Neighbours in Lodge Wood Drive, Ashford, became concerned at the suspicious comings and goings at one of the houses so they alerted police.

Officers went to number 29 to investigate. They knocked on the door and rang the bell, but received no answer.

So they pushed the letterbox open to see what was inside and were struck by an overwhelming smell of cannabis.

The officers forced their way inside the house on the Orchard Heights estate near Repton Park and discovered a cannabis factory with up to 300 plants growing together with harvested leaves being dried.

And hiding among the cannabis was a 25-year-old illegal immigrant who claimed to have come to the UK two years earlier secreted in a lorry.

Albanian Robert Jaku told officers that he had been recruited as a “gardener” for the factory after a chance meeting in a coffee house in Croydon.

Jaku said he had moved into the semi-detached house 10 weeks earlier after being offered £6,000 to look after the factory – which experts believed would have netted the dealers hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Prosecutor Vivian Walters told Canterbury Crown Court that the cannabis plants were growing in the lounge and both bedrooms.

She said: “They also found more plants which had already been harvested and were being dried in another room in the property.

“Jaku was found hiding among the cannabis plants and arrested and made full and frank admissions to his part in what had been going on.”

He claimed he had come to Britain intending to work in the construction industry but injured his right knee and was too scared to receive treatment at an NHS hospital because he was an illegal immigrant.

Jaku heard the case through an interpreter while appearing by prison video link.

He said he was quoted £5,000 to have the knee operation privately and was then offered £6,000 to look after the cannabis plants, by watering them and turning lights on and off.

Kerry Waitt, for Jaku, said: “He wishes no more than to be able to earn an honest living.”

But the judge jailed him for two years and nine months after he admitted his part in the production of cannabis.

The recorder said he was “sceptical” of Jaku’s explanations that he had “little or no” means of communicating with those he claimed had set up the factory.

He is expected to be deported after serving his sentence.