There Will Be Mud

The rain is coming down in stair rods this morning and Frog Lane is already a river, so I don't imagine there will be much gardening going on – well, for several reasons, really. The Garden Club – all twenty-something of them – have just set off for their annual gardens tour. This year the destination is Wales; Caernarfon, Penrhyn, Porthmadog, Bodnant and the famous ffestiniog steam railway... They'll just be tucking into their strawberry breakfast now, I should think, whilst whistling along the M4 towards the Severn Bridge. There was a lot of strawberry picking going on yesterday.

And for those of us left behind, what better day for tuning into Gardeners' Question Time, where there'll be some familiar voices amongst the questioners – Bernard, with his credit-crunch vegetables and my father-in-law with his unyielding blue clay. 3pm today, 2pm on Sunday, and for the rest of the week you'll be able to pick it up on the BBC iPlayer.

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The National Gardens Scheme Open Gardens event at the weekend was a huge success – over 350 people came to visit and they all but ran out of cakes at the Mount House (although I think that may have had something to do with the fact that word had got around about Diane's fabulous cakes – and I can confirm, they were indeed fabulous, and I'm not given to easy praise where cakes are concerned). The gardens were of course spectacular, too. I wish someone would show me how to do a proper herbaceous border. Mine always just look like odd bits of plants dotted around interspersed by bits of earth the dog has had a bit of a dig at and flattened clumps of catmint that the cat has sat on. Ah well, maybe one day...