slim pickings in the asparagus bed

I have started cutting the asparagus, a mere handful of spears each time.  I suddenly noticed a few days ago that there were a few stems ready to harvest.  Since then I've read that St George's day was the traditional start of the asparagus season, but I didn't know that when I cut them.

Apparently the UK is set for a bumper harvest, because last year's good summer and this year's mild spring are what asparagus likes.  I don't think that will apply to our crop.  I haven't looked after it very well, indeed, when I started clearing the vegetable patch over the winter I had grave doubts whether it was still alive.  There didn't seem to be many old fronds from last year, and asparagus is one of those plants that disappears completely below ground in winter with no dormant buds at ground level to reassure you that there's still life down there.

The current bed is my second attempt, which put us back for starters when you're supposed to give plants time to become established and build up their strength before cutting any spears at all.  I planted the first one in the ground without doing much to it first, having read that asparagus liked good drainage and thinking we had that.  A few sad stems pushed their way up through what seemed almost a solid carpet of stones, and were eaten by a pest which may have been the asparagus beetle.  I decided it was time to start again in a different bed, this time boosted by the addition of lots of compost, and bought some pot grown plants that were going cheap at work after the manager had potted up some packaged roots that were left languishing unsold in their bags.

Unfortunately due to a communications failure with the Systems Administrator when the SA was going through a vegetable growing stage they were dug up and thrown on the compost heap.  I rescued as many pots as I could find and replanted them.  They were supposed to be an all male variety, but as some carried berries and bird sown asparagus started popping up in the gravel they clearly weren't.  There hadn't been enough pots to fill the whole bed, and two or three years ago I sent off to one of the seed companies for some bare rooted plants of an allegedly superior variety. There followed a horrendously dry summer, and while I tried to water them they were a long way from the house and there were a lot of other possibly dying plants that needed watering as well.

I did manage to get the bed weeded and Strulched, and for a while it looked under control, but last year I don't think it was weeded at all, and by then the covering of Strulch had broken down, so it was a sadly overgrown and weedy asparagus patch that greeted me this winter when I decided to try and have another go.  Some of the most recently planted posh plants had become exposed, so that the central part of the clump was above the level of the soil, held in place by its surrounding circle of roots.  They looked completely dessicated and very unpromising.

I gave it a preliminary weed which got the big stuff out, though I need to go round again and scrape out more oxalis, and delve away at the running roots of a grass that's set up camp in the middle. And there are a couple of bramble roots I haven't got out completely, and some strawberry plants that rooted from runners making a break from the strawberry bed, and that can stay there just for the minute in case I need them.  But the asparagus is no longer competing with any large weeds, and I have watered it once or twice.  I intend to spread a layer of mushroom compost over the bed, just as soon as I can get round to it, which the exposed roots will probably appreciate.  They are throwing up a few incredibly thin and weedy  shoots from underground, so are not dead yet. Indeed, I've a feeling I've read about asparagus fields surviving ploughing, so the essential life of the plant must be located quite far down.

I've only taken my small crop from the older plants, which have been sending up some good fat spears as well as the weedy sprue, and I reckon are strong enough to take it, though I don't think I'll be picking until June.  There was nowhere near enough for it to be worth serving with hollandaise sauce, but it made a good flavouring for a couple of cheese flans.  Home grown asparagus and our own eggs, but that's as close to the Good Life as it's going to get, since we are definitely not keeping a cow.

more threats to the honey bee

Tonight was the monthly beekeepers' meeting.  We had a lecture about the small hive beetle, which was interesting but has increased by one the list of things to worry about.  It is a pest of honey bees, which is not in the UK, yet, but has spread across America and Australia and is heading in our direction.

It came originally from sub-Saharan Africa, where it is only a minor pest, because their bees are extremely good at clearing intruders out of their hives, and are generally much more fierce than the European honey bee.  Left to its own devices it would probably have stayed there, as it can only fly about seven miles at the most, and sub-Saharan Africa is bounded on two sides by ocean and on the third by the Sahara.  Thanks to human beings moving so much stuff about the planet, not just bees but food, plants, and plant based products, the small hive beetle has made a break for it, and is established on every continent (except Antarctica).  In Europe it is still confined to southern Italy, after a Portuguese outbreak arising directly from the importation of honey bees was spotted quickly and wiped out, but you have a nasty feeling it's only a matter of time.

The beetle is quite a lot smaller than a bee, maybe a bit bigger than a bee's head.  It lives and lays its eggs in bee colonies.  The grubs are truly revolting, wriggly maggots that eat everything. Honey, pollen, bee larvae.  They move throughout the hive, chewing their way through the wax, and defecate as they go.  You wouldn't fancy honey that contained beetle larvae frass anyway, but in case you did, their excrement contains a yeast that causes the honey to ferment and break out of its cells.  The bees mop up the honey and store it again, which merely spreads the yeast further through the hive.

The larvae have to leave the hive and burrow into the ground to pupate, so there might be some prospect of controlling them during that phase of their lifecycle using parasitic nematodes.  The adult beetles tend to congregate together in corners out of the way of the bees, who will harass them, so there is some scope for trapping using corrugated card that you then remove and destroy with the beetles inside, or with liquid traps containing cider vinegar, to which they are extremely partial until the point where they drown.  It sounds like putting out half grapefruit skins and beer traps for the slugs, and is probably about as effective.  There is no chemical treatment available. Mind you, the varroa experience has shown that finding an insecticide that will target the insect pest without also harming the bees is extremely difficult, and if there were just one then the target would soon develop resistance.  And there's the problem of not leaving residues in the honey. Honey containing larval droppings sounds bad enough, but at least they're organic.  Pesticide residues, anybody?

The Systems Administrator asked when I got home if I had had a nice time, and I said that it had been very interesting and I'd spoken to people and eaten a chocolate biscuit, which was nice, only it was all rather depressing.  This worried the SA, until we'd established that it was the prospect of disgusting wriggly larvae that was depressing, not that anybody had died, at which the SA looked simultaneously amused and relieved.  I slightly wish I hadn't seen that video clip of the larvae wriggling, though, as I don't want it coming back into my mind if I wake up at three in the morning.  It really was singularly unpleasant.  The commercial beekeeper there said that what we should really be worrying about was not the small hive beetle, but the Asian hornet, which is already as close to the UK as France and will eat fifty adult bees an hour and forms vast colonies containing thirty or forty thousand destroying insects.  So that's two extra things to worry about.

the folk awards

We've just been listening to the Radio 2 Folk Awards.  I couldn't guess who was going to win in any of the categories, or rather when I did guess, I guessed wrong.  The Furrow Collective, who (which?) I saw at the Colchester Arts Centre a few weeks back were up for two awards, but didn't get either.  I thought they'd be pipped to the post for Best Group by The Gloaming, which (who?) by all accounts are fabulously glamorous and includes Martin Hayes, that most fey and faerie of Irish fiddlers.  Who would ever have thought it would go to three young a capella male singers from Stockton?  Not the members of The Young'Uns, to judge from their amiable acceptance speech. Nobody at the Folk Awards ever admits they expected to win, but The Young'Uns did sound genuinely surprised.

