still Treasurer

Nobody else wanted the job of Treasurer, or else they were too kind hearted to take it away from me.  Probably the former.  They didn't want to ask any questions about the accounts either.  There were some cheese straws left over from the meeting, so I ate half of them for lunch.  They seemed too nice to crumble up and put on the bird table.  I expect the birds would have liked them, but they've got some suet to be going on with.  You can tell it hasn't been really cold from the quantity of rose hips left in the garden, and the fact that the blackbirds have still barely touched the apples on the trio of Malus x robusta 'Red Sentinel'.

It felt chilly today as I began to work my way down the long bed, but I took comfort from a report in yesterday's Telegraph suggesting that feeling chilly occasionally is good for you.  According to some Dutch scientists writing in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, being in a slightly cold environment encourages your body to lay down stores of brown fat, which are fabulously efficient at generating heat, and help keep you slim.  I do remember brown fat from school biology, but have no idea about the academic status of the journal.  It sounds a very northern European conclusion, that exposure to cold is good for you.  I'm sure I've read other advice saying that it can make your blood sticky and is therefore bad for you, but maybe that only applies to old people.  Or perhaps I have to juggle the relative risks of sticky blood (leading to stroke) versus lack of brown fat deposits (leading to obesity).

When I went to do my Pilates exercises I discovered I could barely feel my feet, so I may have overdone the cold exposure.  The Telegraph article did say the study suggested turning the thermostat down to between 15 and 17 degrees Celsius, rather than 3 to 5 C.

The middle section of the long bed has got an annoying patch of weed grass with a running rootstock.  All running grasses are a menace, and this one is especially irritating because it has got into the ivy hedge, the reason why I haven't managed to get rid of it so far.  I forked out as much as I could, while trying not to damage the emerging bulbs (or mourn too deeply the fat hyacinth bud I accidentally snapped off) but I will have to wait for regrowth, and then for a calm day, and then hit the emerging new blades of grass with glyphosate.  And do it again.  And probably again, while trying not to catch the hyacinths, or the ivy, or anything else (though ivy is pretty tough).

As I was pulling out the roots of grass and creeping sorrel, I came upon several star shaped brown roots which I'm pretty sure belong to some sort of hardy geranium.  Normally, when you buy a geranium growing in a one or two litre pot, you don't pull it apart to see what the roots look like, but based on my experience of potting commercially grown roots I thought that was what these were.  They didn't look awfully well, allowing themselves to dug up like that, and rather than replant them in the border I wrapped them up in a plastic bag for potting, to see if they can be nursed back to health in the greenhouse.  They were in a peculiarly nasty stretch of soil even by the standards of that bed, and perhaps their constitution was not up to it.  I rescued a nearby aster just before Christmas, because the plant's entire demeanour signalled so clearly that it was Not Happy where it was.