distractions

Sometimes you start off fully intending to do one thing, and by the end of the day you have done quite something else.  My plan at the start of the week was to plant the bulbs out and repot the dahlias.  I did begin repotting them, but stopped when I'd filled up the wheelbarrow with spent compost.  The obvious thing to do at that point would have been to throw the old compost on the compost heap and keep going, but the heaps needed turning, and I had a sackful of sawdust and chicken droppings from cleaning the hen house roosting board that I needed to add as well, and it seemed stupid to add all that fragmented stuff on top of a pile of leaves and stems that I was about to have to lift from one bin into the next with a fork.  Besides, soiled chicken litter isn't something you handle more than you have to.

I considered whether I could add the old compost and the filthy sawdust to any of the other heaps, but the conclusion was no, not sensibly.  The heap at the right hand end of the row looked ready to use, and all the others were definitely ready to turn.  So I ended up spending a large part of the day digging the finished compost out of the end bin and spreading it on the garden, so that all the contents of all the others could move over one, and I could incorporate the old dahlia compost and chicken litter in the process, while regaining use of the wheelbarrow.

It was lovely, crumbly compost, and sprinkled very neatly on the rose bed where the Camassia are coming up, being much easier to apply around the rapidly enlarging foliage than the mushroom compost had been.  There was even time to dust it with bonemeal and 6X and finish Strulching the bed.  My goodness, one bed actually finished.  I'm never going to get round all of them before the season gets too advanced and I have to stop, but I suppose I'll just have to do as much as I can.

I found two bulbs of Fritillaria persica alive in the compost, though rather slug riddled.  I tried to grow them in pots last year but managed to over-water them and let them sit wet at some point in the winter so that their basal plates rotted off, not the first time they have defeated me.  Cursing my ineptitude I threw the bulbs out when I was tidying the greenhouse.  Plants sometimes have an amazing will to live, and these had managed to grow a few roots from the remnants of their plates. By my calculation it is the second time one of them has come back from the compost heap.  I salvaged them, and will plant them tomorrow in the long bed where they can sort their own roots out, or not, with no more inept attempts at watering from me.

Tomorrow I really will plant some more of the bulbs.  They are sitting in their trays outside the front door, reproaching me, with just a little path for me to go in and out, like a sheep track.