Slugs are a problem in any garden; before I began keeping ducks I used to remove these pests from the vegetable patch by torchlight. I gave each one a sporting chance by chucking it out into the middle of the road. I figured that if a slug managed to dodge the traffic and make it to the grass verge then it deserved a second chance. The ducks however show no mercy and neither do frogs. I installed a small pond to service their needs, complete with safety bars concealed just below the surface. A female frog may lay up to 2000 eggs but very few make it to adulthood. I usually come across the ones that do when strimming the long grass under bushes. Garden ponds and the mountain pools are filled with spawn at the moment, and not just the pools. On a wet Sunday morning when even the dog thought twice about going out, I went for a walk along the laneways. The overnight deluge had abated but rain still continued to fall, many of the lanes now resembled waterways, and placid streams had turned into raging torrents. During the night the frogs had failed to make sense of this topsy turvy world and laid their spawn right in the middle of the lane. I managed to relocate quite a few before my hands froze. Even with warm hands it's difficult to paint in this type of weather but watercolour remains prefect for capturing damp misty landscapes. Working wet on wet, applying fresh pigment before the initial washes have dried allows the paint to diffuse across the wet surface of the paper. The vague background in my picture was painted in this way, I thought about including a frog but opted for the horse instead; I don't often get the chance to draw frogs unless I'm cutting grass and they quickly hop off before being drawn or indeed quartered.