Gardening should be a joyous experience.

With a couple of days off work, my first job was to prune the towering Chaenomeles. All was going well, and it was duly ticked off my list .

Then as ever, I added something in, which wasn’t on my list – namely to pull up the weed suppressing fabric which surrounded the freshly pruned shrub. This turned my gardening happiness to one of gardening despair within less than a minute.

The fabric had been pinned down with long curved pieces of wire, which were difficult to remove. The fabric edges had frayed, which left strands of plastic all over the place. But the most frustrating part was that the quince shoots had speared their way through, I spent what felt like an age releasing this beautiful shrub from plastic.

Why do some people continue to put it down in the first place? Why not put down cardboard and a dense mulch when you need to mulch out pernicious weeds . It is a perfect solution , and more importantly has no plastic content.

This amount of fabric covered about 3 metres square …

Then all of a sudden it was all removed , and instant garden happiness resumed . Within 5 minutes blackbirds and dunnocks were checking out food opportunities as they were able to scratch through the leaf mould and bark chippingsc.

Did I say I found a tortoise in the garden ? I’m generally not one for concrete garden ornaments – however, I came across it as I was ripping out the plastic membrane, and it made me laugh . Particularly as for a brief instant I thought it was a real one !

For a second I thought it was a real one.

What treasures have you found in your gardens recently?