Fighting first frost - and mice

The Occasional Gardener/Sarah Marriott: Winter arrived this morning with the first frost. The grass glistened white in the sun, the skeletons of the trees looked dramatic against the blue sky and even the rushes - bane of my gardening life - looked beautiful.

But instead of enjoying the view from the warmth of the house, I rushed out, still in my dressing-gown, to check on the polytunnel.

Would the frost have got inside and killed the ripening tomatoes? Would the leaves of the frilly lettuce and chicory have frozen solid? And what about the Mediterranean heat-loving aubergines and basil?

I was particularly worried because the tunnel, which was erected in June, is open at each end - the three-foot wide door-frames are waiting for a DIY friend to show me how to make the doors.

The walls of the tunnel looked as if someone had come along with a bucket of white emulsion during the night - and they were made rigid by the frost which was, worryingly, both inside and out. The main casualties were the basil, with blackened leaves, and the courgette plant, whose wilted leaves were crumpled and darkened, resembling sauteed spinach.

Some of the mangetout and peapods were speckled with ice particles and the broccoli leaves nearest the doors were stiff with frost - but the tomatoes and aubergines were unharmed. After picking all the ripe tomatoes, I spent the morning on freezer duty; sautéing aubergine and making pasta sauce with salvaged basil leaves - to bring back memories of the summer in the dark days of December.

As the sun melted the ice, I remembered - too late - that damage to plants is caused by rapid thawing rather than by the frost itself. The best thing to do apparently is to spray cold water onto at-risk plants before the sun reaches them. According to Joy Larkcom in Grow Your Own Vegetables, frost damage is more severe on wet plants and also when cold winds combine with low temperatures, so keeping plants dry and undercover should help them survive for a few more weeks.

Along with frosty mornings, another herald of winter is the sound of scuffling in the roof. Field mice, like tiny heat-seeking missiles, do everything they can to get into the house during cold weather - on a recent chilly evening, I caught one an hour. Country life is definitely not for the squeamish.

Sometimes it feels as if nature is trying to reclaim the house and garden - this morning, one of the resident robins decided to take a closer look in the livingroom and flew around for 20 minutes before heading back out.

Although birds flutter around the tunnel occasionally, they don't seem to be eating anything and luckily, the local mice haven't yet taken a shine to it. A gardening friend in north county Dublin had issued dire warnings about the problems of wildlife in polytunnels. He was so plagued with furry pests eating his vegetables - they would gnaw away the insides, leaving the shell of the courgette or aubergines for him to harvest - that he replaced his tunnel with a greenhouse.

Some animals are good for your garden, though. I heard recently that beekeepers in Dublin take their hives into professional growers' polytunnels so they can pollinate the plants - and many people keep hens just to eat slugs.

My attempt to become a character in The Good Life took the form of borrowing nanny goats to save me having to cut the grass - but unfortunately, what seemed like a lot of grass to me wasn't enough to keep three hungry goats happy so I stuck them in the back of the Saab and returned them to their owner.

Now the closest thing to farm animals I have are the pile of donkey dung slowly decomposing and the occasional cow peering over the hedge. Unless you count mice as farm animals . . .