This morning, when I pulled up the blind in the bathroom to have a look at the day, there was a frost. Last night must have been crucially colder or more still than the one before. I congratulated myself that I had remembered to shut the greenhouse and conservatory doors, and settled down after breakfast to a pleasant compare-and-contrast session with the Chatto Gardens and Dorset Perennials websites, looking at who listed what, who had what in stock, and who was cheaper. Five of a particularly drought tolerant form of Epimedium, some non-running comfrey and some spotted leaf arums are now on their way from Dorset, and I have my eye on a few shade tolerant plants from Chatto.
Then I cleaned the chickens' roosting board, which needed doing. The contents were a welcome addition to the piles of shredded Eleagnus leaves, of which I still have an awful lot of bags left to go on the compost heaps. After the frosty start it had turned into the best sort of November weather, the sun brilliant but so low in the sky that the shadows were interesting. A light sheen of ice on the pots of tulip bulbs by the greenhouse warned me that it was not planting weather, however, and I spent the rest of the morning cutting down the dahlias in pots and moving the pots into the greenhouse. They yielded two big buckets of stems, which made a useful layer on the compost heaps so that I could empty one more bag of the apparently infinite supply of hedge trimmings on top, and the pots took up almost all the remaining floor space in the greenhouse.
I managed to fit in the pots of violas, which overwintered outside last year with mixed results, and that was it. The greenhouse is full. In fact it is over-full, since several trays of nine inch pots are currently resting on top of the dahlia pots, which is going to be a nuisance when I need to water the nine inch pots given the dahlias need to be kept dry, and will not be viable at all once the dahlias start back into growth. I am looking on it as a reminder that I need to press on weeding the meadow to make space to plant out the Gaillardia, and do some renovations in the long bed in the front garden which largely missed out last spring as time ran out.
The ground had thawed by lunchtime, and in the afternoon I weeded and spread Strulch at the top of the sloping bed in the back garden, where I cleared the dead sea buckthorns and replanted the area back in the summer. The new plants at the top end have made massive growth since being released in August from their plastic pots. A pink flowered kind of prostrate mallow, Malvum lateritum, which I got at the garden club plant sale and which sat in its pot outside the greenhouse for three months doing nothing at all has leaped into life. Dosing it for the root aphid I found it was suffering from when I came to plant it out may have played a part in its transformation, but a Sphaeralcea munroana that did not have root aphid has been similarly transformed, and some elderly seed raised specimens of Lepechinia hastata, a slightly tender, sage like species with deep pink flowers that had been languishing for ages in the greenhouse have sprung back into active growth. The oriental poppy 'Royal Wedding' planted out as part of this scheme must be ten times the size of the rest of the batch that are still in their pots on the concrete, while the Diascia personata brought home as a cutting from last year's garden club propagating evening, and that had got horribly potbound before I found somewhere in the garden to put it, is making a burgeoning clump with lots of fine, fat new shoots at the base.
Several of the plants listed in the last paragraph are only doubtfully hardy. Let us hope we don't have a hard winter.
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