I was pleased that Loudon Wainwright III was given a lifetime achievement award, and was waiting for him to thank his producer and Jesus Christ in his acceptance speech, only he didn't, although he thanked lots of other people.  The Systems Administrator and I were early adopters of Loudon Wainwright, and have his first album on cassette.  It still reminds me of lying at anchor on the river Deben, after we played it a lot one summer sailing holiday.  As a proud father he is probably chuffed to bits when the newspaper column inches are filled with praise of Rufus and Martha (I wish I had heard her version of Seven Deadly Sins.  I imagine it would be quite something) but he is probably pleased when the media remembers that his own musical career isn't over yet.

I was surprised that Cara Dillon didn't get anything.  The Radio 2 folk programme has been all over her new album since it came out, and she is so elfin and beautiful.  I thought there should be a Most Elfin award, and it could be given to Cara Dillon, Julie Fowlis and Martin Hayes in turn.  The SA nominated the creation of a Best Bellowhead award, to be awarded annually to Bellowhead.

I am rather sorry that I didn't go to see Greg Russell and Ciaran Algar, who I am pretty sure were on recently at the Arts Centre.  But I had a cold, the seats in the Arts Centre are so uncomfortable that it has to be something really compellingly good to persuade the SA to sit on them for an entire evening, and I was already booked to go to another gig there with the friend who is quite into folk music (though not nerdily steeped in it since infancy) and didn't want to overload her.

Looking at the full list of nominees, I have seen quite a few of them live, rarely in a venue seating more than three hundred, and seldom paying more than twenty pounds for a ticket.  Tim Dowling made a joke in his speech about how the four groups nominated in the category where he was presenting the prize were all dedicated to the tradition while pushing the boundaries (or words to that effect) while all other folk musicians were just in it for the money.  He got a laugh, but it was a bit near the bone.  How many other musicians up for national awards have to man their own merchandise stand during the interval?

a question of priorities

After saying that I must concentrate on spreading Strulch, today I did not touch so much as a single bucket of it.  First of all I watered the ditch bed, and then I helped the Systems Administrator move the piles of cut brambles down from the meadow to the bonfire heap, now that we have a working lawn tractor, and then I inspected the bees, and then I finished watering the ditch bed and watered all the pots.  And by the time I'd had a tiny fit of domesticity and emptied the dishwasher it was gone seven and time to sit down.

The ditch bed and the retro kidney shaped bed round the three river birches are looking very pretty. A fresh crop of weeds is coming through, when you look closely, and some of the flower stems have been eaten off by rabbits or muntjac, but there are primroses, violets, pulmonaria and anemonella, and great clumps of Erythronium 'Pagoda', which seems the easiest of the trout lilies.  The primroses are mostly the wild yellow sort, but there are some pink ones, a few of the little purple 'Wanda', some odd dark red, and a soft pink and white double which are both lasting remarkably well.  Double primroses are not always long lived plants, and I tend not to get round to splitting them and replanting in fresh enriched soil as I would if I were more of a primrose specialist.  There are little violets in a good shade of pinky mauve, and bigger ones in blue.  The pink violets and the primroses have seeded themselves into the shaded part of the lawn where it is turning to moss.  The hellebore flowers are ageing gracefully, as hellebores do, and the spotted leaves of Arum italicum 'Pictum' are making fine fat clumps, since for once nothing has dug up and eaten the tubers.  So the ditch and birch beds are looking very nice, and I enjoyed standing looking as I gently played the hose over them.

There were a lot of brambles.  If I'd been properly on top of them over the past couple of years there wouldn't have been so many, so if I can have a go at the roots with the pickaxe over the remainder of the year then it shouldn't be so bad next year.  Rubus cockburnianus simply needs to go.  It is much, much too rampant.  I can imagine situations in which it could be useful, if you had a spare acre to cover, or if it were safely confined on an island, or maybe in the middle of an area of grass that was mowed weekly so that its questing adventitious shoots were regularly cut down, but it is a menace in a normal garden setting, even in a large garden.  We did not manage to get all the brambles and hedge prunings back in today's session, because after a couple of hours the old lawn tractor began to get rather hot and bothered.  It was quite enough anyway, since by then the Systems Administrator's back had gone.

Four of the bee colonies were bursting out of their boxes and were beginning to think about swarming.  I should really have looked at them last week, only I was committed to going to London on the one really hot day, and the following day when it was warmish my chest was so bunged up I couldn't cope with the idea of opening the bees, and then the chilly easterly started blowing again. Admittedly I could have put supers on, but I expect they'd have started to think about swarming anyway.  They are good natured bees, every hive, but swarmy.  The fifth colony was not doing so well, for reasons that remain mysterious, but the small colony in the nuc, that never built up or did anything useful all last summer, was crammed with bees and had brood on every one of its five frames but without any signs of wanting to swarm.  The sixth colony was almost beeless.  It was originally the other half of the mysteriously weak fifth colony, created by splitting a strong colony last spring, and I had never been able to find any obvious symptoms of disease or reason for its lacklustre performance since.

I gave the full size box from the failed colony to the nuc.  This was at one level a risky strategy, given that I didn't know why the failed colony didn't thrive, and it might have been something infectious.  But the nuc was failing for most of last year, before rallying to the point where it needed a bigger box, and I don't have an endless supply of beehives to give every colony a brand new, guaranteed infection free one every time.  Putting a slightly suspect small colony into a slightly suspect box and reserving my new boxes for swarm control in the booming colonies seemed the best solution.

Besides which, I haven't made up the new boxes yet, I've been so busy with other things.  And now it's urgent.  It remains to be seen how much of the Strulch will ever find it's way on to the borders before winter.

bulk delivery

The Strulch arrived.  The driver had the sense to reverse in, but ignored the request to go round the outside of the turning circle and scraped his way up the eleagnus hedge, though he made it further towards the house than the last one.  I could hear faint fries of protest from the cab because he could not get out, before he emerged through the nearside door.  I found him a piece of board so that he could run his mechanised pallet trolley off the back of the tail lift, and that was as far as it was going on the gravel.

I read an article the other day about the advice from some doctor who was urging the population to take much more exercise for the good of its health.  A stroll around the golf course or gardening were not enough, he said.  We needed aerobic and load bearing exercise.  I don't think his idea of gardening can have been the same as mine, because after the lorry had gone I shifted the entire pallet load off the drive, a bag at a time.  Each bag weights 13.5 kilogrammes, so that's six hundred and seventy five kilos.  Plus the pallet.  Plus dragging a substantial piece of exterior grade plywood over from the workshop and putting it away afterwards.  Shifting approximately eleven times your own bodyweight in materials before teatime counts as load bearing and aerobic in my book.

