windy saturday

The clocks go forward tonight, but it still barely feels like spring.  I spent the day moving more of the great pile of compost on to the vegetable patch, chiselling weeds and roots out of the veg beds as I went  and collecting stones, round pebbles for the beach garden in one pot and irregular lumpy ones in another pot for the path by the dustbin.  The latter still has some bare patches of Mypex membrane showing, but it's getting there.  When it's completely covered I shall work out the area, and try and calculate how many dump bags worth of stone I must have moved, one potful at a time. I'll find it difficult to drop the habit of collecting stones once it's finished, though it will always need topping up as the stones tend to shift to the side over time leaving bare patches in the middle when we walk.  And I can syphon off especially knobbly and picturesque flinty stones for the dry garden by the entrance.

There was a stone covered path across one of the display gardens at Writtle, not laid on fabric, which according to one of the landscape tutors had been topped up over the years with fresh aggregate equivalent to a metre's depth, while still mysteriously remaining at the same level as the rest of the garden.

There was no sign of any of the broad beans coming up, or the parsnips, but I wasn't expecting to see anything of them yet since they are notoriously slow to germinate.  I didn't try to make any further sowings, since handling seed outside when it's too windy is simply frustrating.  Small seeds can blow clean out of the palm of your hand, and a sudden gust can too easily send the open seed packets bowling down the path, scattering their contents wastefully on the ground.

The poor old chickens didn't get a run.  They looked at me slightly hopefully at lunchtime, but their heart wasn't really in it, and mine certainly wasn't.  Hens don't like wind, presumably because the noise and bluster makes it more difficult for them to tell when there are predators about, and I was afraid that if I let them out they would disappear inside the hedge or deep into the back of the big bed in the back garden, and I would find it difficult to keep track of where they were.  And I don't like wind either, it makes me clumsy, and I didn't want to find myself trailing around the back garden after the chickens doing five minutes of this and ten minutes of that, while the wind blew my buckets over and sent my kneeling mat tumbling across the lawn each time I got up.

The Systems Administrator is building a panel to hang across the entrance, of plastic mesh hanging from a wooden frame, to prevent all but the most determined rabbits from coming in during the night.  I am reconciled to hoofing down the drive each morning to move it before the postman arrives.  That shouldn't be too much of a challenge on week days, since the post generally comes some time between mid morning and lunchtime, but for some reason it's earlier on Saturdays.  This morning he came at twenty past eight.  I was already up and had let the hens into their run, but not that long before.