Sir Bruce

As anyone with a spaniel knows, it is very difficult to get them to stand still for very long. So I was delighted when Bruce chose to pose, while waiting for Cara to catch up with him, so that I could blip him to show off his new coat, which effectively reveals his smart black markings.

We met a couple of friendly folk on our walk this morning, including a young lady with Harry, a 10yr old terrier, and an exquisite 7 month old liver pointer called Molly. I took photos of them all together but when I got home was disappointed in the results - it was probably too much to expect a good blip from four canines meeting and greeting.

Once home the rest of the daylight time was very profitably spent in the garden. It was time for both the runner beans and sweet peas to be taken down from their supports and before I started to prune the greenery into smaller pieces for the compost bin, I remembered a tip from a gardening programme. So I brought the lawn mower out and it dutifully chomped everything up in minutes, rendering it lusciously moist and chewed up, ideal for composting and taking up much less space. I'm sure more seasoned gardeners will have used this trick before but it was a first for me - and I was delighted with the result. Some of the munched up greenery even made its way into the wormery.

I then turned my attention to the greenhouse and took down all the cucumber and butternut squash plants even though the cucumbers still had young on them. I grew the variety with small fruit and have been inundated with gorgeous juicy cucumbers all summer long. I'll grow them again - which is more than I can say for the squash. Two plants produced so much greenery that the greenhouse resembled a jungle for the most part of the season, and they only produced two sizeable squashes between them. Next time I must winter prune the grape vine, which also produced lots of delicious fruit this year.