another woodland talk

I have just done another woodland charity talk, this time at the AGM of a local horticultural society.  They are a friendly group, whose activities mainly revolve around their spring, summer and harvest shows, and flower displays for their local church, so the AGM lecture is the only one they have during the year.  I was invited once before, about four years ago, to talk about seasonal planting, and I gather that at last year's meeting they had a park ranger from Colchester to speak to them.

The formal proceedings were wrapped up admirably quickly, in twenty-five minutes, which beat last year's record by five minutes according to the minutes of last year's meeting.  These were ceremoniously read out and signed, though as the chairman said who could remember what had happened a year ago.  The treasurer's report covered all the relevant facts while fitting on one side of A4 paper, and I paid careful attention, given that I'll have to present my own report at the beekeepers' AGM, which will be the first time I have ever been to it.  Normally I try to avoid AGMs, on the grounds if you are an ordinary member with no particular gripe about how your club is run and no intention of standing for office then they fail the test that meetings should be either useful or entertaining (millions of hours of human time would be freed up every year if all organisations adhered scrupulously to that rule).

After the AGM there were home-made cakes and sandwiches, which were very good, but I had to partake abstemiously since trying to talk to a room full of people when your own stomach is full of cheese nibbles and fruit cake is not a good idea.  There was a good turn out, and the annexe to the village hall was nearly full, which goes to show that if you want people to come to a potentially boring meeting then bribing them with food is the way ahead.

I had to set up my equipment to discover the correct position for the projector table and check the wall socket worked before the AGM started, and then move the projector table out of the way so that it didn't obscure the officers of the society from half the audience.  I was a little on edge about having to switch the projector off and move everything then set up again during the refreshment break, since I'd have rather got it all sorted out before the room filled up, and sat there knowing that it was ready to go and I had only to un-blank the image to begin.  However, I managed to put the stand back where it had been before, and not drop anything or press the wrong buttons on the remote control, and it was fine.  I am not a mechanically adept person, especially under time pressure or when people are watching me, so my anxiety was not entirely unjustified.

The fact that I am not good with machinery was demonstrated while I was setting up, since a large and kindly man with long hair and sandals, observing me adjusting the angle of the projector by jamming a sailing magazine under the back edge, observed that my projector stand had a tilt adjuster, and wound a screw underneath it, which had the effect of elevating the back of the stand and so lowering the height of the image.  I have been using that stand for around a decade and never grasped the point of that screw, but was quite happy to be shown.  When you know that you are not good at getting equipment to work, you take all the help you are offered, if you are sensible, provided it is genuine help from somebody who knows what they're doing, and not just somebody being bossy (I had one of those the other day at work, who was very keen to supervise while I loaded trees into her horse box, despite the fact that she had no prior experience of the task and much less practice at loading trees into vehicles than I had.  Her view on how to load the trees turned out to be wrong, and it was the manager who worked out the best way of fitting them in).

After my talk there was a raffle, for which we had all been given one free raffle ticket.  The prizes were boxes of polyanthus, for which there is a class at the spring show.  I won a box, though I think I am excused from entering the show.  Also I discovered that somebody has started putting concerts on in their village church, so left my details to put on the mailing list for details of those, and with a couple of people who thought they might want a talk for other clubs they belonged to.  It was a nice evening.  It is remarkable what can be achieved with some goodwill, some twigs and a projector, and some cake.

stacking the tunnel

My task for the day was to move the magnolias up in their tunnel, to make space next to them for those plants that need to be kept on the dry side in their pots through the winter.  I don't mind moving the magnolias around, in that I like them as a group, and it is a chance to see what's in stock.  There were some lovely young plants of the yellow flowered variety 'Lois', which the boss claims is the best yellow because the flowers don't fade with age.  Unfortunately by the time he said this I had already planted another yellow variety 'Elizabeth', but I think that may have succumbed to muntjac attack, in which case I could replace it with 'Lois'.  The bed concerned is a long way from the house, close by the edge of the wood, and the things planted in it were slightly left with two choices, live or die, but it needs a good weed and tidy this winter.

The list of plants that need to be kept dry over winter was quite long, but in practice not everything on it was in stock.  A couple of the more tender buddleias come in, and the pineapple brooms, and cordylines (but we only had one of those left).  All of the yuccas and the indigoferas, the lavateras and kalmias.  I think of Kalmia as needing a humus-rich, moist but well-drained, woodlandy sort of soil.  I suppose the clue is in the phrase 'well-drained'.

Vitex agnus-castus or the chaste tree comes in to the dry, the origin of whose common name I learned in the Alnwick Castle poison garden.  Apparently the seeds produce a chemical that suppress testosterone production, so monks drank a liquid made from them to reduce those urges incompatible with vows of chastity.  It has been in cultivation in UK gardens since around 1570, and I have seen a very large and fine specimen growing in the botanic garden at Leiden.

We always refer to the autumn process of putting plants under cover as stacking the tunnels.  I don't know if the phrase is in general use in the horticultural industry, since is the only nursery job I have ever had.  Moving plants on a list from point A to point B sounds as though it ought to be a menial, unskilled job, but in practice is made much faster and easier if you have a reasonable knowledge of and interest in plants, or at least the ones on the list.  Otherwise you would have very little idea where in the plant centre point A was, and if you couldn't recognise what you were looking for you would have to read every label, which would take an insanely long time.

None of the individual pots I moved were very large, apart from one Magnolia grandiflora which I dragged instead of lifting.  However, by the end of the day I'd rearranged the whole of one side of a polytunnel to the depth of about a metre.  I didn't pace the length of the tunnel out, but it must be around 25 metres.  The plants weren't quite pot thick (in nursery parlance that means touching, as fully packed in as is physically possible) but they weren't far off, and the plants I moved into the tunnel I had to lift twice, once at each end of the journey.  My shoulders do now feel as though they had done a lot of lifting for one day.  There again, it's all healthy exercise, and the upside is that I still don't mind wearing sleeveless dresses, which are a no-no for many middle aged ladies.

missing person

I nipped down to the village mid-morning on a couple of errands, and was surprised to see a police car parked outside the lettuce farm car park, plus other emergency vehicles and people in uniforms milling around.  Nobody attempted to flag me down, and I was fairly sure I saw next door's Airedale wandering among the throng, so it didn't look like a crisis, on the other hand it was an odd thing to find on your doorstep on a Sunday morning.  I wondered whether there had been an accident with a forklift or something, and more frivolously whether the lettuce farm had been busted for employing illegal labour, though that seemed very unlikely.  There were still police cars there when I got back, and an unmarked white van with people dressed in black standing next to it, looking unhurried but purposeful.

I told the Systems Administrator that there were police down at the farm, though I hadn't seen if there was an ambulance as well, and we speculated uselessly about what might be going on.  Then a police helicopter arrived, and began flying low and slow over the surrounding fields, following the hedge lines.  The SA commented admiringly that that was skilled piloting, and we agreed that they must be looking for something or someone, but that whatever it was couldn't be judged to be a threat to the public, given that nobody had come to warn us or tell us to remain indoors.  We decided that they must either be looking for someone who was feared to be a risk to themselves but not other people, or else had another sighting of the Essex lion, though after the embarrassment they suffered last time we didn't think they'd send the helicopter out for the lion again.

There were voices outside the front door.  The SA went to investigate, and came back saying that five coppers had just gone down through our wood as being the quickest way to reach the small copse across the field.  They hadn't said much, but confirmed that they were looking for somebody at risk of harming themselves.  We stood in the sitting room window, watching the helicopter circle, and after a while the figures of five policemen in luminous vests appeared crossing the field.  They reached the copse, circled it, and seemed not to find what they were looking for, as they set off again heading south towards the far corner of the field.  More police arrived and said that they would like to search our garden and outbuildings.

They were full-blown police officers, not community support officers, in the search team clothing of a one piece suit and boots, and carrying Google Earth printouts of the area.  It is very strange to find your property and immediate neighbourhood the subject of a police search, especially on a beautiful, calm, sunny Sunday morning when you are about to go to lunch with your assembled relatives.  We jumped for a moment seeing somebody moving on the bottom lawn, then saw that it was just a policeman.  The SA wondered if it was OK for us to go out, but the police confirmed that it was fine, and I couldn't see what good it would do if we blew my mother out, besides which, I had the meringues and the cheese straws.  As we got into the car, dressed in our party clothes, a police officer appeared from the side of the house, looking absurdly young and fresh faced.  He said we had a lovely garden, and we said we hoped they found the person they were looking for, and off we drove.  There were clusters of officers in the lane by our spinney, and more police cars parked in the field entrances.

I did deeply and sincerely hope that they found whoever it was, safe and well, as the standard phrase goes.  Two of my classmates killed themselves not long after leaving school, in both cases becoming depressed following educational setbacks, and I always thought what a terrible, tragic waste that was.  There were so many fulfilling lives each could have led, instead of the ones they'd initially visualised for themselves aged eighteen, it really didn't matter in the grand scheme of things where they went to university, or whether they went at all, but they had reached a point where they couldn't see it like that.  I very much wanted whoever it was to be found.

