Polly

Worth adding the contrast that makes the point stick: this reasoning would apply to a crop grown from true seed.

Save seed from your smallest tomatoes each year and you really are selecting, because those seeds carry a genetic sample from that specific plant. Do it for a decade and you will have smaller tomatoes.

That is why the same intuition is correct for most of the garden and wrong for potatoes, garlic and anything else propagated vegetatively. The question is always: am I planting a seed or a piece of the parent?

One practical note: many modern varieties flower poorly or set fruit rarely, and some barely flower at all.

So whether you can collect seed depends heavily on what you are growing and on the season — hot dry weather tends to reduce fruit set. If your plants have never produced berries, that is normal rather than a sign anything is wrong.

If you specifically want to try this, look for varieties known to set fruit readily, and expect it to be an experiment rather than a supply.

One thing worth adding for anyone deciding how relaxed to be: which weeds matters enormously.

Annual weeds that pull out easily and have shallow roots are a minor nuisance and genuinely can be tolerated once the crop is up. Perennial weeds that spread by root — the ones where a fragment left behind becomes a new plant — are a completely different problem, and being relaxed about those is how a bed becomes unusable over three seasons.

Learning to recognise the handful of perennial troublemakers in your area is probably the single highest-value gardening skill there is, and it takes an afternoon.

Whether to act depends a lot on which tree.

The established tree — probably leave it. A mature tree carries an aphid population most years without meaningful harm, and the aphids feed a great many other things. Blue tits raising young are largely eating caterpillars and aphids, and ladybird larvae will arrive if you let them.

The young rowan at a metre — worth attention. A small tree has little reserve, and a heavy infestation on a large share of its total leaf area can genuinely slow establishment.

The elegant intervention, if you want one, is to break the partnership rather than attack anything: a barrier around the trunk — a band of horticultural glue or a grease band — stops the ants climbing. Without their protection, the natural predators get to the aphids within a couple of weeks and the population collapses on its own.

That approach kills nothing, needs no spraying, and works with the ecology rather than against it.

What amphibians actually need, in rough order of importance:

Still water. A recirculating feature is close to useless for breeding — moving water and no shallows. What is needed is a pond with a gently sloping edge, so animals can get in and out, and shallow margins that warm up. It does not need to be large; a sunken container of a metre across supports frogs.

No fish. This is close to absolute. Fish eat spawn and tadpoles, and a pond with fish will not produce frogs.

Cover. Damp shady places to spend the day — log piles, long grass, stones, a gap under a shed. Frogs spend most of their lives out of water and a pond in a mown lawn supports very little.

A route in. Solid fencing to the ground blocks them. A gap at the bottom of a fence, or a small hole, connects your garden to everything around it.

No chemicals. Amphibians absorb through their skin and are very sensitive.

The strong recommendation from everyone who does this seriously: build the habitat and let them arrive. Do not move animals in.

Start with the two questions that matter: is this property suitable for frogs, and if it is, why are there none already?

If the habitat is right and there is a source population nearby, they will find you — often within a season of a pond appearing, which surprises people. If they do not arrive, that usually means either the habitat is missing something or there is no population within reach, and in both cases releasing animals into it produces dead animals rather than a colony.

So the productive work is habitat, and the good news is that it is the enjoyable part.

One practical note while this is unresolved: keep the suckers cut regardless, even though it does not solve anything.

A sucker left to grow becomes a stem, then a trunk, and then you have the same tree on your side with roots of its own. The cutting is not treatment, it is containment, and stopping is worse than continuing.

Check along fence lines and under shrubs where they are easy to miss for a season. That is where the ones that become trunks always start.