Wednesday 18 April 2012

the big muddy

Isn't it always the way?  I have three days with nothing in my diary.  I don't have to scurry around collecting twigs and checking my projector works, or going over to the plant centre to borrow plants, before driving to the other end of the county for a talk.  Nobody is coming round, and I don't have to clean the house, or cook.  I haven't arranged to meet anybody, or got a ticket for an exhibition in London I'd rather not have to go to this week, except that I've already booked my slot.  I am completely and utterly free to get on with the garden for three days, and it's raining, and forecast to rain again tomorrow, and on Friday.

I woke early this morning, and the rain held off until a quarter to eleven, so I was able to pull up more of the nettles from the gunnera bed.  Human nature being what it is, I have left the boggiest areas until last, and am now at the stage of pulling nettle roots from thick mud, wearing waterproof nitrile gauntlets, and resting my kneeling mat on a section of board to spread my weight and prevent the mat from sinking into the mud.  It is impossible to shake all the soil off the weed roots, and slimy gobbets of mud are going into the bags of debris to be taken to the dump (I believe in home made compost, but I'm not putting nettle roots leavened with horsetail on the compost heap).  The nitrile gloves come in one size, which is way too large for my hands, so that my fingers don't nearly reach to the tips of the gloves.  This makes getting my hands under sections of root to prise them up more difficult than it need be.  A small, sharp border fork inherited from my late father-in-law (though with a  new handle since I unwisely attempted to use it to move a hydrangea.  The hydrangea won, and is still where it was, and I have adapted my ideas to fit round it) is a more useful tool than a trowel.

If you have a hosepipe ban then sorry for harping on about the mud.  The water table comes to the surface at this point.  It is unstable, and among the nettles were the dead stumps of a couple of shrubs that I planted there when it was normal soil, albeit on the damp side, and not a bog.  I hope that planting my Primula bulleyana, Osmuda regalis and other extreme moisture loving goodies will not be the cue for the water table to drop again.  Or come up somewhere else really inconvenient, like the middle of the lawn, or underneath the Daphne bholua (it has already done for an Edgeworthia.  An expensive loss).

At least the tickets arrived for the Chelsea Flower Show.  I had been starting to get twitchy about those, as we got to within five weeks of the day and nothing came.  The ticketing agency was saying 4-6 weeks, down from 6-8 when I ordered the tickets, months ago, but given the difficulties we've had with things not arriving in the post, and things addressed to other houses being delivered here, I've been gently anxious not to have received anything since before the six week point.  The Post Office never acknowledged my e-mail telling them I'd received what looked like a financial letter addressed to quite a different house, and I can't imagine they'd be a bit helpful if my tickets hadn't turned up.  Now that the RHS is so big, and subcontracts the ticketing to a commercial agency, I wasn't at all confident I'd get any joy out of them either, though I suppose I could have tried to enlist the boss's help, him being an RHS stalwart on the hardy tree and shrub committee, and moderating at Chelsea and everything.  Still, it's much easier just to have the tickets.  I felt a little warm glow as I tucked them into the letter rack where I keep tickets for things.  It is our most extravagant day out in the whole year.  Indeed, it is my only really extravagant day out.

The Systems Administrator has taken advantage of a brief later afternoon lull in the rain to go and dig holes for the posts to support the back of the new deck.  I could go out and weed the gravel, but I'm not sure I have the willpower.  It is still windy, and cold out there.  Exchanges of e-mails with my fellow beekeepers concerning our preparations for the Tendring Show are laced with concerns about how it is too cold to open the beehives and see what our bees are doing, and our conviction that as soon as it warms up again they are going to want to swarm.

1 comment:

  1. Supposed that office carpet cleaning service doesn’t exist this day and you have hectic schedule would you want to file a leave or find person and pay wages just to do this now that we are all professionals.

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