I also had a much baser and selfish thought, which was that I didn't want this missing person to commit suicide in our wood.  That wasn't very nice of me.  I shouldn't have been thinking about my own feelings at all at such a time, but I'm afraid it is in human nature to do so.  Later on, chatting with someone over lunch they told me about the summer they'd had worrying about their father, who is over a hundred and in poor health in a nursing home some way from where they live.  They were busy with a set of monthly weekend classes leading up to an exam, which they wanted to pass, and with their career, and couldn't help wondering after each scare what they would do if their father died, and whether they would be able to complete the course, or do the exam.  They said they knew it was mean of them, and they shouldn't think in that way, but one did.  One couldn't help it.  Normal life kept happening even in the face of something momentous.  Ah, like the Auden poem Musee des Beaux Arts, I said.  I felt better thinking that I was not alone with my inappropriate thoughts.

We drove home wondering nervously whether we would find police in the front garden, or an ambulance, and incident tape, and how it would feel looking at that patch of one's home and knowing that somebody had killed themselves there, and whether if it turned into a tragedy the press would turn up.  All was quiet.  Everybody had gone, apart from three cars parked as normal for a Sunday in the fishing club car park by the reservoir.  There was nothing obvious on the local news websites to say who they had been searching for.  I very much hope that they found them, safe and well.

mending the shed roof

B&Q in Clacton came up trumps with roofing felt, so we started on the pot shed roof.  The pot shed was originally built as a garage, but we soon found that the turn into it was too tight to get the MG in safely, and it became a garden shed.  That MG is no more, having gone to the great scrapyard in the sky.  It was an MGF made by the now defunct revived MG company, and it required a string of expensive repairs from early in its life, demonstrating a build quality so low that I'm afraid the manufacturer deserved to go bust.  Once we were no longer City slickers we couldn't afford to keep it running, and by then it had proved such a let-down that the Systems Administrator had lost all affection for it anyway.

During a great shed reorganisation this shed became mine, and I spent a long time building shelves to keep my spare terracotta pots on.  It took ages, not because they are very posh shelves, but because I am not very good at carpentry.  The felt has been coming off the roof for months now, and mending the shed has been on the list of things to do.  In the summer it rained virtually all the time, and when the rain stopped there was a mini-heatwave.  Very hot weather is not good for handling roofing felt, because it softens and rips.

Access to the shed roof is not straightforward.  It is next to another shed, which is now the province of the SA, with a gap between them of under a metre, while the chicken enclosure wraps around the back of both buildings, in a sort of L-shaped run.  The run has a wire netting roof to keep foxes out, since a fox will shin over a 2 metre wall of chicken wire, no sweat.  This means that to reach one end of the shed roof from ground level on its northern side you have to work from the narrow alleyway, while to get at the other end you have to remove the netting from the top of the chicken run.

The entrance to the gap between the sheds was blocked by a large wild rose that seeded itself there, while a thick crop of ivy was growing happily in the virtual dark, so we had to do a fair bit of pruning before we could start roofing.  The Systems Administrator thought that we would have to cut the chicken netting, but I thought that given a sharp screwdriver I could prise the staples out, which was preferable given that we'd need to put it back afterwards.  Mobility inside the chicken run is restricted, from a human point of view, by a hawthorn tree that seeded itself in there and is growing out through the wire top.  I was surprised that the chickens didn't eat it or scratch it up when it was little, but it survived, and I've left it, on the grounds that they were originally jungle fowl and are supposed to like sheltering beneath trees.  I managed to open up a large enough hole in the roof to squeeze my shoulders through, but it isn't the easiest way to work, perched up a ladder with your legs hemmed in by a roll of galvanised netting and a hawthorn bush.

The thing that destroys the felt on shed roofs is wind getting in underneath it.  For this repair we ran the felt across the full length of the roof, and as well as tacks applied vertical battens at approximately 80cm intervals, including at both ends.  Horizontal battens will hold down the edges of the felt, though we haven't finished yet so those aren't all in place.  No part of the felt should be more than 15cm or so from an attachment point, and that should prevent it from ballooning up until it rips.  We still have to do the ridge, having run out of daylight, but the other two courses are in place, and I managed to reassemble the chicken run.  The SA's technique with battens has refined over the years.  They are pre-assembled in the workshop with their fixing screws already partly screwed in, so that on the shed roof all you have to do is hold down the batten with one hand and operate the rechargeable screwdriver with the other.  Also this time round the SA is using shorter battens, so that none of them span more than one width of felt.  Last time they were cut to run the full depth of the roof, and we've since realised that if you want to repair one section of felt you have to remove the whole batten to do so.  All we need now is for it not to be windy before Tuesday, as the upper edge of the top roll of felt isn't fixed yet, and we don't want it ripping in the meantime.

Addendum  Here are the culinary lessons of the week.  Firstly, it is very easy to over-cook Tesco's couscous, and if you do it turns into porridge.  Luckily the chickens really like couscous porridge.  From a human perspective I want the individual grains to remain distinct. The instructions on the packet said to boil for five minutes, then stand for another five.  My books talk about steaming it, so I will try that, although I wonder if Tesco sell some sort of easy-cook couscous.  I will ask the advice of a friend who I'm sure has served delicious couscous at parties in the past.

Secondly, pushing other people towards healthy eating tends to produce an equal and opposite reaction.  The SA dined on Moroccan vegetable stew quite meekly, but bought a Pukka Pie to eat for the following night's supper when I was out.

Thirdly, if you blind bake a flan case and it cracks because the pastry fell apart in the course of transferring it to the flan dish, and you did not moisten the edges enough when repairing it, then when you add the filling including egg custard and put it back in the oven, the custard will run out of the hole.  It will not set quickly and stop the hole, like pouring gunge into a leaking car radiator, but will go on leaking for quite some time.  Luckily I had some spare eggs.

unleashing my inner domestic goddess

The plan for today was to re-felt the shed roofs.  However, when I woke up it was still raining, and quite windy, so while I waited for the Systems Administrator to surface I thought I might as well make a start on the meringues I promised to do for my mother's party on Sunday.

The party is in celebration of her birthday, last Monday, and mine, last month.  I offered to make some meringues because various family members like them, especially the younger ones who have no inhibitions against eating what is basically a great inflated spoonful of neat sugar.  Also the simmer oven of a four door Aga naturally runs at exactly the right temperature to cook meringues, so I can bask in a glow of culinary accomplishment for practically no effort.

I started off with four eggs' worth, which will nicely fit on the largest baking sheet, and decided I'd better double up and make two batches to be on the safe side, which left eight egg yolks to use up somehow.  Egg custard based ice cream accounted for three, and used up a bag of 2010 frozen blackcurrants at the same time.  Anything involving blackcurrants more complicated than putting them in a dish with sliced apple and covering them quickly with crumble topping is apt to be messy, and the recipe for blackcurrant ice cream made more than would churn in one go, so by the time I'd finished I'd got purple mixture on the kitchen table, the outside of the ice cream machine, the floor, the drawers of the deep freeze, and (after I'd licked the utensils) my face.

The SA returned from shopping and said that the Colchester B&Q had run out of roofing felt.  I do wish they wouldn't do that.  I go there because it's cheap, and relatively convenient, but they regularly and randomly let basic items go out of stock, and really one shouldn't encourage them.  As it was still windy, though no longer raining, we agreed to try and get felt tomorrow at the Clacton branch.  The wind was forecast to have dropped back by then, and the whole job will be much easier on a calm day anyway.

I settled into full domestic goddess mode, and excavated the laundry basket to find my outstanding hand washing, two pairs of alpaca socks, a linen and cotton sweater and a wool one.  The woollen jumper is a much loved old favourite, now so shabby it has been demoted to domestic wear only.  I used to have it dry cleaned, but it's really not worth it now.   The alpaca socks are an experiment.  They got a very favourable write-up in one of the garden magazines, so I bought two pairs, a compromise between buying loads of socks that turned out to be rubbish, and paying the full delivery charge for just one pair, which seemed silly.  One of the selling points for alpaca was that it was naturally antiseptic, and I could allegedly wear my socks for a week without washing them with no ill effects, but they do still need washing, and they didn't come with any instructions.  I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm very glad to live in the age of the washing machine.  Washing everything by hand, even the sheets, would be ghastly, and incredibly time consuming, but I don't grudge the odd little bit, being rather keen on natural fibres.  I listened to a fascinating programme about the flower fields of west Cornwall and the Scillies on Radio 4 which is well worth catching if you have a spare half hour.  Under the latest BBC system you have over a year left to listen, so you should be able to fit it in.

Three egg yolks were destined for the filling of a flan for supper.  I thought wistfully that the other two could have been turned into lemon curd, if only I'd asked the SA to buy some unwaxed lemons, but couldn't be bothered to go out just to buy lemons, and decided they could be cheese straws for the party instead.  A friend of ours makes wonderful cheese straws, but when I asked her how she did it, all she would say was that they were really easy.  I thought she was protecting her recipe, which was fair enough, until I had to learn to do them for the music society and discovered that they were really easy.  I use a recipe out of the good housekeeper's cookery book I've had since I was a teenager.  It looks stingy with the cheese, but makes really nice short pastry.

