rain stopped play

It was still raining when I got up, and I was disappointed when I logged on to my laptop to see that the Met Office forecast gave an eighty per cent chance of rain until ten o'clock.  The Systems Administrator said that he'd thought I'd been a tad optimistic putting on my gardening clothes, and I countered that I was an eternal optimist when it came to gardening.  Sure enough, by nine it had stopped raining and I was able to get on with weeding the sloping border in the back garden.  It would have been more comfortable if the ground hadn't been wet, and I couldn't apply fish, blood and bone because it would have stuck to the foliage, meaning I couldn't apply any Strulch, but I could weed and prune.

I think I have got all the dead branches out of the Chaenomeles 'Moerloosei' now, though each time I thought that I seemed to notice another streak of coral spot or peeling bark.  Still, it looks fresher and less cluttered, and I can always have another go at it once it comes into leaf and I can see any branches that don't.  Having a good look at it in better light would help, since today was so grey and murky that everything looked dull and lifeless.

There was some dieback in the yellow berried Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus'.  It looked unnervingly like text book descriptions of fireblight, a bacterial disease of the rose family, with blackened leaves still hanging on the dead twigs.  The RHS is emphatic that it only affects members of the rose family in the sub-family Pomoideae, and so it is not the same thing as whatever it is that can cause whole sprays of mature rosemary bushes to blacken and die.  I followed the RHS advice and cut out the affected shoots I could see using the pole lopper, though I did not go back beyond the visible damage by as much as the one to two feet the RHS recommends.  By then, although it was only early afternoon, the light was so bad I could scarcely see what I was doing, and I couldn't reach one dubious looking shoot without wriggling round to the back of the bed with the pole lopper, which I was reluctant bother doing in the gloom.  I need a good, bright but not overly sunny day so that I can see the condition of the individual shoots.  Nursery growers keen to promote fast growing evergreens for quick screening love to recommend C. salicifolius.  All I can say is that in a country garden with cold winds, on poor soil, in a dry area of the country, it is not reliably evergreen.

Fireblight is a potentially serious plant disease, but still I am not too cast down about the cotoneaster's prospects, because I am an incorrigible optimist and it might not be that bad.  A Pyracantha in our previous garden had what looked like touches of it, but survived.  The Cotoneaster salicifolius did not get fed and mulched last year because I had run out of Strulch before I got to the back of that part of the bed, so I am sure that if I feed and mulch it now that will encourage it.

By three it was raining hard.  This morning's Met Office forecast didn't forecast rain in the afternoon, and I felt rather short-changed.  It is so frustratingly slow trying to get anything done when it keeps freezing and raining and getting dark.