The Met Office has got a new supercomputer that weighs as much as some large number of double decker buses and will be capable of performing umpteen million zillion dillion calculations per second. It will make their forecasts Much More Reliable, according to the beaming Met Office Spokespeople on last night's news, and allow them to forecast longer in advance. I suppose it might, though being able to perform more calculations will only improve things if you have a good model in the first place. Yesterday the forecast for today was for heavy rain, all day. By this morning it was for light rain from mid morning. What actually happened was that it stayed dry until mid afternoon, when we began to get the sort of fine, silting drizzle that scarcely looks like rain at all, but makes you quite wet if you stay out in it for any length of time. The Systems Administrator looked at the rain radar and said that there was rain further to the west, but it was petering out before it got here, as it so often does. Let us hope that the well-demonstrated tendency of rain to evaporate before reaching the Clacton coastal strip is programmed into the new super duper computer, since the old one has signally failed to get to grips with this curious east coast phenomenon.
Originally, when I believed the forecast for heavy day-long rain, I was going to write up the minutes of the music society AGM and then make a cake. I had to do the minutes anyway, since the Chairman is now back from holiday and we were having a committee meeting this evening. I wouldn't want to be two sets of minutes behind, and anyway it's better to do them while they're fresh in your mind, only I had a cold after the AGM and knew the Chair was away, which made me idle. Once I'd finished the minutes and it still wasn't raining at all, I thought I'd leave the cake to another day and go and sort out the conservatory, a job that had been on the list of things to do for a while and which I could go on with if the rain did arrive.
I have re-potted the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone'. It looked very sad all this year, making scarcely any new growth at all, and something clearly needed to be done. I fed it, but that wasn't enough. I'd seen unsold specimens at the plant centre go the same way, with growth becoming increasingly sparse, and dark spots on the leaves that indicated the plants were under stress. What it needed, I decided, was a bigger root run, some nice fresh compost it could get its feet into. I potted my plant on when I first got it, and the results for the first couple of seasons were spectacular. The plant produced lots of large, healthy, shiny, pink new leaves and bore a general air of luxuriance, much better than the ones at work that hadn't been re-potted.
I had some qualms about doing the deed now rather than in the spring. You will always hear how autumn is a good time to plant trees outdoors. They will be in active root growth, we are told, and will get their root systems partially established before the cold weather comes. Plant a tree before Christmas and ask it to grow, the saying goes, plant it after Christmas and beg it to grow. But we are also told to re pot house plants in the spring, and not risk them sitting wet all winter surrounded by stagnant excess compost they aren't using. So is a large and expensive woody standard shrub in a big pot in a conservatory a tree (autumn planting good) or a houseplant (autumn planting bad)? I decided that Eriobotrya 'Coppertone' counted as a tree for potting purposes.
I ended up having to smash the pot, which was a shame. I summoned the SA's help, and we tried it with one of us pulling the plant while the other held the pot. We tapped the rim briskly with a chunky length of wood. We cut around the root ball with a bread knife, a steel rule and an old long-hasped metal hinge. Nothing shifted it even a quarter of an inch in its pot, and I was regretfully obliged to set to with a lump hammer, and consign a large terracotta pot to history. In the end you have to decide which is worth more, the plant or the pot. It has gone into a truly vast black plastic pot, since it was already up to the largest size you can get off the shelf in terracotta. I'll have to be careful with the watering over the winter, and cross my fingers. I've got away with potting Hamamelis into pots that were that much too large at the outset, but it was the kiss of death to the Strelizia that the black pot was originally bought for.
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