skiving

There are not enough hours in the day.  That's definitely the problem.  The house had got to a state of dustiness, stickiness and fluffiness that were too much even for me, and I am not overly hung up on these things.  A touch of dirt primes your immune system and prevents asthma.  But there's a touch of dirt, and then there's squalour.  The Systems Administrator said hopefully that we liked it scuzzy, to which my reply was, not this bad.  On the other hand, the weather forecast was for a beautiful day, sunny, calm, warmish for the time of year.  The garden beckoned, for who knows how many more good days there'll be before winter sets in.  The papers were talking of snow up north (I'd like to apologise to our viewers in the north.  It must be awful for them.  Possibly Victoria Woods' finest line).

I compromised and decided I'd clean the kitchen until ten, then switch to outside operations, and resume housework when it got dark.  My first two hour stint of kitchen cleaning took me round almost three sides of it, but didn't include the sinks, or the Aga.  Saving the worst till last.  I didn't get as far as doing the floor, either, but did leave the chairs stacked upside down on the kitchen table, along with the bins, as a hint to myself to do the floor later.  There are some extraordinarily large tufts of cat fur in the corners.  I think they must have been fighting.  (To anyone reading this who ever eats food prepared in this house, fear not.  We do have a good wipe round and a vacuum before starting to cook, when it's guests).

Potting up the tulips was much more fun, though I discovered I hadn't ordered enough bulbs for all the pots.  I have a set of Whichford basket weave pattern pots for tulips, bought in their winter sales over several seasons, and I hadn't realised I was up to fourteen, and only bought bulbs for ten. Now I've got the pots, it seems a terrible waste not to grow flowers in them, but by this stage of the season shops are starting to run low on tulips.  I got ten in the garden centre round the corner, while I was buying more mushroom compost, and I'll have a look tomorrow at what we've got left at work, though I know there weren't many.  I need varieties growing at least twenty inches tall, to go with a hot colour scheme, red, purple, yellow and orange.  Maybe the Clacton Garden Centre will have some left, and I can combine a visit there with another trip to the dump.  Otherwise I'm going to be scouring around the DIY sheds.

I was allowed to bag up my own mushroom compost in peace today.  The last time I went, a tall youth appeared clutching a very large shovel, just as I was unpacking my bags, and asked if I wanted help.  It seemed rude to say no, so like a true Brit I said gosh, thank you, how kind.  He took the garden centre's bottomless bucket from me, that is used as a measure of thirty litres, and then spent a long time trying to get it into the mouth of the bag, since each time he pulled one side up, the other side slipped off again.  Then he took a massive swing at the pile of compost with the large shovel, which skated over the surface without digging in at all.  I began to think that I did not have time to be helped, and went to find another bucket, unfortunately with a bottom, so once filled I had to lift the contents into bags with my hands, and by tipping the bucket very carefully.

After filling three bags the tall youth asked how many I wanted, and I said as many as would fit in the car.  After his fourth bag he wandered off.  Final score, youth four, middle aged lady six.  There is an art to shovelling shit, as there is to most things, and the tall youth had yet to master it. There is no point in smashing a large shovel into a solid mound of straw and manure, it won't dig in.  First of all you need to run the edge of the shovel down the heap a few times, to loosen pieces, then you scoop them up.  There is an art to wedging the bucket in the bags as well, though I can't explain what it is.  The curious can experiment for themselves.

After lunch I cleaned the chickens' roosting board, then planted out my two new chrysanthemums, the stately 'Emperor of China' and a lower growing one with little pale pink buttons called 'Julia', bought on impulse from the plant centre because it was so pretty, and late season, and I thought I could squeeze it into the bed with the other chrysanthemums.  The dark red double 'Duchess of Edinburgh' has disappeared without trace from the bed, though a smaller growing un-named red double grown on from a piece of a bedding chrysanthemum a customer broke off at work is doing nicely.  I wonder whether I put the Duchess in a particularly nasty piece of soil, or if she was not such a good doer as the others.  A quick check on Google came up with a supplier who described her as less vigorous, and another who said she was half-hardy, so maybe.

Then I moved a clump of Galtonia, originally raised from seed, that I had in a too-dry spot, so that while it made leaves it never flowered, and a patch of the aster 'Little Carlow' that was struggling under the double burdens of very light sand and partial shade, stuck between shrubs in the long bed in the front garden.  I put it to live with the other asters, where it should be happier, on slightly heavier soil that's received a lot of muck.  The books say to move asters in the spring, when they are starting into growth, not in the autumn, so I didn't risk breaking it apart too much, but did split it in half, as it was big enough to yield two decent sized lumps.

And now it is back to the kitchen cleaning.  Alas.  The black cat is purring in front of the Aga.  He isn't going to like it when I switch the vacuum cleaner on.