The Strulch is now cached in fairly neat piles near to where I need to use it, some in the back garden, some next to the remaining bag of gravel in the turning circle, and some by the entrance bed.  I wasn't sure exactly how much I'd need where, so stacked some on the concrete by the pot shed where it would be out of the way and could be brought out as and when needed.  Applying it seems terribly urgent.  The foliage in the borders is expanding by the day, and it is getting difficult to apply mulch.  I resumed Strulching in the bog bed, on the grounds that the thalictrum leaves were growing faster and fluffier than anything else, but really it's a case of everything needing doing at once.  I feel the rest of the week is going to be devoted to mulch.  Apart from the fact that some cosmos need pricking out, and the recently planted heathers and box plants need watering.

Meanwhile, we have a new postbox.  One day last week, as I drove past the spot where the previous one used to be, I passed a builder's van and a pair of workman in high visibility vests carrying a bright and shiny red box.  I considered stopping and asking them what had happened to the old one, and if it had been stolen or needed upgrading to fit modern security standards or something.  But then I thought that their job was simply to install the new box and they could not be expected to know the whys and wherefores of what happened to its predecessor.

The new box was not immediately open for business, having a bag taped over its head, and I wondered hopefully whether there was going to be a grand opening, with Councillor Heaney and Bernard Jenkin making speeches about the importance of rural postboxes before ceremonially cutting a ribbon, but the Systems Administrator said it was probably to do with keys.  It was still bagged up this morning when the SA went to the supermarket, but by this evening when I got back from the beekeepers committee meeting the bag had gone.  I am glad we have a new box.  I did sometimes walk to the old one, and it's a four mile round trip to the next nearest, plus stopping in the lane to post a letter when you're passing is easier than parking is in the neighbouring villages. The school and even the church in our village were converted to residential use long ago, so the postbox was the only amenity we had left.

mend your own lawn tractor

The Systems Administrator has got the old lawn tractor running again.  We had problems last summer with it stuttering and struggling to go uphill, apparently due to fuel starvation, and at some point in the autumn it stopped running at all and spent the winter sitting outside the greenhouse on deflated tyres.  I wondered whether it would ever work again or if I was going to have a dead lawnmower next to the dahlia bed for several years until we worked out how to get rid of it, while the SA promised periodically to look at it once it got a little warmer for working outside.

The tractor's cutting deck gave up the ghost several years ago, and its battery would no longer hold a charge so that it had to be jump started each time using a portable jump starter, but it was useful for towing the trailer around the garden to collect prunings, and I've missed it while it's been out of action.  Fixing it entailed removing a lot of gunk from the carburettor, unjamming a little ball thing that is supposed to regulate the flow of fuel and had got stuck, fabricating a new gasket because the previous one had perished and the machine is so old that the SA couldn't find any gaskets to fit, changing the spark plug courtesy of Halfords, re-inflating the tyres which go down overnight, and buying a new jump starter because the old one was knackered.  The new one came with a small compressor built in, which will be handy as the SA can fix the tyres with the tractor out in the garden instead of having to limp back to the workshop on flats.

I was impressed by the DIY gasket.  It was made out of multiple layers of adhesive paper, cut to shape with a laser cutter and stuck together.  It may not last very long, but as the SA said there was no point in buying the materials to try and make a better one before the tractor was up and running, in case there turned out to be some other fault as well as the fuel system, one that the SA couldn't cure.  All that remains is to try and find a copy of the workshop manual online, so that the SA can mug up on what the fuel flow ought to be.  Still, the machine ran, making it to the meadow and towing back a trailer full of bramble stems and twigs that's been sitting by the pond for weeks. I had just about managed to drag the trailer by hand a few times, with the SA pushing at the back on the return journey, but it is much, much easier with a machine.  And beats multiple trips on foot carrying armfuls of bramble stems.  So next week we should be able to make a clean sweep of the remaining debris in the meadow.

Meanwhile I have almost got to the end of the neolithic barrow compost heap.  The vegetable beds really didn't need any more compost, so I spread some of it around the base of the hornbeam hedge. It is not a happy hedge, not as bushy as it should be, and twigs keep dying back, and as it is on horrible thin starving sand I thought that some nice organic material around its roots plus a dose of fish, blood and bone might cheer it up.  Plus it is close to the compost heap, and I didn't fancy barrowing the compost to the other end of the garden.  And I couldn't think what else to do with the compost.  It's full of weed seeds so I don't want to put it on the borders.  Around the base of the hedge I can give it a stir with the hoe.

The episode of the neolithic compost barrow illustrates one of the things I have learned about gardening since living here, which is that compost is really important.  Unless you have the tiniest of tiny gardens and absolutely don't have space for a compost bin, then learn to make your own and work out how you are going to get rid of anything pernicious or weedy that can't be safely composted at home.  Homemade compost is gold dust, but it is better when it is weed free.  The temporary demise of the tractor illustrates another of the things I have learned, which is to get kit appropriate for the size of your garden, be it a pocket handkerchief or rolling acres.  I wasted much time in the early years messing around with wheelbarrows, buckets and a small tipping trailer, before we grasped that for this amount of space we needed a proper four wheeled trailer towed behind a tractor.  I have felt the lack of it for the past few months, and am thrilled that the SA has managed to fix it.

supporting young artists

The music society is putting on a concert for young performers later this afternoon.  They are quite high level young musicians: two are bound for national music colleges this autumn.  One plays the marimba, and I've seen him on YouTube and he is pretty good.  Duty demands that I support the concert, but in truth I'm not overly keen on young musicians.  I know that people's careers have to start somewhere, and so I try to be nice about them, just as I try not to show my annoyance at the learner drivers who wobble all over Colchester's (admittedly confusing) roundabouts and totter through forty zones at twenty-eight miles an hour while indicating so far in advance of their turning that I can't work out what they're doing.  But I secretly wish musicians could spring forth fully formed, or at least that I could wait to see them until they are ready to grace LSO St Luke's.

We are not at all sure how many people will come to the concert.  There are apparently other concerts on today, and it may be that the bulk of the music loving public who are not themselves the proud parents of the performers share my reservations about young artists.  This uncertainty over numbers complicates the catering.  The chairman asked us to bring simple nibbles, definitely not canapes.  I'm not at all sure what constitutes a simple nibble.  When we have friends round it means Waitrose pretzels and retro cheese footballs, or maybe olives if we're feeling lavish.  The chairman announced her intention to bring some mini pork pies and cherry tomatoes that could be held in reserve unopened, ready to be deployed if needed and redeployed at another arts event on Monday if not.

She also bagsied the cucumber sandwich option, and somebody else volunteered her usual cheese and olive scones, adding firmly that they were already made and in the freezer.  I'd quite fancied cucumber sandwiches, not least because you can buy a cucumber for a quid and having to throw away uneaten cucumber sandwiches would be less painful than chucking out half a tray of uneaten ham.  The chairman suggested things that could be frozen if not eaten on the day, but I couldn't think of anything, given that the scone option had already gone.