The SA volunteered to do the vacuuming, so I got off the boring domestic task.  If I were a full-time housewife and had to do this stuff seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, I would be screaming with boredom and demanding an office I could escape to, but it's good fun to spend the odd day pottering about in the kitchen when it's windy outside.  Tomorrow we really will re-roof the sheds, assuming that the Clacton B&Q has any felt.

Pre-Raphaelites and Plant Seekers

I went to London today, to view some art.  The suggestion came from an old colleague, someone I'd not seen for a long while, and who had been proving so elusive that I'd given up trying to arrange anything, so I was pleased to hear from them, in a cautious way.  The choice of gallery was left to me, even after I'd come up with a short-list of three exhibitions, the Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain, Shakespeare: staging the world at The British Museum, and Cotman in Normandy at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.  Given I was planning to visit all three at some point they might as well have taken their pick, but there you go.  I opted for the Tate, on the generous basis that it was relatively convenient for their office and I didn't know if they cared enough about Cotman to schlep all the way to Dulwich, and the more selfish basis that if their attention wavered and they'd had enough after half an hour, I was a Tate member and could go back another time at no cost.

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant guard is a large show, and you certainly need more than half an hour to get round it.  We gave it an hour, and then our brains were full, our mouths dry and our backs beginning to ache.  It is a good show, though.  It's on until 13th January, and I wouldn't mind going back, because there is more there than you can take on board in one visit.  As a teenager I instinctively fell for the Post Impressionists and the Fauvists, and regarded Victorian art as hopelessly old fashioned, but it's grown on me over the years.  Some of the pictures in this show are really very weird, with their brilliant colours and hyper-real detail from foreground to horizon.  Millais wimped out, in the end, and turned to landscapes that looked quite normal (and were admired by Van Gogh), while Burne-Jones abandoned social comment in favour of decorative streams of maidens as he morphed into part of the Aesthetic Movement.

Something I hadn't realised was that Tate Britain is in the throes of major building works, so the basement cafe where I'd banked on our getting a quick lunch and catching up on nearly a year's worth of news wasn't open.  Whether it will re-open under a new guise or is being replaced by something nicer (it was a bit foetid and basementy) I know not.  In the meantime visitors have a choice between the coffee bar near the ticket desk, which now has a chiller cabinet containing a few sandwiches, but a great deal of through foot-traffic and awful acoustics, a gallery cafe right by the Pre-Raphaelites which was simply full, or a marquee in the garden.  That looked pretty full as well, but we managed to get a table and thanks to overhead infrared heaters it wasn't as cold as I'd expected.  Be warned if you are planning a day out at Tate Britain, you might do better to get lunch somewhere else first, or afterwards.  Unfortunately that part of Pimlico is not over-blessed with places to eat.

The Systems Administrator and I were discussing the chaos that is Gift Aid on tickets last night.  At the Museum of Northumberland Life and Alnwick Castle we were asked as we bought our tickets whether we were UK tax payers and would be willing to Gift Aid the cost, then had to supply our address.  I really can't believe that somebody at the Inland Revenue is trawling through the data and matching tax returns to names and addresses submitted at Alnwick Castle, so that seems a bit of a farce.  At the Tate the rules have been interpreted as meaning that visitors must make an additional donation on top of the cost of the ticket for the Tate to be able to claim tax relief on the whole amount.  The cost of tickets for the Pre-Raphaelites is thus £14, or £15.50 with Gift Aid.  I arrived ahead of our meeting time, and looking at the queue at the ticket desk thought I might as well buy my friend a ticket.  There was no clock showing the admission time for which tickets were now being sold, and if it turned out that we couldn't go in until mid-afternoon then we'd need to think of an alternative plan.  The man on the desk told me that tickets were £15.50, which annoyed me.  I believe in supporting art, and have a National Art Pass as well as Tate membership to prove it, but any surcharge on an advertised price should be voluntary.  I declined to upgrade my membership as well, then later wondered if I should have done, but by then I was in a bad mood with the ticket buying process, and I very rarely take anyone else to the Tate.  Most of what they show isn't the SA's thing at all.

After the Tate I planned to visit the Garden Museum, a short stroll up Millbank and across Lambeth Bridge. This lay on my friend's route back to the office, so they came with me and ventured in for a cup of tea.  The Garden Museum cafe has just been rated as one of the top ten places to eat in the world by Gourmet Magazine (no, I hadn't heard of them either) according to The Evening Standard.  This strikes me as slightly implausible for a small vegetarian eaterie in one corner of a deconsecrated church in the shadow of Lambeth Palace, but it is a nice peaceful spot.  International stardom has not gone to the cafe's head or guaranteed queues for tables stretching up the Embankment, and at twenty to three there were two other tables occupied besides ours, and it was very quiet and restful compared to the bustle of the Tate.

My reason for going to the Garden Museum was actually to see their exhibition The Plant Seekers, put on jointly with the RHS.  The exhibition space at the Garden Museum isn't very big, so if the Pre-Raphaelites left me feeling overwhelmed, the Plant Seekers left me wanting to know more.  There are items of collecting equipment ranging from a wooden case for transporting plants back to the UK, used by Forrest, to the rucksack carried through the jungle by Tom Hart-Dyke when he was kidnapped by Colombian rebels and held for nine months six days into his orchid hunting expedition.  There are journals, and beautiful painstaking drawings and paintings of plants, and old photographs.  It's an interesting little exhibition, and if it whets your appetite you can always get some books on the subject.  There is also a display of entries to the New London Landscape: Green Infrastructure Ideas Competition inspired by the High Line.  The winning proposal, which will be built, was for a mushroom farm under Oxford Street.

The chaos of the discretionary ticket has reached the Garden Museum as well, since I produced my RHS card to get half price admission, and discovered I could get in for £3 instead of £3.75 if I used my National Art Pass instead.  It is such a nice museum I feel mean not getting a full price ticket, but what's the point of having the Art Pass and not using it?

tree talk

I have just got back from doing a woodland charity talk.  The audience were the Colchester supporter's group of another conservation charity.  They must have had some publicity up, because my mother was very struck a couple of days ago that she had seen my name on a poster.  However, it was their first lecture of the autumn season, and they had managed to put the wrong date in their magazine.

The meeting was held in a rather spraunchy modern church.  I arrived with plenty of time to spare, having allowed for traffic that didn't materialise, and getting lost, which did but only slightly.  I'm always nervous about missing turnings in densely urban situations, in case I get swept miles away in a one-way system and end up taking ten minutes to work my way back.  The organisers were there ahead of me, which was cheering.  It can be a little lonely, sitting in the car outside a deserted hall and waiting to see if anybody comes to unlock, or if you have got the wrong place.

The organisers were not happy, since the church had dispensed with the services of the caretaker, who used to be very helpful, and they were left to set up the PA system and screen themselves.  Initially the chairman couldn't find the light switch, which didn't bode entirely well.  I volunteered to do the screen, since it was the same as mine and I knew how it worked.  In fact, I'd put my own in the car anyway.  The person who booked me to speak did mention that they had a screen, but I'd forgotten, and from long habit would rather go prepared.  Somebody had set out the chairs in advance, and they filled the entire church.  I rather suspected that we weren't going to get that many people.

The sound system proved less amenable than the lights and screen, and with five minutes to go to the start of the meeting they had to telephone the vicar, who arrived very promptly.  I think it was the vicar.  He was wearing a fleece done up at the neck so it was impossible to see if he had a dog collar, but his grey trousers looked plausibly ecclesiastical, and his attitude to the church proprietorial.  And rather cross, as if he might have been half way through his supper or in the middle of putting his children to bed when he was called out. I would not say he exuded clouds of goodwill to his fellow man.  The fixed microphone attached to a lectern turned out to be broken, and the vicar said crossly that it was because people didn't use it properly.  The vicar got the clip-on microphone to work and disappeared back to whatever he was doing before, leaving us to get on with it.

I have met people, from a business or academic background, who pride themselves on never using amplification when addressing meetings, and consider use of a microphone a shameful professional weakness.  I suspect their typical audiences are two to three decades younger than the ones I tend speak to in the clubs I get invited to address.  They like you to use the sound system because their hearing aids can tune into a hearing loop, and even speaking VERY LOUDLY and VERY CLEARLY is no substitute for that.  Having to talk to a group of strangers (not a room full, but twenty-five or so looking rather lost scattered around the middle of the great sea of chairs) using a microphone you have never used before in your life, knowing that nobody in the room understands how it works if you have any problems, is not the most relaxing way to begin a talk.

The chairman conducted an extraordinarily short extraordinary meeting, to approve putting membership rates up by a pound a year to cover the increase in postage costs, and I was on.  We got the microphone turned up to the right level (I had checked with the vicar where I should clip it before he left) and after that it was all right.  I did see the deputy chairman checking her watch several times, but I think she was worrying about when to go and start doing the teas.  There were some sensible questions, and they said they enjoyed it, which is about as much as you can ask.

the cook chooses the menu

I'd been muttering that as it got dark earlier I could cook a bit more.  I enjoy cooking, when I get round to it, and the convention in our house is that within reasonable limits, whoever cooks gets to choose the menu.  So I wouldn't insist on doing anything that the Systems Administrator hated, or was allergic to, but I can choose to go vegetarian, an option that doesn't come naturally to the SA.  The SA was quite happy to have an occasional break from peeling potatoes and chopping onions, so tonight I'm doing Moroccan vegetable stew.

