The Systems Administrator was looking a little better this morning, still very pale but slightly more cheerful, and beginning to express an interest in having something to eat later on. I decided it would be OK if I ran various errands leaving the SA alone, and went out having given strict instructions to be careful if attempting to go down the stairs, to sit down at any hint of dizziness, and definitely not to fall down them.
My first stop was the local Tesco express, to buy more isotonic sports drinks, and then the dump, where today's cheerful crusher operative on lifting my third or fourth bag of muddy weeds from the bog and decomposed bark from the path by the dustbins asked whether any were heavier than that. I explained that I'd been weeding a wet area where every root came up with a blob of soil, and we had quite an entertaining conversation about topsoil and the price of mulch. I still can't decide whether the staff are simply sociable, or trying to work out whether I'm a professional gardener passing off trade waste as domestic, but I think the former. If you are going to spend your mornings lifting bags of garden rubbish into the jaws of a large electronic ram you might as well try and enjoy the human contact.
My route back took me conveniently close to the Clacton garden centre, to stock up on mycorrhizal fungus, Thomas treats and fly paper. The fly paper is for the kitchen. It looks absolutely revolting, but I'd rather use that than keep spraying insecticide into the air, which I then have to breathe, in the room where we store and prepare food. The next planned stop was the Chatto Gardens, and finally the garden centre in Elmstead Market that sells soil conditioner, but my journey took me past the turning to the tyre shop where the Systems Administrator ordered a new tyre for the truck last week. This reminded me that I'd promised to go and see what was happening about the tyre, and I began to wonder whether I'd planned the optimal route. I didn't think I could fit the soil conditioner and the tyre in the car in the same trip, and had been meaning to go back for the tyre, on the other hand, if I had collected the tyre on the way home from the dump I'd have saved two trips across the railway, with the potential for delay if caught at the gates. It was all too much like the logical problem about the river, the fox and the goose, which I have never been any good at, and anyway the SA hadn't told me how much the tyre was supposed to be, so I left it until later.
The Chatto gardens had more Primula florindae and still had sensitive ferns, Onoclea sensibilis, which was what I went there for. The Onoclea is supposed to able to live in boggy ground, as I discovered when I looked it up after my previous visit. The clue was that the nursery had the pots of plants for sale standing in a tray of water. It is a deciduous fern for partial or full shade that runs if happy and can be invasive, which sounds fine for where I want to put it. While there I was seduced by the beauty of another fern, Blechnum chilense, which the label said was good for moist sites, but my dictionary says not waterlogged, so I'll have to think about where I put that, having bought one anyway. It has stout, handsome fronds, quite prehistoric, and grows tall. My book says 2 metres, but the Chatto label suggests a more continent 75 centimetres.
The garden centre at Elmstead Market turned out to have a pile of organic mushroom compost tucked away at the end of the yard, available for the same price as the composted green waste, so I bought some of that, being very careful as I filled my bags and making a mental note not to come for the next lot wearing shoes with white laces. Their plant offering is fairly modest, and I hadn't gone there for plants, but was delighted to see that they had just one of the mat forming, drought tolerant, low growing forms of Erigeron that I remember from my childhood, so I bought that. They seem completely out of fashion and terribly difficult to get hold of. The woman working there said that they had enjoyed a period in fashion a while back, under the Derek Jarman influence. I must have missed them. I shall use my solitary plant as ground cover in the long bed in the front garden, and hope that as it grows I will be able to chisel pieces off the outside of the clump to make more. You see huge sheets of the stuff in front gardens, often covering those awkward little banks you can get when the garden is higher than the pavement, and I remember masses of it from childhood, so it must spread easily.
The SA couldn't remember exactly how much the tyre would be, and the young lad in the tyre centre couldn't remember what he'd quoted, though he was glad I turned up because he'd had to order the tyre in specially, and then found he'd written our telephone number down wrong and couldn't get hold of us to tell us it had arrived. He fitted it to the wheel, which the SA had left there with the old tyre, in what seemed like extraordinarily little time, and since neither of us knew whether it was supposed to be eighty quid or eighty-five we agreed to split the difference.
Tendring District Council the other day sent us a permit giving us free parking until next March in any Tendring public car park, apart from the one at the Naze. This is in order to boost the local economy by persuading people to shop locally. I don't see how it really helps in the grand scheme of things whether I spend my hard earned cash (such as it is) in the Tendring peninsular or five miles up the road in Colchester, and everywhere I went today provided free parking anyway. Still, today I did my part helping the local economy.
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