So I made a batch of my usual Good Housekeeping cheese straws, which I consider superior to the boxes of ready made Fudge's ones.  Since learning how to make them it has appalled me how much supermarkets charge for premium cheese straws.  That seemed a bit stingy on its own, so I made some mini egg sandwiches as well.  It seemed like a good idea before I began, after all, we have lots of eggs.  My confidence took a slight dip when I discovered that nowadays sliced bread doesn't seem to come thinly sliced, you can have thick or medium.  It took another dip when I discovered that the Hovis I'd bought in a fit of generosity instead of going for the cheapest own brand loaf felt on the dry side although I bought it specially this morning.

I took the crusts off, keeping them for the chickens who are partial to a bit of brown bread, and tried to work out how many pieces to cut each sandwich into, and ended up using an awful lot of knives as I didn't want to dip one that had been in the egg and mayo mix in the butter.  I opted for six mini sandwiches from each pair of slices, but I don't like the way that small pieces of egg were beginning to bulge out of the edges.  I put them in the fridge until I was ready to go out, having a healthy fear of food poisoning when it comes to pre-prepared salads and sandwiches, and in the hope it would stiffen the mayonnaise (Heinz finest, and I bought a new jar for the occasion), but goodness knows what they'll be like after half an hour in the car and spending the first half of the concert on a table in the back of the church.  I can see trouble ahead with the vestry carpet, and honestly I wish I'd gone for smoked salmon fragments.  I shall know next time, if there is a next time.  One of the committee members has been rallying support for another jazz concert.  I kept quiet in the committee meeting about my almost pathological hatred of most jazz, not wishing to seem hostile and negative.  If it happens I shall feel obliged to go to that as well, but I don't know if a jazz concert requires simple nibbles, or merely crisps and copious amounts of alcohol.

visiting wildlife

The night camera footage of the bottom of the garden was inconclusive.  There were a lot of shots of Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat.  He was here this morning, too, sleeping in the rose bed.  I wonder what and when he eats.  I never catch him coming in through the cat door to help himself to our cats' food, so does he go home for meals and then come back to spend the rest of the time in our garden?  Or does he hunt?  Or is he in fact a demonic being in the shape of a spectacularly ragged eared and sinister cat that doesn't eat?

More surprising were pictures of Our Ginger at half past four in the morning.  After spending the evening in our laps or sprawled on the hearthrug he evidently has another life later on, when he goes out into the garden and patrols as the great orange hunter.

Two muntjac were an unwelcome surprise, as was the fox the Systems Administrator caught on camera last week.  The muntjac appeared in front of a shrubby honeysuckle, eyes glaring, but there was no clue as to how they got in or where they went.  And there was that wretched rabbit.

By day there were pigeons, blackbirds, a pheasant, a jay, several empty shots where it wasn't clear what had triggered the camera. and the rabbit.  Just the one rabbit again, moving across the grass in short hops and nibbling as it went.  If it would strictly limit itself to grass that would be fine, it could be my friend, but it doesn't.

I found another clue to the visiting wildlife in the form of an owl pellet under the Metasequoia.  I thought for a moment it was a large dried cat turd, the slightly furry texture being not unlike the droppings of a cat that's been swallowing too much of its own fur, before spotting the mess of little bones embedded in it.  They were very thoroughly dislocated and disassembled, in no way resembling a mouse skeleton, though the whole thing did have a vaguely mouse-like air, as if a mouse had been put through a miniature car crusher.

I put it carefully on the edge of the System's Administrator's sitting out deck so that I wouldn't lose it, but when I remembered that evening that I'd left it there, the SA did not show any desire to see it, enquiring rather whether it would not be unhygienic to bring it inside.  I could not see what was unhygienic about it, beyond the fact that it had been sicked up by an owl, and used to be a mouse, but I am afraid that the SA does not share my enthusiasm for natural history.  I tried to think who else among my friends and acquaintances would appreciate an owl pellet, but no names immediately sprang to mind.  I did notice that while in 2013 the Barn Owl Trust was offering mouse pellet dissection kits in their Christmas catalogue, complete with pellet, they had dropped them the following year.

a rabbit but no Strulch

We are definitely not winning.  I went out into the front garden at half past seven this morning to open the anti-rabbit gate and saw one hopping in a leisurely fashion from the eleagnus hedge into the bed by the entrance.  A large, fat, adult.  Only the one, and no babies, thank goodness, so no evidence that they are breeding in the garden, but they seem to be living in it, or at least one is.  I went and fetched Our Ginger and carried him down to the gate, while he purred, pleased with the attention, followed at a distance by the short indignant tabby, shouting loudly and presumably displeased at my sudden disappearance before she'd decided if she wanted any more breakfast.  I set Our Ginger down on the gravel pointing at the bed where the rabbit had gone, and he stared at it politely but in apparent bafflement, and five minutes later was back outside the cat door.

The Strulch did not come.  I bit the bullet at the weekend and ordered another pallet.  I am so almost on top of the weeding in the formal garden for once, I'd like to keep it that way.  Rusted iron plant supports or a sculpture for the garden would have been nice, but mulch is more important.  The leaves of everything are expanding by the day, so I would have liked the Strulch for the weekend, if not tomorrow morning.  Besides which, I'd been hanging around within sight of the gate and keeping a regular check on the phone since yesterday morning.  I rang after lunch to enquire, and discovered that there had been a problem with the bags which had thrown everything out of synch.  The owner sounded harassed.  It is a wonderful product, but a bit of a one woman show when it comes to ordering and delivery.

She had rescheduled it for tomorrow, when I had said on the order form that it must NOT come on Friday.  I have to go out, and it seems unfair to end up leaving the Systems Administrator to offload another fifty bags, plus I absolutely do not want to find the lane out blocked by a delivery lorry at the point when I have to leave.  We agreed she would reschedule it again for Monday, and she thanked me for being so understanding, and I thought that I must have managed to sound more understanding than I felt.

Once I didn't have to keep an eye out for the Strulch lorry I was free to roam, so I disappeared to the bottom of the back garden, where the bog bed needed watering.  It is incongruous to have to water a bog, and I was afraid that might happen when I planted the area up.  Two years ago after the very wet winter the bed was mud soup to a depth of nine inches.  It isn't now.  Nothing I planted positively demands to be in liquid mud, but the primula and ferns certainly don't want it dry.  It was nice anyway to have a reason to work down there, since the fritllaries are out in the lawn and the great white cherry is in full blast.  I collected up dead bamboo leaves, noting a small piece of wandering root that needs digging out before it can spread further outside the circle of galvanised lawn edging that is supposed to delineate the limits of the bamboo, and pulled up hairy bittercress and nettle seedlings in preparation for the Strulch.