Despite the fact that I own at least one book about Moroccan cookery, plus several by Claudia Roden who includes Morocco in her surveys of Mediterranean and Jewish cookery, I'm doing an Essex version, taken from the little recipe book the new cafe people at work have put out.  It sounded nice, and didn't demand any Arab spices that Tesco and Waitrose still don't sell, and that I would have had to go to a specialist supplier in the Tottenham Court Road for.  I bought the book to encourage the cafe people in their first week, and because the samples of food on display looked and smelt jolly good, and the small tasters I've been given so far have been delicious.

A dish like this is so simple to make, chop away and before you know it your supper is ready! said the book. There is a lot of chopping.  Two medium sized onions, two garlic cloves (I used more, they were rather small), two carrots (I used three to finish up a bag in the fridge), an aubergine, two peppers, two sweet potatoes.  OK, I have never been on a cookery course (I don't count cooking lessons at school) and I don't chop as fast as a trained chef, but it took me getting on for half an hour to prep that lot, including scrubbing the sweet potatoes.  The book said to fry the onions and garlic.  I immediately deviated from the book since I'm of the school of thought that says fried garlic can easily turn bitter, so I kept the garlic back to add later.  Then the book said to stir in the spices, so I did that, still sans garlic.

Then I had to add the vegetables to the onions, which were supposed to be in a medium sized saucepan.  Fortunately having looked at the pile of ingredients I'd used the largest of our three Aga saucepans.  The chopped vegetables, which had overflowed two Denby soup bowls, filled the pan so that several lumps of carrot and sweet potato shot out over the hot plate when I tried to stir.  I added the garlic, and after a couple of minutes the mound of vegetables began to pack down, which was just as well, since I still had to fit a tin of chickpeas in somehow.

The next instruction in the book was to add the spices.  That was confusing, since I'd already done it.  I checked in case my eye had slipped down the page and I'd made a mistake the first time, but no, the instruction to add the spices was given twice.  In this recipe I don't suppose it matters when you add them, but it goes to show the hazards of self-publishing.  The photos in the little book are stylish, very River Cafe Cookbook, a mixture of food portraits, black and white photos of diners in the existing restaurant and the owners chalking the menu up on a board or pulling dishes from the oven, and scenic shots of the picturesque River Stour and surrounding countryside.  However, the book could have done with an editor, a Jill Norman to their Elizabeth David, who could spot when stages were left out or repeated.

I'd begun to have my suspicions when I noticed that two of the bread recipes didn't include a second proving stage.  I'm not very good at yeast cookery, but after mixing, kneading, and proving, when you knock the air out of the dough and shape it into loaves, I thought you generally left for a second proving, even if only half an hour, for the finished shapes to rise before cooking them.  The book omits a second proving stage, and says to bake the bread until it has risen.  Maybe it does rise in the oven.  I asked the cafe owner, diffidently, and he wriggled and said that he generally gave it a bit of time to rise again before cooking it, but he didn't look happy.

They aren't alone if their book has one or two mistakes.  I've noticed in Amazon reviews that when cookery books that have gathered lots of five star reviews (maybe for the nice pictures from people who haven't tried cooking from them much?) pick up some two and three star reviews as well, one of the common complaints is that some of the method don't make sense, or that items from the list of ingredients then never feature anywhere in the recipe.  Celebrity chefs are generally the worse offenders, while food scholars like Jane Grigson and Claudia Roden are generally OK on that score.  (Delia's Hungarian meatballs were a sad disappointment, but that wasn't because they didn't come out as meatballs, merely because they were disgusting.)

I have just added the chopped tomatoes (three, not four, because that's what we had that needed eating up) and the tinned chickpeas.  We are going to have it with couscous.  I adore couscous, while the SA is not so keen, but like I said, whoever cooks gets to choose the menu.

Addendum  Tesco are just as unhelpful.  The cooking instructions on the couscous packet gave the ratio by volume of water to couscous without saying what volume or weight of dried couscous to use per head, and the calorific content of an 88g serving of cooked couscous without the dried weight equivalent.  I had to have a quick look in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian to estimate how much I should cook, since I don't do couscous often and didn't know the answer offhand.  Failing that, if I'd followed the rule for rice that half a glass is enough for the two of us I'd have been about right.  If I were a novice cook and didn't have a library to refer to in a hurry I'd have been stuck.  No wonder people end up going for a takeaway.

a power cut and a difficult customer

It was a slightly scrappy day.  In the middle of the morning we had a power cut, which knocked out the tills and the credit card machines.  The manager, the gardener and my young colleague rushed about looking at fuse boxes and starting to dig out the emergency generator, while I waited at the till as two sets of customers advanced on me.  The man who runs the cafe was stuck as well, with no cappuccino machine, microwave or toaster, and stood behind his counter looking rather nonplussed.

The first pair of customers wanted to buy over eighty pounds worth of bamboos, for which they expected to pay by card.  I explained that I could take all of their card details, guard them very carefully, and put the transaction through later when we had power, and that regrettably that was all I could do, unless they happened to have the cash.  They agreed to do that, though I'm not sure they were thrilled about it.  It's a nice dilemma when the system breaks down, leaving the customers about as uneasy at leaving their card details with a stranger as the retailer is about seeing a trolley load of goods go out of the door without (at that moment) payment.  The next customer also wanted to use a card, and was fully prepared for remote credit card transactions, having one that she only used for gardening, with a deliberately low credit limit so that if her details did go astray the thieves couldn't spend much.

The power loss was limited to the shop, and by dint of switching everything off, resetting the fusebox and switching things back on again one at a time, they narrowed the problem down to a particular socket in the cafe.  We had wondered whether the fault lay with the chiller cabinet, which does sound as though it is labouring awfully hard when the compressor comes on.  Once I was sure they'd stopped messing about testing things, and that the electricity ought to stay on I processed the two credit card transactions.  They both worked.  I thought they would, but you never know.

The phone rang, and it was somebody wanting to know whether we had a Sapium japonicum in stock.  I checked in the place where I thought it probably would be if we had, and then in a couple of other places where it might possibly have been, and drew a blank.  Then he wanted to know whether we had Fraxinus sieboldii and I hunted about, but we didn't have any of those either.  He complained that he had contacted us previously about plants that we listed but didn't have in stock, and that it was misleading of us to have such a big fat catalogue, and we shouldn't claim to sell them if we didn't.  I apologised and promised to pass his feedback on to the owners. He ran through his list of complaints again, and I apologised again and promised to relay his comments to management.  He began to go through his list of our deficiencies for a third time, comparing us unfavourably to other nurseries and grumbling that we didn't call him back when we couldn't get plants, and I lost patience with him.  He knew that he was speaking to an underling and not part of management.  I had been polite, and sympathetic, and apologetic, and promised to pass his comments on the relevant people.  Ceasing to be polite or sympathetic and employing the Today Programme's politicians' trick of talking over the person who is talking to you, I told him that I had taken his comments on board and had already promised to pass them on to the right people.

When the manager got back from lunch I thought I had better confess that I'd been rude to a customer, though strictly speaking I suppose he is not a customer if we never have any of the plants he is trying to buy, and that the manager had better call him to say when the Sapium might be available and why we hadn't supplied any of the other plants, though be warned that he was a truly horrible man.  The manager went to make the call and came back saying that I was right, he was an appalling individual, but the good news was he wanted all his outstanding orders cancelled, so I could have the pleasure of crossing him off the list.  Shop assistants should not be rude to customers, but equally when you are complaining about a service there is no point in bawling out junior people who were not involved in whatever it was that has gone wrong, and have no power to change the way the firm does business.  You need to direct your complaints to the appropriate level of the organisation.  Smile, take a deep breath, acknowledge that it isn't their fault personally and then explain what went wrong.  Clearly.  Once only.

Later on I called somebody who had been waiting for a particular Daphne since March, since we still couldn't get that species but had a possible substitute.  He'd found the Daphne elsewhere, but wanted some shade loving plants, so we had a nice chat about those and he said he would come over and take a look.  I then called someone who was looking for a crab apple that had just come in, though I remembered from our previous conversation (this time last year) that she lived in Norfolk.  The crab was too big to post, and although it would fit in a car she can't drive this far, so unless she can think of a friend or acquaintance who is coming this way and would collect it for her she will have to forego it.  Last time she hired a man with a truck, but that is prohibitively expensive for one tree.  She was happy to be remembered after so long, and my faith in human nature was partially restored.

The power cut had its last laugh in the middle of the afternoon, having disrupted the timers for the automatic irrigation, which suddenly came on in one of the tunnels.  Luckily nobody was in there at the time.

a good time was had by all

Today was a little busier, and buzzier, which was more fun, besides which, we need the sales.  The owners put a positive gloss on yesterday's efforts, saying that the customers all enjoyed it, and that there were plenty of people on the guided tour and at the pruning talk, though they could have done with a few more at the tree planting.  That's fine as far as it goes.  We want customers to have a good time, and there are few things more dispiriting than talking to a group when the number of people who have bothered to turn up could be counted on the fingers of one hand, but the aim is to drum up business.  Saving our own blushes and making members of the public happy isn't enough.

