My harvest is paltry. first bag of potatoes has yielded six very nice small new potatoes, less weight than the seed potatoes put in. The slugs and snails are doing very well, crossing grit and gel barriers, ignoring pellest, and eating away merrily on bought in brassicas. Noting their liking for cruciferae, I bought a load of mustard green manure seeds, to give them a barrier they could eat so not reaching the crops. They don't like it!

Brambles are doing very well, and a few peaches are fattening up. The courgettes are growing like mad. Tomatoes scarce, and the outdoor ones have succumbed to blight. 'Taters, too.

Today I found a frog trapped in the old water tank, it being too deep and the water too far down for him to get out. I managed to sweep him into a bucket and tip him out on the garden - but I cannot work out how he got there. It's two foot tall. If he could climb up the fence onto the plastic chute for water and emulate Tom Daley, maybe, but it's the climbing I doubt.

My chief problem is in the kitchen - flour beetles - the red variety, since some fly. (The others are, apparently, confused.)I had them in the last kitchen, but thought that with cleaning things out and packaging well I might have left them behind. But no. They have demolished a pack of chocolate cake mix, some chocolate sprinkles, and the sauce mix inside packs of pasta and dried potato in my emergency stuff.

I've been heating flour and sieving it and packing it in sealed containers with bay leaves, and unopened packs inside double plastic bags with bay and clove oil. I have also been very naughtily spraying insecticide in the cupboards. And I am very tired of standing. The kitchen is floury, and the water heater switch has packed up.

Penny