I repotted the orchids as well, now I'm fully kitted up with chopped coco husk chips and perlite. The anxiety of disturbing their roots was intense and I shall worry about them for a fortnight until I see they are none the worse for my messing around with them.  The leaves on one of the two Erythrina crista-galli seedlings suddenly began to shrivel in the greenhouse a couple of days ago. You just never know with plants.

win some, lose some

I don't think we are winning in the war against the rabbits.  The new gate proved not to be making any difference, as the Systems Administrator discovered on going out at dusk recently and seeing rabbits in the drive.  They scooted towards the gate and dived off to one side, disappearing into the undergrowth.  It took me the best part of a morning chopping back the brambles by the gate to establish that there was a ten foot run where there was no wire, and make good the deficiency. There used to be some ornamental hurdles, many years ago, but they'd rotted away.  Luckily we had half a roll of quite tall wire netting left over from something else, and even more amazingly I knew where it was.

This morning, emerging from the greenhouse and heading back to the house, I saw a large rabbit scampering about inside the gate, in broad daylight.  It ran out into the neighbour's field when it saw me, but things are getting pretty desperate when they come into the garden in the middle of the morning.  The gate has to stay open during the day, since we can't expect the postman or any other delivery drivers to get out of their vehicles to open it, let alone shut it behind them on the way out.  A new generation of cats seems the only solution, sweet little kittens that Our Ginger and the short indignant tabby will have time to get used to before they grow up to be huge ravening beasts.  That's assuming they do turn into ferocious hunters.  After all, the short indignant tabby didn't.  She doesn't even really approve of grass, much preferring man-made surfaces like concrete, or better still staying indoors.

The Amateur Gardening readers' offer lavenders arrived with today's post.  I wasn't expecting them until the end of the month, but never mind, I was here when the postman called, and they were all potted up into two seed trays by lunchtime.  They were tiny little plugs, but that's what you get for £5.95 for forty-eight plants, and they were very bushy, with multiple shoots from ground level though still less than an inch tall.  I wondered how they were made. The lowest leaves were a different shape to the others, rounder and with wavy edges, so definitely not minuscule cuttings. They might have been seed raised, though named varieties strictly shouldn't be, and then I thought perhaps they were micro-propagated.  They came in four strips of a dozen plants, each strip consisting of a row of blunt-bottomed V shaped pots, divided down the middle so that you could bend the two halves apart to release the small rootball, and held in a moulded flat plastic box inside a shiny cardboard sleeve for postage.  It worked, the little plants arrived in perfect condition, but it was industrial plant production.  How very different to the Plant Heritage propagation mornings and plant stall.

The flower on the Plant Heritage Clivia in the conservatory is opening.  It consists of a cluster of individual trumpet shaped blooms at the top of a fat stalk, the general arrangement not unlike an agapanthus.  The petals appear lustrous and slightly fleshy, in a luminous shade of orange.  I think it is marvellous, very glamorous.  I've fancied trying one for years, but not seen a plant for sale before.  Of course now I've got the ordinary orange sort I covet the rarer yellow form, but conservatory plants in general are not the easiest things to track down.  I suppose it is such a small market.  Most conservatories are used as garden rooms, with soft furnishings, and plants don't get much of a look in.

portraits of artists and friends

I went today to see the Sargent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  He was a prolific chap, Sargent.  This was the third exhibition devoted to his work I've been to in my gallery visiting lifetime, the previous two being the National Gallery's blockbuster including(so far as I can remember) the notorious portrait of Madame Gautreau with her haughty nose and chalk white skin above her plunging neckline, and the second being Sargent and the Sea, a sideways look at his output by the Royal Academy.  Look, he didn't just paint Society portraits, he did seascapes too.  As I recall they were good but didn't quite pack the punch of Madame Gautreau.

The current show, which runs until 25th May, concentrates on Sargent's pictures of his friends, family, and other creative people of the day.  You don't get as many sumptuous dresses as with the society portraits, but the personalities are livelier.  And you get Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, though I think that's normally on view in the Tate anyway.  It is pretty, though it always makes me think of the Ruggles family and their unfortunate decision to call their eldest daughter Lily Rose, who grows up a stout child with red hair who is neither lily nor rose like.

I like portraiture as an art form, and I particularly like it when I already know a little about some of the subjects. Gabriel Faure as painted by Sargent is a dreamy man with gentle eyes and a huge, soft moustache.  I can easily believe he wrote Faure's Requiem.  Edmund Gosse is highly strung and slightly tormented with a blue vein pulsing in his temple.  My companion had not read Father and Son and was not so struck by Gosse as I was.  We agreed that the Spanish dancer looked a complete pain, and Asher Wertheimer as if he would be thoroughly good company, while Robert Louis Stevenson looked as nervy and intense as you would expect of the inventor of Jekyll and Hyde and Treasure Island.  Sargent was a very, very successful portrait painter in his day and you can see why.

I don't actually think he was a particularly good draughtsman.  Some of his people don't make me believe for a minute that there is a real skeleton covered in actual human musculature underneath their clothes.  The Spanish dancer's feet don't seem to me to be quite in right place given where her head is, and her hand doesn't really look as though it was on her hip, if I thought she had any hips under her orange flounces, which I didn't.  But it doesn't matter.  He was brilliant at faces, and more than that he was brilliant at personalities and attitude.  The anatomy of Cezanne's card players is all over the place, after all, and those are some of the most valuable paintings on the planet.

We had lunch in Dishoom, a cafe I have vaguely heard of and which I know now I have looked at their website pays loving homage to the Irani cafes that were once part of the fabric of life in Bombay.  They serve an interesting roti, very large and very thin, so that I wondered whether it had started off as a piece of dough rolled out to paper thin dinner plate size (in which case how do they handle it?) or poured as batter.  If I ever go back I shall ask.  And I wore a new (in the mid season sale) Toast shirt in a fetching (I think) shade of burnt orange.  I felt quite trendy, but now it's back to weeding, compost, and poached eggs for lunch for the rest of the month.

warmer weather beckons

After seeing the weather forecast for the rest of the week I thought it was time to get the shading paint on to the greenhouse.  Damping down the floor will get you so far, but shade is more reliable, and it's a sad thing to go out for the day and come home to trays of shrivelled and dessicated seedlings.

Years ago I used to buy an expensive high tech paint that was supposed to go transparent when it rained, and cloudy again when the sun shone.  The idea was that the plants received maximum light on dull days without cooking on hot ones.  It was frankly not worth the price or the hassle, and nowadays I use a basic titanium dioxide based powder, a couple of sachets mixed up in an old fertiliser bucket in half a litre of water and applied with a long handled decorator's roller.

High status greenhouse management it is not.  The roller gives a thick enough covering to do the job, but the result is uneven, and you can see the greyish stains on the wood where I spilled over the glazing bars.  It is a world away from the pristine greenhouses on display at Chelsea or advertised in the glossy magazines.  There again, it is a working plant factory, and I'm not sure how well some of the glamorous but unshaded greenhouses would perform in practice.  One year I copied an idea from a gardening TV programme (I think Monty Don was the culprit, though he is normally pretty reliable) and threw the shading paint over the greenhouse roof, but besides being very wasteful of paint the end result looked as though an entire flock of seagulls had catastrophically crapped on it.

