Make a note in your diary NOW to buy the Echo this Friday, as I am, once again, starring in a photo of me in my old garden. I looked dreadful that morning, but please buy anyway and write letters saying how keenly you are following my garden progress. Might be my big break into journalism, and last night I was awoken from a dream that I was writing a piece for the Daily Mail on child protection. Children at risk were likely to eat ham sandwiches for tea and be found on top of the piano. Sounds more like Mozart in the making than a child on the CP register.

I have been trying to get a better deal on my car insurance, but inadvertently typed in the wrong registration number, and got a quote for a BMW. Anyway, on the website you type in the first few letters of your occupation and it comes up with possibilities. I typed in tea and as well as teacher, it came up with tea blender and tea taster. What a great job that would be! Sitting around drinking different types of tea all day. It reminds me of the jigcaal thing we did at secondary school where you filled in a form and a computer told you what your ideal vocation was. These were the days when things were printed on green paper with perforations down the side, so there was room for improvement in the systems. Libby was down as a prison warden, which I think she would be good at. I got social worker and teacher, but also wigmaker and taxidermist. I am a vegetarian for heavens sake! And was then! Speaking of which, the garden book suggested I put dried blood in the hole in the ground before I planted my fruit trees. But that would make the fruit carnivorous, and as a vegetarian I don't feel comfortable feeding my plants dried blood. How do you dry blood? In the oven? Out in the sun? Is sundried blood better than factory produced? Decided that the trees could lump it and eat worms if they were that hungry. Busy weekend in the garden, with lots of help from our housegroup, demolishing a shed and taking apart another, we found 2 big frogs living in some rotting wood behind them. Fabulous weather for being out in the garden, our first barbecue to feed the hungry helpers on Saturday. The Crandons enjoyed it so much they came back for fishfinger sandwich lunch on Sunday. They had breakfast and lunch on Saturday in the Hinkler pub, clearly supporting the local businesses of Thornhill with great determination. I don't think I can face breakfast in a pub yet. Do they do muesli? I have grown rather partial to a bowl at breakfast time.

Took a delivery of pebbles and bark today, as you do, and also gave away some garden chairs to a student who is clearly madder than us, as he tied them to his pushbike and cycled off. Which almost beats Rob G, who turned up on Saturday for the shed attack session, on his bike, with his sledge hammer in a rucsac on his back. He makes Mad Max look like Where's Wally!

I had a lovely run today in the woods, don't know if it was 5k but it was 30 minutes and lots of ups and downs and the sun shining. Yesterday I did an hour of swimming lessons, learning front crawl, so it was great to get in lots of technique. I can do a length in 30 seconds, but not sure I can sustain that for more than 1 length, and I need to do 16!

If you want to do some gardening this weekend you are very welcome to get in touch. Get in there quick before I join the BBC as their anchor on Gardener's Question time and Gardener's World. I am delighted to say that 'Kitchen Garden' magazine has joined the bathroom reading dinghy sailing magazines. It's November's edition, and actually the feature '62 must do things in November' put me off a bit. Surely there is nothing you MUST do in the garden in November? Except avoid it as its cold? Look out of hte window at it?