We are finally getting a handle on the drainage issues in our little bit of suburban paradise. When it rains during a Perth County summer, often as not it comes down in stair-rods, accompanied by lightning and fierce gusts of wind. It's called the Lake Effect; the storm cells form over the Great Lakes and move east on the prevailing wind, and they can be really intimidating when you hit a series of them on the highway.

But at home a rainstorm means huge quantities of water tumbling off the roof and into the garden, which is about eight inches of tilth on top of hard-pan clay. If your house is in the wrong place, your drainage issues will never let up and you have to get drastic -- one of the houses we saw when house-hunting had two sump pumps and a French drain in the front garden alone!

This place doesn't need a French drain, thank God, but in the three years we have been here, we have installed a full set of eavestroughing and drainpipes, window-wells in all four basement windows, and a patio in the back of the house that takes the flow of off-fall water away from the foundation.

Now we're doing the last phase of the plan, with two rain barrels and rather a lot of soaker hosing. Of course, now the rain barrels are in, it has hardly rained at all.

Himself has almost stopped grumbling about growing vegetables, but it took two full summers of pointing out the sun requirements of even the humblest tomato. We have five huge trees on our property (there used to be a lot more) and a large cedar hedge, so only the front edge of the lawn is in full sun throughout the day. If the world goes completely to pot, we could plough it up for veg, but that doesn't make a lot of sense in this very rural area where every expedition takes us past half a dozen farm gate stands offering all manner of temperate-zone delicacies, professionally grown by people who know how to keep the pests off their crops.