As I go through things, I write lists of what is in cupboards on labels on the inside of the doors. In the garage, I wrote directly on the door of the old filing cabinet the vendor left. I also have an inventory spreadsheet on the computer in the study. I have found that leaving time between sessions is fatal for remembering the tidy place I have filed things! And I have had to leave time because of other obligations.

In the garden, I have built a structure of stacked flags, two towers nine and seven flags high, with steps on each of two half flags, as a wall beside the steps up to the veggie part, on which I have placed the pits with strawberries.

I have removed most of the vinca, which, it turns out, may be an invader from next door. The last will have to wait until I have fixed the bramble stems to the fence - my arms are scratched! I have borrowed a friend's mattock to trench the plot for beans and peas and discovered that what I thought was Flints-with-Clay subsoil is actually builders' rubble - the brick was a bit of a give-away. I'm using a Cornish mine/quarry technique (on a very small scale!) to help with the bricklike clay, washing (or "hushing") the flint out, and allowing the clay to loosen up with the soaking before digging it the next day.

I have very low germination with the peas and beans, so I've bought in some dwarf runner bean plants.

I have to pot up some bedding plant bulbs and corms my friend's mother has given me, and scatter some seed which is supposed to cover 15 sq yards - which I haven't got. I wish people would ask before choosing garden gifts!

My potted dwarf peach is putting on lots of leaves, but the flowers that bloomed early in the season don't seem to have set fruit - no trace that flowers were ever there!

The angelica doesn't seem to fit expectations - though the bees like it. There doesn't seem anything attractive about it, contrary to web descriptions of pleasant aromatics throughout the plant. The flowers smell of pee, the leaves of non-descript greenstuff, and the stems of generic umbellifers, like cow-parsley. I've checked descriptions, and physically it looks like angelica, rather than, for example, giant hogweed. I'm wondering if it would have developed more aromatic compounds if in more sun. Bluetits found whatever it was that was eating lower leaves, so it's been good for wildlife, if not for bottling in syrup and cooking with rhubarb.

Penny