Saturday 9 November 2013

short days

I went to the dump this morning.  I hadn't been for a while, for all sorts of reasons.  I was busy.  It was raining.  It just had been raining so the bags of rubbish were wet, and would make my car wet. It was a nice day and I wanted to spend the time in the garden.  It was a windy day and the rubbish would blow everywhere.  In the end I had to go, because I had run out of empty bags in which to put any more horsetail, nettles, creeping sorrel and other horrors.

The dump was doing quite brisk trade, for the second week of November.  It is generally a cheerful place.  Everyone using it is united in the knowledge that they are behaving like virtuous citizens, and not just tipping their waste into the nearest lay-by or field entrance, and the staff joke and laugh with their customers.  You would not imagine that a civic recycling centre in Clacton would be a jolly place to visit, but it is, on the whole.  As a bonus, I was pleased to find that none of my bags had leaked on the back seats.

I came home via the local garden centre to buy mushroom compost.  They sell composted green waste as well, but I've seen what goes into that, and don't fancy it so much, all that diseased plant material and weeds.  The mushroom compost must be reasonably free of nasties, given it has just been used to produce food.  Alas, that will be the first of many, many trips.

Then it took me until lunchtime to move the pots of dahlias and Eucomis from the deck outside the conservatory into the greenhouse, a job I should have done weeks ago.  They were rather wet, but only one plant felt suspect and rotten at the base.  I had to stash them under the staging, where they can dry off and will be protected from the worst of the winter cold, but they'll need to come out before they start into growth.  They have started growing under the greenhouse bench before now, but they became drawn and leggy, and never really recovered for the rest of the season.  I'm sure they need repotting into fresh compost anyway, as they've been in those pots for ages, and didn't grow or flower all that well this year.

As things stand, there is no room for them to come out from under the bench, which will be tricky come late March.  By then I'll just have to have planted out some of the other things that are currently occupying the greenhouse floor.  There are all the iris I got from a Peter Beales' special bargain offer of Howard bare root iris.  Howard are a wholesale grower up in Norfolk: I know their plants, and the thought of buying iris at one pound fifty instead of the six pounds fifty the Plant Centre would charge for the identical same plant, after it had been potted into a two litre pot of compost by someone like me and given a couple of months to root in, was just too tempting.

After lunch I spread mulch and compost in one of the rose beds, until the light went.  It gets dark disgracefully early at this time of the year, but I know from past experience that it is not worth trying to press on into the final ten minutes of dusk.  That's when accidents happen and I poke myself in the eye, and end up spending Sunday morning waiting to be seen at the walk-in clinic.  It was starting to rain again anyway.

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