is with a level of mollycoddling that I neither have the time or inclination to give them. So I would rather grow a dozen varieties of perfect apples than a few pathetic specimens of an unwilling sub-tropical fruit. Go with the flow. I try and rear strong, healthy plants that go into rich soil and then fend for themselves. They grow slower than their chemical counterparts and often a little smaller but they taste wonderful and are not poisoned. And that, it seems to me, is the least that we all should be asking of our food.