Our internet and my laptop seem to be working again. I was out yesterday, and left my computer switched off, good little energy conscious eco citizen that I am, so when I got home and switched it on, it wanted to do a day's worth of updates while all I wanted was to be allowed to reply to my emails and write a quick blog post. Add to that the fact that according to the Systems Administrator our internet connection had been on-off all day, and the blogger website became practically unusable. In the end I was so fed up with staring at my screen for two and a half minutes while it refreshed itself, and being told that an error had occurred while it tried to save my post, that I wrote the blog in Word and copied it over at the end. Which messed up the font, but by then I wasn't willing to spend any more time fiddling with it.
I have dropped brick sized hints (well, put in more of a blunt request) for a new laptop for my birthday. I am sure my computer ought to be able to run updates while still allowing me to do other things as well, but like Gerald Ford unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, it can't. It isn't even that I've taken up computer gaming that's really heavy on processing capacity, or developed a passion for doing extremely advanced things with Photoshop while eating my muesli. I am still just trying to read the papers, run rudimentary spreadsheets, write the odd Word document and browse through online plant catalogues, exactly the same as I was five years ago, but in that time the websites I visit have begun to demand more and more processing capacity, and my poor old laptop can't keep up. The SA, who does like playing complicated games and watching films on the small screen, ran a test and told me that my machine was running at about two per cent of the capacity of the SA's bigger and newer one.
The internet connection seems to have settled down today, but whether that was thanks to BT, or due to the SA spending a chunk of yesterday fiddling with settings I do not know. We have a complicated array of boosters so that the domestic wifi will reach all the way from the bottom of the garden to the workshop and the blue shed (which is handy as the zone encompasses my greenhouse) and this morning a box of bits arrived to upgrade the booster system.
Out in the garden, muntjac have eaten almost every plant of Rudbeckia subtomentosa 'Henry Eilers' to leafless stumps. I am cross about that, since it has left a nasty hole in the bed, and poor Henry is normally a useful late flowerer but the damage has put paid to any hopes of quilled apricot yellow petals for this autumn. If the muntjac would eat things that have already gone over that would be less irritating, provided they stuck to the flower stems and didn't defoliate the plant. They've had half the spent heads of a pink polygonatum, and I don't care about that in the least. But as well as the Rudbeckia they've grazed down some chrysanthemums, though luckily not taking out any patches entirely, and stripped every flower off a couple of Knautia macedonica. The Knautia is a scabious relative with small, dark red, scabious like flowers over a long season, and might come back this year.
I am pretty sure the damage is down to deer and not rabbits this time round, from the height at which it started, and the fact that pieces of nipped off stem up to six inches long were left scattered around the plants. Rabbits would have had to stand on a box to reach, or make a rabbit pyramid like something out of a Nick Park animation, and they don't generally snip out whole sections of stem and then leave them on the ground. This is a set back, in that I'd treated all the damaged areas with more than one dose of Grazers. It has been so effective against the rabbits, I was hoping and assuming it would work against deer as well, but it doesn't seem to provide anything like the same level of deterrence.
I had rather discounted the possibility of keeping deer out of the back garden. They can jump higher than rabbits, and I'm a long way off fencing the meadow to a standard that would stop muntjac getting in. At the moment it isn't even rabbit proof. And muntjac used to come in through the gate, so fencing them out elsewhere was pointless. Pinning my hopes on Grazers, I hadn't bothered to check the fences around the back. But then I thought that they probably couldn't jump the rabbit gate, and weren't actually very likely to come clip clopping across the gravel and right past the house to get from the meadow to the back garden. They skulk in undergrowth, muntjac, from what I've seen of them, and don't look like creatures that would choose to take long walks out in the open right by human habitation.
Crouching and crawling under a shrubby honeysuckle I worked my way to the corner of the fence where the wood meets the ditch, and sure enough there was a broken stretch where a willow branch had toppled on to to the fence. Fetch the pruning saw, the bow saw, wire netting and green garden wire. Fetch a stake and a lump hammer. Be careful not to drop the hammer on the cat, who had come to investigate. Realise you have left the wire cutters on the lawn and crawl back through the honeysuckle. Saw up and remove the fallen branch, haul the wire back upright, plug the gap in the corner with more netting. Bish eventual bosh. Get the SA to set the wildlife camera up on that corner, and we'll see whether anything comes in.
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