Space inside is very, very tight and I am going to have to evict anything reasonably tough that's still rooting in to the cold frames, to make space for the next round of pricking out.  I might have to sow some broad beans in pots, as there is still not a single one emerging in the veg patch.  How can broad beans not germinate?  They are huge great seeds, supposed to be tough as old boots and idiot proof.

The Systems Administrator, who has been waiting for days for the wind to go round to the east to have a bonfire, seized the moment late this afternoon and had one, and as promised the enormous heap of brambles and woody waste waiting to be burned vanished in scarcely any time at all.  I'm glad it's gone, as there is still plenty to come down from the meadow and it makes space for more. If the Met Office are right about it being a hot summer (and I'm not holding my breath) then we need to stay up to date with bonfires, before everything gets so hot and dry that it isn't safe to have another until the autumn.

an old butler's trick

Now the weather's warming up (not to mention the wind blowing half a gale) the hoses are coming back into commission.  In the winter I water the pots by hand when they need doing.  It's not that many trips with the watering can because the plants' water needs drop right back, and it's easier to avoid overwatering things if you aren't splashing a hose everywhere.  Plus, I learned from the year I left the spray attachments in situ attached to the hoses and they must have had water in them because one cold night they split like unlagged pipes in the frost.  Nowadays I know to take them off at about the same time as I move the pelargoniums and Geranium maderense back into the greenhouse, and the white holey stone and glass danglers into the spare room for the winter.

One of the spray guns worked perfectly when I tried it, but the other didn't.  They are rather over-engineered for my purposes, having heads you can rotate to give a variety of spray patterns, when most of the time I only want the one marked 'shower', that produces a diffuse but not too wide spread sprinkle like a watering can rose.  Sod's law dictated that the rest of the spray settings worked beautifully, the overly fierce jet, the fine mist, the flat jet (who on earth does use that?) and all the other patterns that some designer dreamt up, but not the one I wanted.  When I set the head to 'shower' lumps of water fell out of every joint in the gun, dribbling on my trousers and other places where I didn't want it.

Thinking about it logically it seemed likely that it was not actually a case of sod's law, but the holes in the head I used regularly having got clogged up with use.  I'm not sure if our water technically counts as hard, since we aren't in a chalk area, but mineral deposits rapidly collect on the kettle, the taps, the draining board and everything else it comes into contact with.  It seemed extremely likely it would be capable of blocking the channels in a spray gun, and one thing I learned working in the plant centre is that as soon as the water in a lance stops flowing quickly through the holes it was designed to flow through, it starts dribbling out everywhere else.

I could have started messing around with lime scale remover, but had a hunch that vinegar would do the trick.  Vinegar was what butlers used to use to clean decanters that were marked with mineral stains.  I remembered that from our guided tours around various stately homes servants quarters, and Margaret Powell probably mentions it in Below Stairs.  I didn't even have to dunk the whole end of the gun in vinegar, after the Systems Administrator showed me that the rotating part of the spray head unscrewed.  The only trouble with cleaning with vinegar is that it makes your house smell powerfully of nothing else, and after about five minutes I put the bowl in the porch. Twenty-four hours later I remembered it, fished out the end of the spray head, gave it a good rinse and screwed it back in place.  It worked perfectly.  No dribbles, no mess.

I was rather gratified.  The Systems Administrator picked up the current spray heads in Tesco a couple of summers ago, for a ridiculously small amount of money, but they no longer seem to be doing them, or maybe it is too early, while B&Q were charging between twelve and twenty quid. To have actually succeeded in mending a mechanical device, and saved myself a meaningful amount of money in the process, is a rare and sweet pleasure.

Addendum  The box of orchids ended up spending the night shut in the downstairs loo before being safely removed to the conservatory, as I had a sudden horrid vision of Our Ginger deciding to sleep in the box.  They are mysterious little things.  I truly have no idea whether the long green growths coming up from one of them are roots or shoots.

conservatory gardening

I have been researching the needs of my new orchids.  Three of them prefer to be pot bound, so beyond transferring them very carefully from their plastic into tiny terracotta pots for purely presentational reasons, I don't need to do anything to them other than give them a little bit of orchid food occasionally.  The fourth, a winter hardy species I could plant in the border if I wanted to, and which I fell for partly after hearing the grower describe how rapidly it would bulk up, is a more demanding character.  It needs to go into a bigger pot to give it room to spread, but ordinary multipurpose compost will not do, instead it needs a mixture of finely crushed bark and perlite.  I do not have any of either among my stocks of gardening supplies, and the extra potting medium is going to cost me as much as the original plant, but it will be very nice if it does really double in size this year.  Apparently masses of water during the growing season should do the trick, and a dose of tomato fertiliser every fortnight.

It is called Calanthe brevicornu, a name I still keep forgetting because it is so completely unfamiliar.  My other new acquisitions are epiphytes, living in the wild in the tree canopy with no proper soil as such, so their roots need to be tucked into a minimum quantity of very free draining compost and kept bone dry in the winter, but the Calanthe is a woodlander from north India.  The nurseryman was entirely confident that it would be hardy outside in our climate, and I had brief rococo images of establishing a drift of it in the very end of the wood.  The vendors did not think that slugs ate it, or rabbits, and the plants came in a lovely range of amber and mauve shades, so that I had real difficulty only choosing one.  But in the real world I had better see if I can keep my one plant alive before attempting any drifts.  It is only flowering now because it has been under glass for the winter.  If grown outside the new growth would barely be showing above ground by this stage of the year.

I haven't yet taken any of them down to the conservatory.  All four are still sitting in a small box on the dining room table while I contemplate them and consider their precise requirements.  They should be fine there for now, and they are getting at least as much light as they would be if they were still in the RHS halls at Vincent Square.

I have been scrubbing the deck outside the conservatory.  It's the first time I've done it since the Systems Administrator laid it, and apparently that was four years ago.  The SA can date it precisely because the cricket world cup was on at the time.  The Western Red Cedar has faded from its original rather bright orange shade to something more subtle, though not so silvery as weathered oak, and it is rewarding to see the colour come back as the layers of dirt and algae scrub away.  It is a lot of scrubbing, though.  The SA is not keen on using the pressure washer because it can too easily rip up the grain of the wood, and at least doing it by hand I don't spatter filth over the conservatory windows and neighbouring plants.  The only cleaning product I'm using is a little bit of Ecover washing up liquid in a bucket of water, plus fresh water sprayed out of the hose.

I did take a break from the deck to wash the kitchen floor.  Even I began to feel a sense of warped priorities to be putting that much effort into cleaning my garden at the same time as the floor of the room where we prepare food had a fine swirl of cat hair in every corner, plus a spattering of coffee grounds.

art and orchids

I went to London today.  My real business was with the RHS orchid show in Vincent Square, but I wanted to get maximum value from my travelling time and off-peak rail fare, and fitted in a couple of exhibitions first.  It's a slightly back to front way of planning a day out to save the main event until last, when you might be getting tired, but I thought that if I were to buy any plants I would probably not be allowed to take them into a gallery.  I might be wrong about that.  I have never tried taking a carrier bag of orchids into the Tate, and if I were going to attack the artworks a small Dendrobium would not be my weapon of choice, but I was afraid that the staff might take a dim view, and even if they didn't it would be a faff carrying the plants all round the exhibitions without squashing them.

