It was raining when I woke up, and when I got up, and when I went out to open the pop hole of the chicken house. It rained as I drove to work, and when I got there. I still had to get the hose out to water inside the polytunnels, where a few things were starting to look rather dry, though I was fairly frugal with the water, following the old advice on house plants, that more die from over-watering than under-watering.
It didn't seem likely that we'd get many customers, given the weather. The chap who runs the cafe had the same thought, and rang shortly after ten to say that the cafe girl wouldn't be coming in, so could my younger colleague who knows how to operate the coffee machine do hot drinks, and we were to call him later on if it got busy. I thought that was pretty poor, since we didn't think we were going to get many customers, but opened up as normal anyway. You don't build a retail business by arbitrarily shutting when it suits you, and it reflects badly on the plant centre if refreshments aren't available when we say on our website that they are.
My older colleague counselled against telling the owner at that moment, on the grounds that it would only upset her just as she had to drive her son back to school in the rain, and would make no practical difference since we were going to be saddled with the teas anyway. This was good advice, since the owner was already cross that the cafe shut so early yesterday. I left a brief note for her at the end of the day. She'll be able to digest the news overnight, instead of being provoked into ringing up the cafe man and screaming at him in the heat of the moment.
Euonymus were still selling briskly, after their television appearance. I wasn't at work when they were filming, but apparently the crew were there for the entire day, of which no more than five minutes was finally transmitted. A Viburnum we list turned out to have been in yesterday's Telegraph as well, but that only resulted in one sale.
I spent the first part of the morning, once I'd done the watering, clearing up after myself from yesterday. The manager's note of jobs to do over the weekend included a list of herbaceous plants that I was supposed to round up and take over to the tunnel on the other side of the car park, where they will spend the winter under cover. Salvia, Sedum, Stachys and other things that don't want to sit too wet in their pots. After I'd worked my way through the list I looked at his instructions again, and saw the additional words 'and tidy'. Oh. Bother. I was meant to cut down their dead stems, strip off their manky leaves, pull out any weeds and scrape off the liverwort. By then I'd stacked them on two red trolleys, so half of them were at head height, and the centre of the bottom deck of a two-storey plant trolley about one metre by two is not the most comfortable place to work. And one of the trolleys was outside and it was raining. Fortunately most of the pots were fairly clean and tidy already, apart from the Kniphofia which were riddled with straggly dead leaves, and the Lathyrus which combined shabby leaves and a huge crop of liverwort. I managed to sort out most of them in situ. It wasn't the best plant cleaning job I've ever done in my life, on the other hand they are going to spend around five months sitting in a polytunnel anyway, plenty of time to grow fresh liverwort, and they'll need tidying again before they come back out for sale.
I was able to use up a largish part of the afternoon productively, advising a couple who wanted planting ideas for a reasonably sunny front garden on free draining soil, which they had totally cleared. I felt I was on secure ground, given that our front garden and meadow are on sand, and the front garden is in sun for most of the day, and I was able to hold forth on a group of plants I know well from first hand experience. I wrote down the names as we talked, so that they could look up more details afterwards (and because otherwise people always forget most of what you've suggested to them) and they were very happy, and said they would be back next week to make a start, once the topsoil had been delivered tomorrow. They'd deliberately chosen to come and do their research on a wet day, because they thought we'd have more time to speak to them, which was quite cunning. They were excited to have finally reached this stage, after doing all the grunt work of removing an old hedge (which had to wait until they'd sorted out the house) and weeding and preparing the ground. As Charlie Dimmock used to say on Ground Force, and now for the fun part, the planting.
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