Today's customers certainly did seem to have a nice time.  An old boy who had come over from Saffron Walden because he loves trees was in very heaven.  His companion professed to be more into vegetables, but had a good day as well.  They asked about cherry birches, or Betula lenta, of which we had none left, but I showed them where to find the rarest trees, and he bought a nice young form of Betula utilis called 'Buckland' and professed himself very happy with it.  Then we fell to talking about trees in general, and the discovery in Australia of the Wollemi pine that was thought to be extinct, and I was able to show him one of those, as we had one.  He touched it with great reverence.  They went on the garden tour, and had some tea in the cafe, and had another look round, and the vegetable enthusiast added to his purchase of 'Aquadulce Claudia' broad beans, the variety generally recommended for sowing in November, with a small Corokia, explaining he just liked it.  They went away very happy.

Two ladies who are regular customers came in for tea.  One asked when we'd be getting raspberry canes in, explaining that some of hers had died but she wasn't sure how to tell where the gaps were until next spring when the row started sprouting, so how would she know where to put the replacements in if she bought them now, and if she waited until spring might we have sold out?  I suggested that if she bought a bag when they came into stock she could heel them in over the winter and move them as soon as the old row started into growth, or alternatively she could probably find suckers in parts of the garden she didn't want them, and move those, since in my experience raspberries were travelling plants.  She was quite pleased with this idea.  It is my job to sell plants, but there's no merit in getting old ladies who are regular customers to buy bags of raspberry canes that they don't need.  Far better in the long run that they feel they are getting their money's worth.

A couple who had recently moved to the area wanted advice on where they could buy house plants other than a supermarket, which had me racking my brains since I only possess four house plants, and two of those did come from supermarkets, while the others came from the gardeners' stall at the National Trust garden at Wallington, and a WI meeting where I was doing a woodland talk.  The WI find is a spider plant, bought out of sentiment because I used to grow them when I was a child, and it has ended up living in my bathroom which suits it so well I don't have the heart to move it, despite the fact that it is in the way and I have to pull all its dangling stems of babies aside each time I want to get in the cupboard for fresh loo roll or a clean face flannel.  They also wanted to order a tree, and when I took their telephone number I realised they must have moved into the village itself.  I asked whether they by any chance liked classical music and they did, and had already got themselves season tickets for the music society, but I was able to give advice on how they could find a suitable choir to join.  You don't get that in B&Q.

I boosted the day's takings modestly myself by yielding to temptation and buying a Meyer's Lemon.  I've wanted one for ages.  It is a particularly cold hardy variety as citrus grow, and supposed to be a good vigorous doer.  The blossoms smell exquisite, and while in the long run (if it lives that long) it will have to spend winters in the greenhouse, I thought that while it was still small it could go on the hall table.  The manager found a supply of them at a remarkably good price, for citrus, and I sold two others over the weekend to bona fide customers.  One asked how the fruit were fertilised in the winter, when there were no insects flying, and the manager explained that the pollen bearing stamen gradually bent over until the plant fertilised itself.  That was a good question, and one I'd never thought to ask.

too quiet for our own good

Trade was awfully quiet.  This was depressing, since it was Day One of what the owners call their annual Tree Weekend.  Not enough people came wanting to buy trees, or anything else.  I can't blame the weather, since it was a truly beautiful day, sunny, not windy, with no forecast of rain to deter visitors, and the low October light made the plant centre and garden look very pretty.

Maybe it has been such a difficult year for gardening that by now people are discouraged.  Drought, followed by endless rain, rampant growth of weeds and garden plants alike as a result of the rain, fruit and vegetables that rotted or never ripened, a second dry spell that left the top 15cm of soil too dry and hard to feel comfortable planting things, torrential rain again over the past couple of nights.  Perhaps many gardens are now such a dishevelled mess that planting anything new is not at the top of people's lists of things to do.

Maybe it is the economic squeeze.  Retail spending has been subdued all year, and plants and garden furbelows are heavily discretionary items, compared to food, say, or children's shoes.  Consumers have been cutting back on driving, too, given that petrol sales are down in volume terms, and that isn't helpful to rural businesses like ours.  Some of our customers are frankly rich, but most are merely comfortable.  Many are retired.  They have probably seen negative real income growth for several years, and could be having to help out children and grandchildren.  I don't think there is loads of spare money swashing around the middle classes of East Anglia.

Maybe it is the low level of activity in the housing market.  Moving into a new house with no garden beyond whatever oddities the developer left you, or moving into a place with an existing garden you don't like, are spurs to plant buying.  Gardens are very late cycle in housing terms, since most people would probably sort out the house and furniture before they put too much money and effort into the garden, but the market has been depressed for a long time now.  People who've moved have had time to get to grips with their gardens.

Maybe gardening is going out of fashion.  It had a big upswing in the 1980s and early 90s, so perhaps that is reversing to some extent.  It gets far less cover on television than it used to.  Where once Gardeners' World was  popular Friday night viewing and we had Groundforce and various offerings from Channel Four, audience figures for Gardeners' World are off their peak, and Groundforce is no more.  I think Alan Titchmarsh is doing something for ITV, but nobody I know has mentioned watching it.  I should say that in TV terms baking was the new gardening, and sales of bakeware at Lakeland are through the roof.

Maybe (whisper the thought) our customers are getting a little bored of the Tree Weekend.  The format has been the same every year for as long as I've worked there.  The boss and a professional landscaping chum of his demonstrate how to plant a tree.  The boss leads a guided tour of the garden.  The manager gives a talk on pruning.  All the talks are free, but by now loyal customers would have been able to see the boss plant a tree approximately fifteen times.  The owners must know in their heart of hearts that the Tree Weekend is not what it was, since they didn't bother getting the gardener to come in to act as car park marshall.

It is rather depressing.  I feat that the owners of the plant centre need to put some money into marketing and advertising, but when cash is tight they don't like doing that.  Plant retailing is a very fragmented market, and we're pretty good at doing it.  There must be lots of people out there still buying plants, even in a depressed market, so how do we get them to buy their plants from us?  Answers on a postcard, please.

what the Dickens

I went last night to see Miriam Margolyes' show show about Dickens' women at the Colchester Institute.  The good news is that it was a hoot, and the bad news that the UK tour is nearly over.  You can still catch her at Lincoln, Goostry, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Windermere and Cardiff, and after that you will have to go to Massachusetts.

I have an ambivalent view of Dickens.  His private life was really quite unpleasant, and some of the women in his books make Violet Elizabeth Bott look like an emancipated militant feminist.  His novels hold a sort of glutinous fascination.  But I am a fan of Miriam Margolyes, and thought that her account of the death of Dora would have to be worth hearing.

We did not get the death of Dora, alas.  Dora is a particular favourite in the cardunculus household, her cry that Gyp must have a mutton chop or he will die having entered common usage, each time one of the cats is sitting about looking particularly pathetic until it gets something special to eat.  However, we did get Oscar Wilde's verdict on the death of Little Nell ('One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing') and a brisk summary of Dickens' many practically pre-pubescent, sweet, docile and witless heroines.  I hadn't realised there were so many, not having read all of the books.  As Ms Margolyes said, she found them rather icky.

Dickens' fixation on seventeen year old girls stemmed at least in part from tragedy, as his seventeen year old sister-in-law died suddenly in front of him while climbing the stairs after a night at the theatre.  Dickens was very fond of his young in-law, and later of a seventeen year old actress, and his other sister-in-law who came to keep house for the family, while being very horrid to his wife.  I knew that bit from various R4 plays and documentaries.  He was deeply smitten by his first love, who rejected him, a fact he never got over, but then as Miriam Margolyes said, Dickens never got over anything that happened to him.

Miriam Margolyes is a brilliant character actress, and her Mrs Gamp, Mrs Micawber, workhouse matron whose name I've forgotten and beadle (she plays the male parts, too, where required) were very funny, and the serious passages she read were utterly gripping.  By the end of it I was even thinking I might go back to some of the books, or try one or two of them that I hadn't read, which is presumably the reaction Ms Margolyes hoped for.

My only gripe was that the complete lack of signs to the theatre at the Colchester Institute, so that before the show bewildered would-be theatre goers were wandering around in small circles in the car park asking each other if they knew where it was, and the fact that once I did find the auditorium, the air conditioning was stuck full on, and by the time the second half approached its conclusion we were all feeling rather chilly.  The sight lines were good from where we were sitting (my friend had been there before and knew which the best rows were) though the chairs were hard, and my companion who has back problems was wriggling in her seat by the end.  But it was a good evening.

the threat of the new

It has been beautiful autumn weather for the past couple of days, and I've been weeding the big sloping bed in the back garden and tidying the shrubs down its back.  Some dead wood has accumulated in a large and fine yellow berried cotoneaster, which needs to come out, and an escallonia has grown larger than I ever envisaged and is looming over other things, so several of its more wayward branches have gone as well.  It is probably not the right time of year to prune escallonia, but this one is such a brute, I'm sure it won't miss the odd piece here and there.

