You know you’re getting – well, let’s just say to the lunchtime of life, rather than middle-aged - when you realise you’ve answered a question roughly 10,612 times in the past two or three decades. So here is a collection of the questions most frequently asked of me:

Doesn’t your wombat eat the lettuces?

No, she prefers grass and weeds. But she devastates carnations.

How do I grow the biggest pumpkin at the show?

Why bother?

Why does next door\'s garden look so much better than mine?

Send an air-conditioned limousine to pick me up (with a spunky driver and a bottle of chilled champagne) and I\'ll take a look and tell you. Seriously though, next door\'s plants probably just get more food and water than yours do. A good sprinkle of smelly fertiliser every year (preferably from spring to mid-summer) really gets plants growing and blooming.

Starved plants mostly don\'t die - they just don\'t look their stunning best. The people next door probably prune their garden once a year too - a great way to get healthy new growth and stop plants looking tatty.

Why is my fruit falling?

Maybe it’s too ripe. Maybe it has been infected by fruit fly or codling moth, or damaged by frost. (Damage to the core will cause fruit to drop.) Maybe the weather’s been too dry or too windy, or the birds have been partying up there with their boots on. Plant more trees to make up for fallen fruit, and introduce some chooks, geese or wombats to eat the fallen fruit to cure your pest problem.

How can I have flowers all year round without spending every weekend in the garden?

Poke plastic flowers in all bare spots. Change them every few years when the colours fade. Alternatively, plant early, medium and late blooming camellias for flowers from autumn to spring; a couple of remontant (a fancy word for repeat flowering) rambling roses for spring ostentation, or ever-blooming Mutabilis, Berlina or Iceberg roses; a few hibiscus or bougainvillea in frost-free areas; and Federation daisies, long-flowering grevilleas, white Alyssum, Brachycome daisies, Erigeron, Gazanias or Trumpet Creeper (Campsis grandiflora) for masses of orange bells all through summer. But if you really want lots of flowers, plant one lot of annuals in spring and one in late summer to bloom through winter - annuals give you more flowers than anything else in very hot or very cold weather. I plant calendulas, pansies and primulas for winter and zinnias, impatiens (look for the ones that suit you) and petunias for summer.

My rose has black spot.

Okay, two choices: haul it out and plant a black spot-resistant variety; or cover the bare soil by spreading it with thick mulch every spring or late winter. Prune off ALL old foliage every winter and spray with Bordeaux spray. The American Rose Society recommends the following organic spray: mix 3 teaspoons bicarb with 2.5 tablespoons Pest Oil (a commercial oil-based spray) then mix into 4.5 litres of water. Spray every four days for two weeks then once a week.

Well-fed roses will outgrow black spot. At least most of them will; if you have a black spot-prone Bourbon rose like La Reine Victoria, you\'ll need to stick it in a raincoat to stop it getting black spot entirely. Take a look at your spotty rose bushes. The old leaves will look awful - but the newest leaves will be unblemished. Remember too that in most varieties the more new growth, the more roses.