The manager returned to work to find it had been all go in his absence, what with another burglary and a second member of staff resigning. He looked very well after his holiday, though I don't suppose that'll last more than a week or so. The owner announced breezily that there was no point in advertising for staff during the holiday season, and that she'd start looking at the beginning of September. In the meantime we would muddle through. We lose five man days per week in five days' time, and another four days a week from the end of September, both people who can operate the cafe. There'll be a delay once she advertises while they wait for the CVs to come in, and hold the interviews, and whoever they select could be on as much as a month's notice, so we aren't going to have got anybody before the end of next month.
In addition, the cleaner has got the whole of the second half of August and all of September off, and the owner left the manager a note saying that we might have to form a rota to clean the loos and shop during that time. The manager grumbled that he didn't want to clean the loos, it wasn't what he was paid to do, and he didn't even like cleaning his own loo, which were my feelings exactly. Nor do I want to serve in the cafe. If I'd wanted a job in catering, I wouldn't have bothered to spend three years at horticultural college, and I'd find myself a place at a good restaurant where I was going to learn about food, not dishing out tea and cakes in between watering and weeding.
The manager was occupied ploughing through the backlog of e-mail enquiries, and searching the plant centre to try and work out what else might have been stolen. He was sure there had been an olive tree in front of the shop when he went away, and a couple of hollies, though it's always possible a member of staff moved them before the burglary. I returned to the task of disentangling the climbers, since I'd run out of pretties to put on the display tables. It went against the grain to remove nice, new, healthy growth from the honeysuckles, but they had all grown into each other so much that it was impossible to pick any of them up if you had wanted to buy one. It proved a slightly expensive exercise, as I was so taken by Lonicera sempervirens, a beauty with narrow red trumpet flowers, orange inside, that I bought one to go at the back of the dahlia bed. Looking it up now on the web I see that it is from north America, and in its native land provides a nectar source for hummingbirds. Some of the web entries make it sound not so easy to grow as the boss's label suggested, so I hope it was not an unwise purchase. I try not to buy plants on impulse, but could visualise exactly where I was going to put this one.
To my regret, somebody had deadheaded most of the Hemerocallis which had finished blooming before I could get to them. Some varieties form small plantlets in the nodes of their flowering stems, whose bases gradually swell to the point where you can see rudimentary roots developing. I have half a dozen of the dark red 'Chicago Blackout' from cuttings salvaged a couple of years ago, and was hoping for some of the lovely brick red 'Chicago Fire' to add to the collection, but all I managed to spot was one 'Lemon Bells'. The old stems are going to be cut off and thrown away anyway, so it is not like taking cuttings of a shrub, which you should never, ever do in other people's gardens without their express consent. The stem-bourne plantlets root very easily in moist compost. If the swelling at the base is not yet pronounced, and doesn't look as though it is going to snap away cleanly, I have rooted them with a short section of stem attached rather than risk breaking them off, and that seemed to work equally well.
The Systems Administrator returned home from two days of watching the Test Match at Chester-le-Street, half an hour after I got in myself. Although the blog does not give our address, and you would have to work moderately hard to identify the house, and despite the fact that only about five people read it anyway, and one of those is my mother, you will notice that I did not advertise the fact that I was home alone for three days. It beats me why people plaster the fact that their property is standing empty all over Facebook and Twitter. They would do better to brag about their new (and totally fictitious) Alsatian.
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