The exhibitions on at Tate Britain at the moment were not necessarily top of my list of things I wanted to see, but Millbank is very close to Vincent Square, and I was quite sure I would be able to get in on the grounds that (a) I have a membership card which offers immediate entry to all temporary exhibitions and (b) neither exhibition has received blockbuster rave reviews and they were most unlikely to be full (so unlikely I would put it in the same category of implausibility as Gladstone slapping Queen Victoria on the back the first time he met her and offering her a cigar. It's possible, but you know it didn't happen).

Salt and Silver, early photography 1840 to 1860, is rather good in a quiet way.  It shows a small part of a very large collection amassed by Michael G Wilson, who in his day job is a film producer who has worked on the James Bond franchise, and is also an Art Fund trustee.  The photos are visually attractive, in a soft, small way, and interesting as historic documents of vanished people and places.  I am not a photographer and let the technicalities wash past me, apart from being amazed that the processes described could possibly have produced coherent images (and in my hands I'm pretty sure they wouldn't).  So that was nice.

Sculpture Victorious is simply bonkers.  The Tate has filled several rooms with stuff the Victorians made, apparently largely because they could.   Busts of Queen Victoria, nude statues of nymphs and athletes with tight buttocks, some caught in the act of wrestling snakes or slaying eagles (what did the Victorians have against eagles?), huge strange contraptions for putting salt or candles in, elephants, dead birds.  They used a vast range of materials (because they could), marble, imitation marble, ivory (poor elephants), pottery, wood, bronze, copper and zinc, plaster.  Most of it was unremittingly hideous.  I don't understand how an era that could produce Middlemarch and Jane Eyre could lose its way so utterly when it came to the visual arts, but there you go.

The orchids seemed less over the top than they would have otherwise, after viewing the Victorian sculpture.  They were still quite overwhelming.  When I visit Chelsea nowadays I have a rough idea of what quite a lot of the plants are.  By no means all of them, and not the tropical displays, but on many of the stands I have a general idea of what I'm looking at, or direct experience of trying to grow some of them.  With orchids my knowledge and experience pretty much end with the supermarket moth orchids on the kitchen window sill.  Two large halls full of strange and unfamiliar flowers in every colour you can think of (except true blue) coming from every corner of the Far East and Latin America, that's something else.  They were wonderful, and I wandered around gawping.

I made a few small (young plants) and modest (by orchid standards) purchases, after asking a couple of exhibitors if they had anything that would grow in the conditions I had to offer, frost free but no warmer in winter, west facing so only partial sunlight.  People were extraordinarily nice. One man spent ages explaining Dendrobium to me, brushing aside my concerns that he was spending a lot of time over a potential six pound purchase.  I suppose you only go into that line of work if you really like orchids.  You certainly don't do it to become rich.  And today's tentative beginner might be a keen collector in a few year's time, and might click on your website ahead of others because they remember that you were helpful to them, but I think mainly they are driven by enthusiasm.  I'll see how I get on with my embryonic collection, and let you know whether they live and flower, or merely live, or quietly die.

Addendum  Today's literary crib is from GK Chesterton, who would believe the impossible but not the improbable.

my new TV crush

We are hooked on a BBC2 historical food programme.  Or maybe it should be described as a reenactment.  Or a reinvention of reality TV.  It is called Back in Time for Dinner.  The fact that it was on totally passed us by until half way through the series, but in these modern times we have been catching up on the iPlayer.

A family are eating their way through British food culture since the 1950s, at the scale of one day per year, while the ground floor of their house is redecorated in the style of each decade, complete with historic kitchen appliances and going to the lengths of blanking off the kitchen extension for the 1950s because the room wouldn't have been that large then.  Clothes, cars and music of the period complete the atmosphere.  Giles Coren presents, popping up periodically in between leaving the family to their own devices, Mary Berry and a hairy biker make guest appearances, and there is a food historian on hand.  The family themselves are delightful, funny and reflective by turns.

The format allows scope for plenty of date driven jokes, along the line of the bread being mouldy but they've had it since 1962, and there is some slapstick action with some of the vintage kitchen equipment.  First prize must go to their efforts to open a tin of pilchards (though at least they did get their pilchards eventually rather than beating the tin to a shape so horrible and misshapen that they threw it in the Thames).  But the real draw is the social history.

When did smoky bacon flavour crisps first enter British food culture?  And who knew that people used to go out to dinner at the first motorway service stations, which were regarded as glamorous destinations but were not given licences to serve alcohol, even though there was no drink-driving legislation at the time?  Episode one on the 1950s felt like history.  Well, it was before our time. We began to recognise bits of the 1960s, and as for the 1970s, those brown and orange storage canisters, that checked orange and brown furnishing fabric, the visits to the freezer centre.  Space hoppers.  Power cuts.  OK, it was a bit more long winded than simply nibbling a madeleine, but we were off down memory lane like bloodhounds on the trail of a packet of sausages.  I can't wait for the 1980s from the trailer, those rubic cubes and the bright red handles on all the kitchen cupboards take me straight back to the Swiss Cottage branch of Habitat.

I love food history.  Partly, I like food, but how and what people cook and eat says so much about how they live and how they relate to each other and what their values are and how their country's economy is doing.  And food history covering the second half of the twentieth century rather than the Victorian era or the Tudor kitchen allows us to calibrate our own experiences against the general trend.  I think that by the mid 1970s my mother was doing more cooking from scratch than the average, despite have a full time university lecturer's post.  The Systems Administrator was not allowed to have Angel Delight at home, poor mite.  Since starting to watch Back in time for Dinner we've been trying to date our own culinary habits, and come to the conclusion that we are quite old fashioned.  We both like corned beef hash, but possess no cookery books by Yotam Ottolenghi.

You have eleven days to catch part one, and presumably longer to watch the later episodes.  It's worth watching.  Apart from Wolf Hall, it's the only thing on TV all year that I've liked so much I've been actively looking forward to the next episode.

chopping and pruning

My latest thorn proof pruning gloves have dyed my fingers yellow, so that they look as though I had a severe smoking habit.  I was afraid that was going to happen as I eyed up the bright ginger gauntlets that were the only pruning gloves on offer in the Clacton Garden Centre, but the seams had gone down the index fingers of my old ones, and I needed replacements at that moment.  I wish somebody would take the issue of protective gloves for gardeners seriously.  I look enviously at workwear sites on the web, where specialist gloves for various industries are numerically graded in terms of cut resistance.  The most you can find out about most gardening gloves is Amazon user feedback along the lines of 'the lining came unstitched the first time I wore them'.  Everyday green gardening gloves from supermarkets are a gamble when they sell them (in the summer months only, since nobody gardens in the winter).  Some are fine, just as good as the branded ones in the garden centres but less than half the price, but others dye your fingers green.  If having nicotine coloured fingers is bad then having green ones is worse, making you look vaguely gangrenous.

