When I got back from the dump the sound of the Systems Administrator vacuuming the gravel on the far side of the front garden would have been quite disturbing, if I hadn't known that what the SA was actually doing was clearing loose gravel off the track bed of the model railway. When the SA came in for a coffee I asked how the renovation was going, and the SA said that the model railway was suffering from the same issue as some real life narrow gauge restorations, being that when they cleared the weeds they found that the vegetation was the only thing holding the track up. The SA lamented that unlike the full size railway restorations, he didn't have a gang of fifty or sixty volunteers. I have been weeding whenever I have the time, but I draw the line at track laying. The SA is using the opportunity of rebuilding to iron out some steep climbs that were only going to cause perpetual difficulties for the little engines otherwise, while on track laid by me you'd be on course for a weekly re-enactment of the Flag Creek Light Railway's worst ever train disaster.
Although I am not a railway buff I have read LTC Rolt's Red for Danger: the classic history of British railway disasters, a history of safety measures on the railways, and it is one of the most universally applicable works of non-fiction I've come across. Every so often a very bad accident happens, and every time the response is to design a massively over-engineered solution that makes sure that kind of accident can never happen again. And it generally doesn't, but in due course there is a different kind of serious accident which nobody has anticipated. As with railway safety, so with financial regulation, economies and probably life itself. I would put Red for Danger up there with Sun Tzu's The Art of War for universal teachings that far transcend railway safety, or war.
I bought another box of six heathers while I was in Clacton, since the garden centre still had some. All credit to their staff, they know how to look after their stock. I'm sure the heathers were from the same batch I had a couple of boxes from weeks and weeks ago, since I recognised the packaging and they're the sort of thing that garden centres get in then when they're gone, they're gone. Nobody restocks with heathers in May. The plants still left at the garden centre had grown more than the ones I've got planted out in the ground, and were looking shiny and healthy with no brown patches at all.
I like the Clacton Garden Centre, the staff are always pleasant and they have the best selection locally of proper gardening sundries. Not your canvas log carriers, hand crafted at vast expense in Norfolk, or whimsical glass bottles with Perfectly Drinkable Tap Water engraved on them, but greenhouse shading paint, spare blades for the bowsaw, divided trays for pricking out, that sort of thing. Today I got a packet of beneficial fungus for sprinkling in planting holes, and a very reasonably priced bag of Scottish cobbles, but I noticed they were out of stock of 25 kg sacks of fish, blood and bone. I still have a tub left that I bought the last time they'd run out of sacks, but made a mental note to snaffle a bag, if not two, the next time that they had any.
The hornbeam hedge, which I dosed this spring with fish, blood and bone, plus some incredibly weedy compost from the remains of the Neolithic compost barrow, is looking greener and healthier than it has for years, and almost bushy, though the fact that I took up to six feet of growth off the top of it may have had something to do with that. Fish, blood and bone is great stuff. Forget those little boxes offered by the purveyors of log carriers and arty jam jar covers, when you have a large garden on light soil you want it by the sackful. I have started using it on pots instead of messing around with the slow release granules that cost a fortune and leave little coloured plastic beads in your compost heap. Bought in big bags fish blood and bone comes in at barely over a pound a kilo.
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