conservatory gardening

I have been researching the needs of my new orchids.  Three of them prefer to be pot bound, so beyond transferring them very carefully from their plastic into tiny terracotta pots for purely presentational reasons, I don't need to do anything to them other than give them a little bit of orchid food occasionally.  The fourth, a winter hardy species I could plant in the border if I wanted to, and which I fell for partly after hearing the grower describe how rapidly it would bulk up, is a more demanding character.  It needs to go into a bigger pot to give it room to spread, but ordinary multipurpose compost will not do, instead it needs a mixture of finely crushed bark and perlite.  I do not have any of either among my stocks of gardening supplies, and the extra potting medium is going to cost me as much as the original plant, but it will be very nice if it does really double in size this year.  Apparently masses of water during the growing season should do the trick, and a dose of tomato fertiliser every fortnight.

It is called Calanthe brevicornu, a name I still keep forgetting because it is so completely unfamiliar.  My other new acquisitions are epiphytes, living in the wild in the tree canopy with no proper soil as such, so their roots need to be tucked into a minimum quantity of very free draining compost and kept bone dry in the winter, but the Calanthe is a woodlander from north India.  The nurseryman was entirely confident that it would be hardy outside in our climate, and I had brief rococo images of establishing a drift of it in the very end of the wood.  The vendors did not think that slugs ate it, or rabbits, and the plants came in a lovely range of amber and mauve shades, so that I had real difficulty only choosing one.  But in the real world I had better see if I can keep my one plant alive before attempting any drifts.  It is only flowering now because it has been under glass for the winter.  If grown outside the new growth would barely be showing above ground by this stage of the year.

I haven't yet taken any of them down to the conservatory.  All four are still sitting in a small box on the dining room table while I contemplate them and consider their precise requirements.  They should be fine there for now, and they are getting at least as much light as they would be if they were still in the RHS halls at Vincent Square.

I have been scrubbing the deck outside the conservatory.  It's the first time I've done it since the Systems Administrator laid it, and apparently that was four years ago.  The SA can date it precisely because the cricket world cup was on at the time.  The Western Red Cedar has faded from its original rather bright orange shade to something more subtle, though not so silvery as weathered oak, and it is rewarding to see the colour come back as the layers of dirt and algae scrub away.  It is a lot of scrubbing, though.  The SA is not keen on using the pressure washer because it can too easily rip up the grain of the wood, and at least doing it by hand I don't spatter filth over the conservatory windows and neighbouring plants.  The only cleaning product I'm using is a little bit of Ecover washing up liquid in a bucket of water, plus fresh water sprayed out of the hose.

I did take a break from the deck to wash the kitchen floor.  Even I began to feel a sense of warped priorities to be putting that much effort into cleaning my garden at the same time as the floor of the room where we prepare food had a fine swirl of cat hair in every corner, plus a spattering of coffee grounds.