Under the shrubs is a mini-forest of holly and ivy seedlings, with the odd ash and hazel thrown in, plus a few hopeful young brambles and nettles.  Most pull up as easily as cress after the rain, but some of the larger ones need prising up with a trowel or even the border fork.  There's a good crop of stones as well, which go into three pots, round pebbles for the beach garden in the turning circle, rough pebbles for the utility path by the dustbins, and larger flints to cover some landscape fabric at the foot of the bank near the septic tank.  The plan to mulch the path by the bins with home collected stones is coming on apace.  If I'd thought of it when we first moved in, nearly twenty years ago, I could have done oodles of paths by now.  Admittedly, we do have very stony soil.

I'm planting seed raised foxgloves at the base of the shrubs, where they'll be in moderate shade, and trying an experiment towards the front of the bed.  I have three trays, so two dozen plants, of oriental poppies in mixed colours, raised from a packet of seed that came free with a magazine and which it seemed churlish to throw away.  This is not the best basis on which to acquire twenty-four plants of anything, and I wasn't entirely sure what to do with them.  Looking at the expanse of space left bare as I cleared out the tangle of perennial sweet peas and geraniums which have been cheerful and weed-smothering over the summer, I thought that maybe the poppies could occupy the gaps.  They leaf up and flower in the late spring, and after flowering their leaves largely die down, leaving a gap in the border which it can be a puzzle to fill.  Perhaps they wouldn't mind being over-run by perennial pea for the later part of the growing season?  The way to find out is to try.

I'm mulching the bed with spent mushroom compost, but it is going to take quite a few trips to the garden centre up the road to get enough, and I've just run out again.  The areas I've done look very smart and cared for.  Unfortunately, as I work my way down the bed I know I am getting closer to a large ash stump, which seeded itself inside a Jerusalem sage and grew un-noticed until it was too large to pull up.  I managed for years by cutting the growth back at intervals, but now the sage has gone and I want to do the job properly and plant something else in the space.  A session with the pickaxe looms.  I started on this stump in the spring, but didn't manage to cut through the tap root, and to judge from the amount of regrowth over the summer it is still going strong.

Meanwhile, while I was having a nice peaceful time in my corner of north Essex, trouble was brewing down the road at Wrabness.  Grayson Perry has been given planning permission for his holiday house.  The row about it has even made the Telegraph.  I saw in the local paper a while back that he wanted to replace a singularly unprepossessing small farm cottage with a modern building, in which he planned to hold artistic events from time to time, and hoped it went ahead.  I am a fan of Grayson Perry, and feel that life in the Tendring peninsular would probably be more entertaining if he were around.  I gathered then that there was some local opposition.

There still is.  I must admit I was startled by the picture of the proposed building, which does indeed look rather like a Disney version of an Indian gingerbread house in the artist's impression in the Telegraph.  But I have faith in Grayson Perry, and I expect it will be fine.  I can't really believe it is going to 'spoil the area forever'.  The inhabitants of Wrabness seem an ungrateful lot.  Grayson Perry can come and live in my small village any time, though I fear a view of the lettuce farm and a wind turbine would not be so appealing as the Stour estuary and surrounding area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

secret lives of the potato growers

When last night I read on the Telegraph website that one in five Brits think parsnips grow on trees my initial reaction was that maybe around one in five Brits enjoyed winding up researchers asking daft questions.  Then I read the article, and the response from Caroline Evans of Potato Council.

"Our research shows that some grown-ups still really need to brush up on their foodie knowledge.

"It is worrying to think that there are people out there who believe types of apples to be potatoes and that well known varieties of British grown spuds are unheard of.

"There is plenty of information available, such as our new potato classification guide, so they can brush up on their facts."

Goodness.  I didn't even know we had a Potato Council, let alone that it had time to produce potato classification guides.  It sounds like the sort of thing that the Coalition would have abolished by now, like the UK film council, or alternatively like a rather dodgy novelty band from the 1980s.  I Googled it, and discovered that it does exist, or at least it has a website.  It is a division of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, and is committed to supporting the British potato industry.  It has an annual budget of £6m which is raised through a levy, 80% from growers and 20% from buyers.  It conducts research into storage of potatoes at its own research centre, and produces reports on all sorts of things, from diseases to exporting seed potatoes to Libya, though that one was dated 2006 and things may have changed a bit since then.  And it has a mission to sustain demand for potatoes, including regional Ambassadors.  Over the past twenty years there has been a 40% drop in consumption of potatoes in the British home, so they have their work cut out.  The decline is coming at the younger end of the market, who prefer rice and pasta.

Who'd have thought it?  Our neighbouring lettuce farmer has just grown a crop of potatoes in the field next to us.  They were harvesting them a couple of weeks ago, but I never imagined the great infrastructure underpinning the production of the simple spud.  I hope Dave feels he is getting his money's worth from his levy.  I can't see copies of the new potato classification guide flying off the shelves in Waterstones, and fear the Potato Council may need to intensify its efforts if it wants to reverse the decline in sales.

By the time I'd finished with potatoes I was curious about the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board.  They too have a website, and are funded by industry levies, with sectors covering horticulture, beef and lamb, pigs, milk, and cereals and oilseeds, as well as potatoes.  In total they represent about three quarters of total UK agricultural output, which left me scratching my head as to what the other quarter consisted of.  They support research and development (R&D) and are dangerously given to jargon, undertaking farm level knowledge transfer (KT) and knowledge exchange (KE) activity.  I don't immediately see the difference between the two.  Maybe it is a transfer if it is one way, and an exchange if you get some knowledge back in return.

Lettuces fall within horticulture, and when I searched for the word 'lettuce' a long list of research publications came up.  Pest control is a big thing in lettuces, but hydroponics and the measurement of nitrate levels in lettuces get a look in.  There are links to growers' associations, and it turns out that there is a British Leafy Salads Association, which exists with the primary aim of increasing UK consumption of leafy salads.  Our neighbouring lettuce farm is a member.  They have a conference coming up in mid November.  Early sessions focus on the core staples of pest control and nitrates, but later on they move on to look at the impact of changing social trends on salad consumption, and engaging consumers with leafy salads.  It will be a chance for them all to get together and compare horror stories.  The website tries to portray a positive image of salads, with quite a sweet review of different lettuce types, and I couldn't find any industry figures about production and sales in 2012, but I think it has been a year of crops rotting in the fields, and consumers not wanting to buy salad if it manages to make it as far as the shops.

Next time you are buying a bag of mixed leaves, take a moment to consider the great hidden world that underlies its final appearance in the supermarket of your choice.

new floors and mouse guards

I'm still feeding the bees.  It may be rather late to be doing that, but I know I'm not the only beekeeper in my association not to have finished.  Today, while I was at it, I switched the hives back from the solid wooden floors they had for the duration of their anti-varroa gel treatment back on to metal mesh ones.

I changed to mesh floors a few years ago as an additional step against the varroa mite, the idea being that any mites that drop off the bees fall through the floor and are permanently lost from the hive.  The jury still seems to be out on whether it is a good idea to use them through the winter.  Some beekeepers maintain that they make the hive too cold, others that damp rather than cold is the enemy of over-wintering bee colonies, and the fact that water can't collect on a mesh floor is a plus in the winter months.  My bees went through the past two years on mesh and seemed fine, despite some steep drops in overnight temperature this February, and a long cold winter the previous year.  I had noticed condensation build up inside some colonies in previous winters, so I'm trying again this year with the mesh.

I fitted the mouse guards at the same time.  Mice find the inside of a beehive a very cosy place to shelter during the cold months, but bees do not feel equally positive about mice.  They hate the smell, and will not use comb that mice have crawled over.  Mice pee constantly, by the way.  They have surprisingly small skulls and can creep through very tiny holes, including the standard entrance of a beehive even when reduced to its smallest size.  To stop them coming in during the winter I fit metal strips over the bottom of the front of the hives including the entrance, that have holes drilled in them just large enough for a bee to crawl through.  These are an upgrade from my previous defence, which was to stick small pieces of galvanised mesh along the top of the door to narrow its size, using drawing pins.

The metal strips are quite chunky, and drawing pins would be inadequate to hold them, so the only solution seemed to be to use screws.  I bought them loose at last year's county beekeeping conference, and they didn't come with any instructions, but I can't think how else to attach them to the beehives.  The Systems Administrator lent me an electric screwdriver and found me a supply of short screws.  I rapidly discovered I was going to need washers as well, since the bee sized holes in the strip were larger than the screw heads, and the strip simply fell off as soon as I let go.  I must have needed washers last year as well, but had forgotten.  That's the trouble with doing something once a year, like trying to bake an edible Christmas cake in the Aga.  By the time the need comes round again you can't remember the lessons of last time.

It is not very easy to screw a metal strip across the door of a beehive, while trying to avoid squashing any bees, and while the bees investigate you.  The beehives sit on low stands with the entrance only about 30cm above ground level, so you have to work crouching down, or else leaning over, which makes my glasses slide down my nose so that I can't see.  A friend ties elastic to his and takes it around the back of his head to stop them doing that, and I might have to try likewise.  It sounds hopelessly geeky, but I'm afraid beekeeping is, even if the papers have talked it up as being trendy in recent years.  An additional complication is that bees are defensive about the door to their hive, and notoriously not keen on the sound of machinery which might include electric screwdrivers, so you really do need to wear gloves, which makes it difficult to handle the screws, let alone the washers.

