calm before the storm

I started listening to Radio 4's In Our Time, as I pottered about the kitchen.  This week was on the history of the Corn Laws, which in theory I should like to know about, but I found the programme format distracting, not for the first time, as Sir Melvyn gave each guest a go, prompting and summarising between speakers.  I think I'd find it easier if one historian who knew their stuff simply spent half an hour explaining the Corn Laws.  I was also confused by the fact that one of the experts was named as Boyd Hilton.  What, I wondered, was Mark Kermode's stand-in on his film review programme doing on a history panel discussing nineteenth century domestic politics, or rather, what was a professor and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge doing moonlighting as a film reviewer?  I had to look it up on Google, and found that of course they are two different people, even though Boyd Hilton is not the most common name.  It's not as if they were both called John Smith.  I am not terribly good at names, when they belong to people rather than plants.  It took me quite a long time to work out that John Williams the composer of film scores, and John Williams the classical guitarist, were not one and the same, and I have given up trying to tell the difference between Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie.

Outside, it was the calm before the storm.  My Peter Nyssen bulbs finally arrived yesterday, after some nagging on my part.  Maybe they never send domestic orders out until the fourth week of October, but given that I placed the order on 13th June, as soon as their website was accepting orders for autumn planting, I thought they might have managed to get it to me sooner than now, and had a dark suspicion that the systems problems which led to the start of live on-line ordering being deferred several times might have spilled over into their fulfilment operations as well. However, when I checked the contents of the box, everything I'd asked (and paid) for was there, and none of the bulbs were mouldy or soft, as far as I could see.  The daffodils should ideally have been planted early last month, but they'll survive.

Part of the order was 250 Crocus tommasinianus 'Whitewell Purple', to bulk up the display in the bottom lawn, and I spent a happy hour crawling around planting them.  C. tommasinianus flower earlier than the big Dutch crocus beloved of municipal naturalisation schemes on roundabouts, and do well in grass.  I lost most of the Crocus chrysanthus planted in the borders to marauding mice, or voles, or something that dug them up and ate the bulbs, tossing the foliage contemptuously aside, and I have a theory that crocus bulbs scattered through grass are less likely to be eaten wholesale. Pheasants do eat the petals, though.

Despite having whinged a great deal about the bulb order being so late, I left potting the rest of it for a wet day.  We seem set to get several of those very soon, though some may be so windy that I might feel uncomfortable working in the greenhouse.  It is getting on a bit, that greenhouse, and if it finally blows down in a gale I should prefer not to be inside when it happens.

Instead, I went on chopping down the stems of spent herbaceous plants, and pulling up weeds.  The compost plus Strulch treatment makes such a difference, I must try not to leave any bare earth this winter.  Far fewer weeds germinate into the covered areas than the naked soil, and when they do get a hold they pull out much more easily.  The leafy material I've carted away is piled up in great tottering heaps in the three end compost bins, though it will squash down quickly enough.

Addendum  The David Nicholls reviewing the best task lamps in the Guardian is not the same David Nicholls that wrote the novel, adapted into the film in which Anne Hathaway was ridiculed for her accent, One Day.  Just thought you'd like to be clear on that.  I haven't read the book.  I was thinking about it, then read a massive plot spoiler that was dropped tangentially into an article on the Wall Street Journal website.