THERE are occasions when I want to stamp my foot and flounce a bit; which I don't of course because it's a bit silly at my age. But I ask you, isn't it the last straw when you have at least 20 plump and healthy courgettes in the garden and someone in your household actually goes out and buys some at the Callington WI market (every Wednesday morning in the Scout Hut, highly recommended)?

Admittedly the ones purchased didn't have slug nibble patches on them, but you can't always be picky can you? I can tell you, there have been threats of complete withdrawal of gardening services for next year if this kind of behaviour is repeated.

I enjoy vegetable gardening, although I'm not always successful. My carrots were more stumps than stump rooted this year and all I can say of the onions is that there's going to be a bit of a glut on the pickled onion front at Christmas. But the beans were fine, the peas were great, the marrows and courgettes as big and juicy as ever, even if spurned by some.

Mostly, people appreciate the produce, even if there are little moans when animals creep out of lettuce onto the salad plate. I always say the sight of a live creature is jolly good proof that I don't use any noxious chemicals, so should be welcomed. Funnily enough, not everyone agrees.

My main problem is that I like to experiment with something new each year, sometimes one or two things.

Last year it was tomatillos, which for those unused to poring over seed catalogues are a member of the physalis family otherwise known as Chinese Lanterns. The latter are grown for their lovely red lanterns which brighten up the borders but all the family is edible and some are very sweet and sold in supermarkets, coming with their own little paper case wrapped round them.

I didn't grow these, I grew tomatillos which were big and green and positively flew out of the garden and produced hundreds of firm fruits like tomatoes. They are extensively used in Mexican cooking, or so I told everyone, but very few people took me up on my offer of a pound or two. Eventually I made them into chutney, which I thought would pass muster because it looked like green tomato chutney which most people like. Sadly most people guessed the chutney consisted of 90 per cent tomatillos and sort of changed the subject when a jar was offered.

So much for innovative new ingredients.

This year I threw caution to the wind and grew three completely new things. Well new to my family and friends. First there were the big round dark purple podded beans which climbed a pyramid of poles and produced pounds of rather knobbly beans. I kept telling everyone they turned green when cooked, that they tasted like ordinary French beans even though they made the cooking water dark purple and squeaked when you ate them, but again there was a marked reluctance on the part of the lucky souls I offered them to.

The real novelty was the several kinds of squash and the garden huckleberries. The former have done very well this year, the weather has been kind with plenty of sun and rain and I now have a good collection of round green squashes and elongated yellow ones called butternut. I'm very proud of my squash, and will show them to anyone I can drag down the garden to see them (I'm afraid the postman made a hasty exit when I asked him if he would like to view my butternuts).

Most people have been enthusiastic but I know full well when it comes to eating them there will be few takers and I'll have to chutney them and pretend they are marrows. You can actually stir fry them, curry them,, bake them, boil them or roast them. I must admit that whatever you do with them they do taste a bit like marrows but nothing wrong with that.

I wasn't over-confident with the huckleberries because the plants were very small and I wasn't expecting much but all of a sudden I had several rows of plants covered in big round firm black berries. Pounds of them.

I have to admit I did search unsuccessfully for the seed packet to make sure they were the huckleberries, because they did look a bit like deadly nightshade but I didn't see how deadly nightshade could have come up in straight rows.

I explained that I was going to make jelly out of them and my daughter, who makes excellent preserves, took over. I don't know quite what's gone wrong but these berries seem to have an infinite capacity for absorbing pounds of jam sugar without becoming even slightly sweet. Anyone who has been persuaded to taste the resultant goo has said the taste seems to be a cross between iron filings and a particularly nasty cough medicine. I'm sick of being asked 'are you sure you can eat them' as if I'm trying to poison everyone and I'm never going to grow them again. I haven't mentioned to anyone that the New Zealand golden berries are on the point of ripening and that the one I tasted had a very odd mothball flavour to it.

I'm off on holiday for two weeks - a trip that was going to be trouble-free until my daughter who now lives in Cyprus realised that when she packed her stuff to move she accidentally packed the vacuum cleaner and sent it into storage.

Personally if I lived in a country where the sun always shines, where the beach is a ten minute walk away and where lemon trees are blooming in my garden I wouldn't care if I never saw a vacuum cleaner again. But I'm not my daughter.

A telephone call earlier this week threw the idea that I was going to be travelling light out of the window when she informed me she had ordered a new cleaner on the Internet to be delivered to my house because she would have to wait six to eight weeks for one over there; and would I bring it with me?

I've had to ring airport security to ask if in these times of trouble there would be any problem carrying a vacuum cleaner with me and unfortunately they said no, there wouldn't be.

My daughter also says that there shouldn't be any trouble with it because it only weighs eight kilos (some hope) and anyway I carried a gazebo home from Germany on the plane.

That blasted gazebo, people throw it in my face all the time, and it fell down last year in a gale and I've never managed to get it back together again because all the instructions are in German.

Ta ta for now.