Scale are easily rubbed off at the soft green stage. They are more stubborn when they mature but it’s still quicker to rub them off with a toothbrush than to go out, buy the spray, then use it. An oil-based spray risks burning tender leaves in hot weather, too.

Old toothbrushes are also excellent for rubbing aphids off cabbages or onion top or rose buds, removing tiny green caterpillars from the broccoli leaves, scraping pear and cherry slugs off the pear and cherry trees, unless the leaves are too tall to reach, in which case get a pump sprayer and whoosh the flour and water spray on to them. Or forget about them, out of sight and out of mind way up there, as once a pear or cherry tree is full grown they can cope with an infestation of saw fly larva, which is what the ‘slugs’ really are.

It’s gardeners who get all upset by them. Cherry and pear trees have been coexisting reasonably happily with sawfly larvae for many many millennia, with no humans getting their knickers in a knot about lacy brown bits on the leaves.

Try barriers instead of pesticides. As soon as the fruit sets on your trees or tomatoes start getting fat, cover the tree or tomato bush with fruit fly netting. It’s not really netting, so birds and bats don’t get caught in it, but it will protect your fruit from them, too, except the most determined ones. It does a reasonable job protecting trees from hail too, unless it’s extremely heavy, as well as keeping off caterpillars and codling moth, stink bugs and those pear and cherry slugs.

If your trees are too big to drape the netting over, try calico bags, slipped over clusters of fruit or trusses of tomatoes. If your trees are really big you may not need all the fruit on them anyway - we are delighted when the birds share eight cases of apricots and a 10-metre tree’s worth of apples. The contents of 20 calico bags are plenty for us. The same with quinces: we have 13 varieties but definitely don’t need 13 trees' worth of quinces. But 10 bags' worth, on 13 trees, is perfect.