It rained again. I managed to weed some more of the shrub rose bed after the overnight rain had ceased and before the lunchtime rain started, tickling the soil with my hand fork, dusting it with fish, blood and bone, and tucking Strulch around the allium stems. It was a job that would have been much easier three weeks ago. On the plus side, foliage has now started to emerge on the too-numerous clumps of self-sown Campanula lactiflora, enabling me to find them to dig out the ones I don't want. C. lactiflora is a perfectly nice plant, in a rubustious way. Indeed, the parent of my unwanted largesse, the soft lilac variety 'Loddon Anna', holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit. It's just that you can have too much of a good thing. The smaller roses do not like being loomed over, and I don't want to stare at a monoculture of Campanula in that corner of the bed.
While it was only raining a bit I went to buy some more compost for the dahlias. Last year's display was slightly disappointing, and I decided then that I really would try to find the time and energy to restart the tubers this season in fresh compost and set at the correct level in their pots so that there was a space at the top for watering. It is so tempting, with all the other things to do in the spring, to just start them back into growth in their existing compost and tell yourself that with some liquid tomato feed everything will be fine.
The old compost came away from the tubers like dust as I probed at it with my fingers, and I felt a conscientious glow that for once I was doing the right thing by the dahlias as I settled them down in fresh compost, tapping the pots lightly on the ground and pushing compost down into the pot, but not too hard, to try and make sure I didn't leave any air pockets. For good measure I topped every pot off with a sprinkling of Vitax Q4. Some of the tubers were massive and I moved them into slightly bigger pots. One yielded a couple of offsets, each with a portion of stem and three swollen storage lobes, that will make new plants, but others showed no signs of wanting to be split and I left them intact.
The greenhouse is bursting at the seams so I stood the pots out on the concrete, feeling vaguely radical since dahlias are not frost hardy. But the ones left in the ground over the winter normally survive, and manage to come back into growth without being destroyed by frost, and I thought that I could fleece the pots when frost was forecast. I was just so keen to get myself some working space in the greenhouse, so that I could space the pots of overwintering tender shrubs and herbaceous plants more widely, and have some elbow room while I tided them up and fed them.
By teatime it was raining properly again and I gave up for the day. It is awfully disappointing weather for the Easter weekend.
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