Thursday 13 November 2014

chopping down, clearing up

A small, brown, padded envelope arrived for me in yesterday's post.  It was my Felco secateurs, back from being refurbished.  With a replacement spring, new (or at least reconditioned and sharpened) blade, and adjusted and oiled, they felt like new secateurs in my hand, apart from the fact that I recognised the mud stained handle as indubitably mine.  The reconditioning service offered by UK agents Burton McCall in Leicester is not cheap, now being up to £19.99, which I reckon has pretty much doubled since I first started using it a decade ago.  You could buy a pair of secateurs for less than that, in fact you could buy two or three.  They wouldn't be very good, though.

The Felcos are great if you have a lot of pruning and cutting back to do.  Mine are number sevens, with a swivelling handle to reduce the strain on your hand.  They are extremely comfortable to use, and make nice clean pruning cuts, at least when properly adjusted.  For £19.99 we really ought to learn how to service them at home, but this pair had become mysteriously loose and unhinged and resisted all my efforts to tighten them, and those of the Systems Administrator who is far more mechanically adept than I am.  It's worth paying less than the price of half a tank of petrol to have them back in full working order.

To celebrate, and as a change from weeding and muck spreading, I began to cut down the herbaceous plants in the back garden.  The Japanese anemones and Rudbeckia in the sloping border had finished flowering, and although I'd been trying to appreciate the dead heads of the asters in a disciple of Piet Oudolf sort of way, and telling myself that the seeds would be good food for the birds, I had to admit that they were not creating attractive winter silhouettes.  Anyway, there's too much cutting down to do to leave it all until February, and I'd like to get the beds chopped down, weeded, fed and mulched before the bulbs start coming through.

I took down the flowering stems of the yellow flowered Phlomis russeliana as well.  The seed heads form bobbles at intervals up the stalks, which are reasonably architectural, and would look attractive sparkling under a hoar frost.  On the other hand, it seeds about incontinently, and we don't get many hoar frosts in north Essex.  Mainly in winter we get damp.  After admiring the bobbles for a couple of months, the novelty had worn off, and I thought I'd rather make a clean sweep of things.

I should not have been so harsh about the floppiness of poor old Chrysanthemum 'Emperor of China', since when I got to that part of the bed I realised that the reason why it fell over, or at least part of the reason, was that the collapsing leaves of Crocosmia 'Lucifer' had fallen on it.  It is a tricky question, the point at which to start clearing foliage after something has finished flowering.  The late bloomers can look spotty and rather foolish if left standing in isolated patches when all around them has been cut to the ground, but allowing them to be swamped by dying stems doesn't create a great look either.  I fear the answer is a more regular and intensive maintenance regime than mine, to go round all the beds every few days deciding on an individual basis which plants are still contributing to the garden scene, and which should now be cleared.

As to how I managed for the twelve days it took to turn the Felcos around, the answer is that I have two pairs.  The second pair, which I was using up to yesterday, are getting rather blunt, and the catch that holds them shut when not in use has developed a maddening habit of swivelling round and locking them after every other cut.  I've tried and failed to tighten it to stop it doing that, and very much doubt that my attempts at sharpening them are going to be as good as the professionals'. Could be time soon to send them off to Leicester for a revamp.

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