I can hardly believe that it is grass cutting time again. It starts slowly, once a fortnight for a while and then we are off, once a week and then twice a week in warm wet spring conditions, which usually means lovely lush growth which clogs the mower every fifty metres or so. My hands turn green, my boots turn green and so do my trouser legs. The television experts now expect me to feed the grass to make it grow quicker and lusher.......that will be the day.

Existing as I now am, with the minimum of greenhouse protection I am at a loss to know what to do with all the trays of Nicotiana sylvestris and langsdorfii which I pricked out during a thoroughly wet Friday a couple of weeks ago. I also have quite a few plants of Ricinus, which I managed to germinate under very difficult conditions (they damp off as soon as they germinate and the seed husk clings to the seed leaves and won't drop off so the leaves rot away without ever properly seeing the light of day). The little greenhouse looks like a multi-storey car park with layers of trays and plants all precariously balanced. I cannot actually get inside the greenhouse but conduct all my business from the doorway just leaning in, watching my step and hoping against hope that the mice don't make themselves comfortable with the trays of seedlings placed on the floor.

Talking about animals making themselves comfortable. At the Lodge a rabbit has been digging a very deep hole under a climbing rose under the sitting room window. I fill in the hole, it re-appears two days later. I try to fill it with water but no bedraggled bunnies crawl out. I shoot Jeyes Fluid down the cavity but this has no effect. I ask the keeper and the keeper's assistants for help but there isn't a ferret in sight. When I inspect my large stone troughs in the courtyard I discover that rabbits have been bounding up onto these and digging further holes under my tulips and hyacinths. I call this astonishing and the fact that Daisy, my Jack Russell, finds all this perfectly uninteresting and won't lift a paw to help makes me think that all creatures great and small are in league with each other against....... me. For example, I replanted a cider mill with sempervivums as the herbs I originally used could not stand the dry in the summer and were constantly wilting away. Two weeks later, six lambs appeared in the garden and spent a happy dawn concentrating their attentions on these same plants just like woolly rotorvators. Such a thing has never happened before, how do they know where to strike? there must be a 'mole' somewhere.

Our new water garden is flowing beautifully and I have been planting further water plants. I needed to add oxegenators in quantity so invited the water garden experts to calculate how many I would need. A minimum of 1500 plants at 80 pence a throw. So I spent a happy couple of hours tossing them into the water, trying to space them out equally. The trouble was that some sank straight away but others, with less lead strip wrapped round them just bobbed about and eventually shot over the cascade and down the drain. I had a bit of a job catching these and I am sure that some liberated themselves when I was not looking. Once the air bubbles on the leaves had dissipated they sank well enough but I now see that we have two female mallards sitting on nests next to the water, are they looking forward to a weed tea soon?