It is also difficult to set a laden brood box down on a beehive floor without squashing some bees.  You need both hands to lift the box, which is bulky and heavy, but then need a third hand to brush bees out of the way.  I could have asked the SA to help, I suppose, but didn't.  The SA has helped in the past with swarms, and in building hive parts, but partially dismantling brood boxes in a way that could provoke an unpleasant reaction from the bees isn't really something the SA has volunteered for.  I felt bad about the squashed bees, though, both from their point of view as individuals, and because it is a waste of good bees, and because the smell alerts the others that danger is afoot and potentially makes the entire apiary harder to handle.

The first colony I tackled were very good about the whole procedure, particularly since I'd managed to reposition the hive on its mesh floor on the stand in such a way that the landing board of the stand was blocking the entrance to the beehive.  Having got the mouse guard on, after a struggle, I stood back to watch if the bees were using the entrance OK, and discovered that they couldn't get in or out of the hive at all, so I had to remove the guard, reposition the hive, and refit the guard.  I had a colony a while back which produced a high proportion of golden bees, and was sorry to lose it when they swarmed and the new queen failed, so was pleased to see today that this hive is also producing golden bees.  I don't know if it really makes a difference, but they are very pretty, and seem nice to handle.  They were still bringing in a lot of pollen, mostly bright orange but I saw a few carrying dark red loads on their hind legs.

The second colony didn't seem too fussed, and I didn't make the same mistake with their entrance, mainly because the stand was better designed.  However, one bee did manage to sting my wrist through the cuff of my beekeeping glove, which hurt, and subsequently swelled.  Then the smoker went out.  The third colony were on the alert before I ever touched the hive, guard bees standing outside the entrance with their bottoms pointed warningly in the air, having presumably smelt the mayhem from the other hives (though thinking about it they were a bit crabby the last time I opened them).  They came rushing out when I lifted the box, so I'm glad I'd bothered to relight the smoker, but then they weren't too bad, and I didn't take any more direct hits.  The final colony was small and no trouble.  They were building up nicely, but swarmed very late in the summer taking themselves back to square one, then had a late outbreak of chalkbrood which they'd been clear of earlier in the year.  It was an awful season for bees.

All I have to do now is keep giving them syrup until they don't want any more, and put wire netting around them in case of woodpecker attack.  They'll keep foraging on warm days, while there is anything to feed on, but the season is winding down for both of us.

new and improved

The holidays are definitely over, to judge from the volume and snarl-up of traffic at the Manningtree railway crossing.  I was five minutes late for work, and made a mental resolution that I would have to wind my alarm clock setting back from 6.15am to 6.00am (which I have now done).  Even getting up at quarter past, it is still virtually dark, which is rather depressing, and I had to stir around in the pile of gardening clothes at the end of the bed trying to identify my work trousers by touch.  The days do shorten most rapidly around the time of the equinox, so I suppose that given a few more weeks the sense of collapsing day length will get less acute.  Plus I will have had longer to get used to the idea.

We finally have new telephones at the plant centre.  After months of difficulties answering calls, where we couldn't hear the person at the other end of the line at all, while they could hear us going Hello?  Hello? or where the line broke up so badly that the conversation ran along the lines of I'm sorry, the line is really bad, could you repeat the name of the plant, sorry, could you spell that, sorry, I didn't catch your name, we have new phones that make both ends of the conversation audible to the other.  And don't arbitrarily refuse to let you make outgoing calls.  Or cut you off in mid-flow if you stand in the wrong place.

They have many, many more features than we have worked out how to use.  The handbook covers making internal calls, which we never need to do because we all have radios, but doesn't say how to transfer calls from one handset to another at all.  Indeed, we haven't yet managed to tell what number each phone is.  The person who was responsible for sourcing the new miracle technology wasn't at work today, while his deputy who was supposed to teach the rest of us didn't seem to know too much about it, beyond saying that she'd programmed all the phones to be different colours to differentiate them.  Colour coded phones make me think vaguely of Play School.  Where's the manager?  Oh, he's on the Red phone.  One of our suppliers rang for him, and I had to explain that I couldn't transfer the call, and would have to go and physically locate him.  The supplier was quite good natured about this.  There seems to be a strong inverse correlation between enthusiasm for plants versus technology, so maybe having customers that are unable to operate their own telephone system is par for the course in his experience.

Apart from that it rained, and not many customers came.  Takings were boosted by someone ringing to pay for a gigantic mail order consignment which my absent colleague had assembled and quoted for, including delivery.  However, when his deputy (in mail order as in phones) rang our usual courier company it turned out that they didn't even deliver to the Isle of Man.  I think that by close of play she had managed to find someone who would take the plants for within the amount of money we'd charged the customer.  As she packaged up the plants through the course of the day a sizeable collection of large and odd shaped boxes built up around our office area.  I hope they get there intact.

The cafe was very quiet, and the girl running it today wanted to use our office area to work in.  I don't know what she is working at, but she had a small laptop she needed to plug in.  The manager was reluctant to give up his desk, which is understandable, and wanted the cafe girl to stay in her part of the shop.  The office was almost completely full of boxes by lunchtime anyway.  The cafe people have got a very stylish but heavy wooden A board, announcing the presence of the cafe.  It was already tucked away inside our gate as I went home, and I don't know whether the cafe girl brought it in on her way out, or whether it had been there all day instead of standing on the opposite verge to announce the cafe's presence to passing trade.  I don't know if the cafe girl can physically carry it.  She isn't very big.  I tested the weight after bringing in our sign, out of curiosity, and it is at the upper limit of what I could safely carry across a busy road.  True, I am ovet twice her age and not terribly large either, but as Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa put it, strong as a little French horse.

bulbs

It's time to be thinking about planting bulbs.  Actually, it was time to be thinking about planting daffodils a month ago, as they naturally start into growth by the end of August, but my Peter Nyssen order didn't arrive until while we were on holiday, and today is the first I've had time to do anything about it.

I placed the order back in early June, and at the time I had a clear plan of where every variety was going to go.  Unfortunately I have since forgotten it, and lost the piece of paper it was written on.  I'd pretty much forgotten what I'd ordered, so it came as a nice surprise opening the box to see what was in it.  Lots of tulips, several varieties of daffodils, some alliums, hyacinths, and a few bits and bobs.

The daffodils are all starting off in pots.  The longer term intention is to grow them in the ground, since in my experience daffodils don't seem to like being in pots for more than a single season.  I've managed to fit them into square one litre pots so far, or even 11cm for the smallest bulbs.  This means that they aren't planted as deep as they should be, so when I come to plant the potfuls out in the garden I'll need to bury them a bit deeper.  Weather and other garden jobs permitting, they'll go into the ground in March, once I can see what other bulbs are coming up and avoid spearing them.  I think the original plan was to put them in the long bed in the front garden.  At any rate, if that wasn't the original idea it's a perfectly good one, and I have time to change my mind again before March.  The long bed already contains Muscari, various sorts of bulbous iris, and hyacinths, planted out each year after doing duty for one season in pots.  I thought it could still do with more spring interest, and I was trying to think of places where the daffodils might do well.  They are mostly dwarf varieties, and don't want to be overwhelmed by other plants before their leaves have finished growing for the year.

There were two bags of ten hyacinth bulbs, allowing five each for four pots to go in the Italian garden.  I see that this year I've gone for the variety 'Minos' which is described as blue-violet.  I can't honestly remember why I chose that one, but it must have sounded desirable when I looked into it.  I haven't tried it before.  The hyacinths and daffodils are starting off inside the greenhouse, in case we have another dire winter.  I used to leave the hyacinth pots outside, and they were fine for many years, until the year before last when most of their basal plates rotted.  I had better set some mouse bait, however, since last year quite a few pots of small bulbs were dug up and eaten inside the shelter of the greenhouse.

I've bought some Anemone nemorosa, the wood anemone.  These look desperately unpromising when they arrive, a small plastic bag with little sections of black rhizome in it, like pieces of shoelace.  I've started them off like that before, and I think I got a pretty good strike rate.  At £3.50 for 25 pieces of root it is a much cheaper way of getting plants than buying them in growth from a garden centre.  I have a feeling that I may have read somewhere that A. nemorosa tended to be easier in garden cultivation than A. sylvestris, the snowdrop anemone, but I'm not sure about that.  I know I spent some happy evenings reading up on it all when placing the order, so I must have convinced myself at the time that Anemone nemorosa would be a good thing.

