gardening at full clatter

We went and got mushroom compost.  The woman at our friendly local garden centre offered to tip an industrial bucket full of compost directly into the back of the truck using their tractor, to save us bagging it, or at least to fill the scoop for us so that we could bag it without bothering about the thirty litre measuring bucket, but after some deliberations the Systems Administrator opted for the usual bag-as-you-go method.  I was quite relieved not to be left with five hundred litres of wet manure in the back of the SA's flat bed, rotting its way through the floorboards every day I didn't manage to finish unloading it, and as the SA said, the compost needed to be in a bag of some sort for me to carry it into the beds.

After twenty bags the SA's back was beginning to give way, and the SA was worried about the loading on the truck.  In its young days it would have been filled with piles of sand or bricks and made nothing of it, but it is a very old truck.  Twenty bags is three hundred litres, give or take, and when I went to pay I found I had been promoted to the bulk rate, even though I hadn't technically bought a bulk load this time round.  As the woman in the garden centre said, I keep coming back.

After lunch we had another session with the pole mounted saw.  Tapping branches with a long bamboo isn't quite as easy as it sounds, since the other end of the cane keeps getting tangled up in things, but we managed to remove some dead branches from the trunk of the gean, and take some more overhanging ones out of the boundary hedge.  I don't think the dead branches in the gean were a sign of ill health, merely that as trees grow they naturally shade out their lower branches.  I wanted them off for aesthetic purposes, to give a clean trunk.  The view past the Buddha statue into the wood will be very nice, once we've worked out how to remove the fallen birch that's currently wedged itself across several other trees.

The pole mounted saw will not cut very thin or whippy branches.  They just bounce off, while threatening to unseat the cutting blade from the guide.  I promised the SA I'd clear out as much as I could by hand, then we could review the problem again.  The SA said we might need the Henchman, but it is getting very late in the season to be doing that, with bulbs and new foliage coming up all over the place.

By the end of the day I'd already used a third of the compost, and am within spitting distance of finishing mulching one end of the long bed, to the point where the mushroom compost will meet up with the home made stuff in the middle I applied in the winter, until it ran out.  I can see where the pots of Nectaroscordum siculum (I have to remember not to call it Allium siculum) in the greenhouse need to go, now that the ones already planted in the bed are through, so will plant those before applying the Strulch.  It's all charging along splendidly, if only I could have a whole dry week I'd get loads done.