I've also started bringing the pots of tender things in from the Italian garden, to over-winter frost free.  The only problem is that the greenhouse is already desperately crowded.  Some of the pelargoniums that didn't do well this year, and were kept from last year, are going to go on the compost heap, and I'll start again with new vigorous plants in the spring.  I weeded and tidied the pots as I brought them in, and found several Geranium maderense seedlings in them, that had sown themselves from the plants that flowered this year.  I potted three up, slightly unceremoniously since a seed bed congested with pelargonium roots isn't the easiest medium to dibble seedlings out of.  If they survive they'll be my replacement plants for the year after next.  G. maderense generally dies after flowering, though not always, but is very generous with its seed.  My stock came originally from plants in the courtyard of the V&A, which had conveniently set seed and not yet been cleared away.

a sweet hope of glory

It was a beautiful, sunny day, and after charging around looking at other people's gardens it was nice to have some time in my own.  I need to get the pots of pelargoniums and other tender things into the greenhouse pretty soon, before a frost catches me out, which is tricky as the greenhouse already seems rather full.  The answer to this is to plant out some of the trays of home grown plants, and accumulated purchases, that are currently in the greenhouse, which in turn means finding spaces for them in the borders.

The variegated Luma apiculata was no problem.  I've known for ages where that was going to go, and there's been a place ready for it since the gigantic self-sown biennial Silybum marianum that was there flowered and died.  This is an ornamental thistle whose leaves are splashed with white, and purple flowers.  Legend has it that the white markings are down to the Virgin Mary accidentally splashing the plant with her milk, a story reflected in some of its common names, like blessed milk thistle, as well as the specific epithet of marianum.  It was traditionally used in herbal medicine to treat liver disease, and the scientific jury is still out about quite how clinically effective its active ingredients might be, though they are used to treat acute poisoning due to eating death cap toadstools. The plants can stay as little runty specimens or grow well over a metre high, depending on soil conditions, and this one had become truly enormous.  It is a spiny beast, and the brown remnants were quite uncomfortable to cart off to the bonfire (Christopher Lloyd refused to grow the Scotch thistle Onopordum for that same reason).

The Luma is a slightly tender shrub, and it may be unwise to plant it out in late September, but I thought I could put a pot over it if a very cold snap were forecast.  At least the ground is warm so it should start rooting into the surrounding soil, and it will have more reliable drainage in the gravel than sitting in its black plastic pot all winter in the greenhouse.  In milder parts of the country I have seen the plain green Luma form small trees, with lovely cinnamon brown bark, but in north Essex I'll be quite happy with my variegated Glanleam Gold if it manages to make a nice medium sized dome.  I have got it near to the olive tree in the Italian garden, where it is supposed to contribute to the Mediterranean ambience.

A likely looking gap near the front of the sloping bed in the back garden, where I was hoping to drop in three Penstemon grandiflorus, proved to be rather full of roots.  That is the trouble with trying to fill spaces in mature borders.  Even when there is a gap visible to the eye above ground, below ground things tend to be pretty crowded already.  I hacked out planting holes, digging up a few Muscari bulbs in the process.  Penstemon grandiflorus hails originally from the prairies of central North America, so it may cope with root competition from shrubs or it may not.  We'll see.  It has tubular flowers in a subtle shade of lavender blue, and looks wilder and more natural than the hybrid penstemons you usually see in garden centres, as indeed it is.  I thought it was delightful.  I have just seen that Chiltern Seeds offer it, so if my plants survive, flower and set seed, and if I remember to save some, I should be able to get some more plants.  Looking at the way the bought plants were clumping up in their pots, I thought it might be possible to split a mature specimen, something you can't normally do with penstemons, but this species seems less woody than most of the hybrids.  It may be correspondingly less easy to take cuttings.

One piece of planting from a previous year is starting to pay off.  I sent a Vitis coignetiae to climb up a native birch that had seeded itself into the pile of soil created when the conservatory foundations were dug.  It is very nasty soil, which has seen off several of the plants I've tried in it, and the vine took its time to get going, but on the basis that grape vines are very deep rooting, I hoped that this one would manage to get its roots down or out to some decent soil.  Vitis coignetiae is not a grape vine, so it may be that it isn't deep rooting at all.  However, it has survived on the spoil heap and has just about got to the top of the birch, and this year is colouring up as it is supposed to.   It has the largest leaves of any vine, which are meant to go a vivid red in the autumn, hence its common name of crimson glory vine.  Finally this year it is starting to look both crimson and glorious, standing out against the birch when seen from the far side of the garden.  Some concentration so as not to cut through the base of the stem when clearing brambles and weeds has been required over the years to get to this point.

well worth seeing

I went with my dad today to the Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy.  It runs until 9th December, but I'd been meaning to sneak in a visit before the end of this month because that's when my gift membership runs out, which by mutual consent my mother is not renewing.  Dad asked if he could come too, having read a rave review in The Economist, so off we went.

It is a really good exhibition, and very well worth seeing.  Some of the objects are beautiful, and some interesting rather than aesthetically delightful (though beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder).  They span five millennia and almost every continent, and are arranged thematically, with heads in one room, groups in another, animals together, and so on.

This produces some fascinating juxtapositions.  A tall, thin figure made as a votive offering dating from prehistoric times stands just across the room from a lanky Giacometti man in a cage.  Had Giacometti seen such ancient figures, or was he reinventing an image that had occurred previously in the history of art?

I was too mean to buy a catalogue (you have to draw the line with art books somewhere) but things that have stuck in my mind include:

Portrait of an artist made in the last century.  His head is modelled from a palette board and his legs seem fused with those of his easel, as if painter and work were one.  His whole air is joyously jaunty.  I'd have liked to take that one home.  It would look very nice in the garden.

A late  Renaissance life size sculpture of a turkey that looks astonishingly modern.  If I hadn't read the caption I'd cheerfully have believed that it was made last week.

The remains of a dancing satyr (head and torso plus one leg) that were dredged up from off the coast of (I think) Sicily, that greets you on the way in.  There is so much movement in his dance.

A strange little prehistoric wheeled chariot with warriors and antlered beasts, found at a Danish burial site.  The beasts could have been knocked out at any time during the Sixties.  Once you've got a good design formula then why change it?

The mysterious buddhas.

The Nigerian masks.

And so on.  There are lots of good things, and for enthusiasts of the male body some very buff nude torsos.  I think the things that moved me least were the vast statues of biblical and mythical figures standing lecturing or slaughtering each other, as the case may be.  My favourites seemed to include the quirkiest, and those portraying animals.

A display in one room explains different casting methods, including how in lost wax casting you can avoid destroying the original model, which I think I almost followed, except that I am still confused about how the final cast object is hollow, and not filled with clay or plaster.  I should have bought the book.

gifts available to buy

We are going to another wedding next month.  I am looking forward to this, firstly because it should be a very happy occasion, secondly because it provides another opportunity for me to wear the hat, and finally because it is in West Sussex, too far to drive there and back in a day, and so I get to spend a night in a luxury hotel.  This is because the wedding is being held in the hotel, and by the time we'd booked into a middle market alternative and organised a taxi to take us there and collect us afterwards, we might as well just go for it and stay at the venue.  And some of our friends are staying there.  And as we are driving down on the morning of the ceremony we could be tight for time trying to check in somewhere else first.

I suddenly remembered that we needed to get them a present.  They are very organised, and have a List at John Lewis, but the last time I looked at the details I discovered that the List had not yet opened for shopping.  The Systems Administrator and I did not have a list.  Twenty eight years later we are still boiling pasta in the striped enamel pan from Habitat that someone gave us, though it is a bit chipped now, and cooking from Jane Grigson's Book of Vegetables, though you have to be a little careful with that because some of the pages are coming loose, but the home brewing kit that someone else chose for us never produced anything drinkable, and several house moves later none of the parts survive.  It is probably a good idea to have a list, if you actually need stuff for your house, and don't trust your friends and family's ideas of what items would be either useful or beautiful.

I gave the card with the number of the List on it to the Systems Administrator, who logged in, and announced after a while that the happy couple wanted a waste paper basket, and a radiator.  I would not have thought of giving anybody a radiator as a wedding present, but if you happened to need one you might be very pleased to receive it, which goes to show how useful lists can be.  The SA opted for the last pair out of an original request for three sets of Waterford goblets, which brings them up to a full set of six, and seems preferable to them receiving two of this and four of that.

I had a look at the list, feeling slightly voyeuristic to see somebody else's ambitions for their home laid bare to public scrutiny.  They would like a tablecloth, which is good.  I'm all in favour of tablecloths.  Also baking beans, measuring cups, a cooling rack, chopsticks and a TV.  The TV is one for the parents or a rich uncle, I fancy.  They would like a toilet brush.  Even though it is their day, and they should have what they want, I'm not sure that a loo brush is the best wedding present material.  A pizza wheel.  Can't argue with that.  Happy domestic nights in together with pizza and the Sopranos, of such is married life made.

Trying to remember what we have bought for our house recently, it would probably appear similarly mundane and eclectic.  Two albums of bagpipe music.  A two pint jug from the museums catalogue.  Three tupperware boxes, one with a complicated snap lid.  An experimental reading light from B&Q, since one of ours has broken and the strange conventions of the throwaway society mean that a whole new light costs the same as a new halogen light bulb, without any of the risks of buying a bulb that doesn't fit your existing light.  We need brighter lights to read by nowadays, but the new one can't live where the SA thought it might, since as well as shining on the SA's book it shines across the room and directly into my eyes.  An ice cream machine.  Yes, I should say that we were still living in wedding list land.

Addendum  The SA had a look at the website of the Northumberland Gazette, based in Alnwick, to try and find out more about the floods up there, but the headline news story was that a fence in Alnwick had been vandalised.