I borrowed the Systems Administrator's welding gauntlets recently, to deal with some particularly vicious brambles in the meadow.  The trouble with most industrial workwear is that it only comes in large sizes.  I take a size 7 in gloves, and wearing the SA's size 10s is like gardening dressed up as a flappy handed clown.  I suppose that the market for people doing heavyweight garden work by hand is tiny.  Field hedges are all cut with flails nowadays, and a farmer's or professional landscaper's response to an unwanted patch of brambles would be to petrol strim or bulldoze the lot.  Only a few fanatical but disorganised gardeners end up dealing with problems like a fallen but still growing oak tree that has filled with brambles to a height of about fifteen feet, and need to remove the brambles by hand while keeping the oak.

They have gone now, and I have rounded up the straggling stems of the rambling rose that is supposed to be 'Ethel' and shoved them in the direction of the oak canopy.  Whatever the rose is, it's a good clinger-on.  It took me a long time to extract it from the other shrubs it had grown through instead of climbing the oak tree, as it clung tenaciously to the neighbouring shrub roses, a holly and the remaining litter of cut bramble stems on the ground.  At times it seemed to have clasped its hands around its old companions, refusing to let go.  If it can be persuaded to get going in the oak instead it should be secure up there, not like 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' which is a slippery beast.

Late in the afternoon I pollarded the pussy willow that seeded itself in the bog bed a few years ago. I felt rather mean chopping it now, partly because a few pussies hadn't quite gone over and a few bees were foraging on it, and partly because the leaf buds were swelling and about to break.  But I can't work out when else to do it.  I want it as a pollard, a neat lollipop like you see along rivers, because otherwise it will grow far too big and cast too much shade.  It's not as though it's meant to be there at all, I already have an orange tinted alder in that bed.  And I want the pussies, because otherwise what's the point of growing it at all.  If I pollard in the winter when it's dormant I won't get the flowers, so the only time I can think of to do it is immediately after flowering, but it feels wrong to be removing all those swelling leaf buds.  I told myself that willows were tough old things that would root from cuttings even when you stuck them in upside down.

the mystery of the vanishing rabbits

Curiouser and curiouser.  The camera footage of the bottom of the big sloping bed in the back garden showed absolutely nothing at all, except for a chicken.  Otherwise a complete blank, no bunnies.  So the back of the top of that border is a rabbit superhighway, then at the bottom of it there are no rabbits whatsoever.  In between is a very solid wire netting fence that appears to be entirely rabbit proof.  An Agatha Christie locked room murder mystery of rabbits.

So where do they come from and where are they going?  We agreed that we must pursue a logical search pattern, and follow the rabbit activity from its last known position, rather than setting the camera at random here and there all over the back garden.  The camera is now set on the fence a bit downhill of the previous night's sighting, as we try to follow them down the hill.  They must be getting to the back of the top of the bed from somewhere, and when we can find out where it is we can block it up.  Unless they are living in the garden.

There are no visible warren entrances.  I've crawled over almost every inch of all the beds in the back garden, or at least peered into the recesses of the larger shrubs, generally in pursuit of bramble roots, and I haven't seen any signs of that much digging.  There is always the nasty possibility they could have taken up residence under the rose bank.  That would be a tough one. The bank is covered with Mypex fabric, which is in turn covered in a solid tangle of rambling roses and honeysuckle to a depth of between four and about ten feet.  I have no idea how we would ever find even one entrance to a burrow under that lot, let alone several.  Time for the Systems Administrator to spend some long summer evenings on a scaffold with some camouflage netting and an air rifle, if there are rabbits living among the roses.  But with any luck it will not come to that. What we need now is information, but with only the one camera to track them it feels like a painfully slow process.

The roots of Penstemon grandiflorus surprised me as well.  I dug up the first of my non-doing plants, expecting to drop it into the rubbish bin and chalk the attempt to grow it in that spot down to experience.  Instead of finding a single woody rootstock as I was expecting for a Penstemon, I found it was made up of multiple shoots, each with its own shuttlecock shaped cluster of quite fleshy and not very branching roots.  The clump started to come apart quite naturally in my hands, rather like dividing up a primrose, and I thought it had to be worth potting up the individual clumps and see how they did.  While the article I'd read about Penstemon said they did not transplant well, these little individual shoots looked eminently pottable.

Time was getting on by then.  I only dug the plant up at that moment because I was Strulching that part of the border while keeping an eye on the chickens, and I hadn't been expecting to find anything salvageable.  I put the bits of root in a plastic bag, folded the end over and put it on top of the bucket of fish, blood and bone in the garage so that I'd be sure to find it the next day and so remember to pot it.  Then I spent the morning clearing prunings out of the meadow and the wood, and only came upon the bag with the Penstemon in it after lunch.  I was not so horrified by the delay as I would have been ten years ago, having seen how many days commercially supplied bare root plants for potting typically spend in their plastic bags before they are all potted up.

The pieces went into my new supply of 7cm square black pots, bought courtesy of Amazon after realising how useful the old ones left over from a consignment of alpines were, tucked away out of direct sun at the bottom of the greenhouse staging, and I wait to see what happens next.  The same horrible stretch of soil that did for the Penstemon virtually killed some Campanula punctata 'Silver Bells', and the miserable fragments of root and shoot I salvaged last autumn from the wreckage are starting to throw up leaves and looking as though they might come to something, so I have hopes.

loose ends

I filled the bed in the vegetable patch where the potatoes are supposed to go with compost from the remains of the great heap, and planted the potatoes.  I suppose it would have been traditional to do this on Good Friday, but I was busy doing other things that day.  A date that moves from year to year and takes no account of the weather seems a very arbitrary guide to gardening anyway. April 6th felt as good a date as any.  The great heap grows rather good potatoes from the odd old tuber that's got left in there, so it will be interesting to see if it can deliver the goods when moved to a bed in the veg patch.

I inspected the spot where I'd sown the broad beans, but there was nothing.  The sowing date on the label said 22nd March.  I checked the germination time for broad beans later on in my Doctor Hessayon guide (still the most useful vegetable book I have.  By now you have to ignore practically everything he says about disease control, because he is heavily chemical dependent and most of them have been withdrawn, but the basic stuff about spacing and timings is easy to find.  His book is not nearly so pretty or aspirational as those glossy publications about ornamental potagers and French vegetable gardens, but it is my go-to place for the germination times of broad beans).  The book said 7 to 14 days.  Hmn.  That's about now.  Maybe I should sow some more in pots in the greenhouse, risking the root aphid and coping with the complete lack of space somehow.

Some loose ends.  The Systems Administrator really liked the mincemeat pie, so I might have to persist with the impossible pastry, and go easier with the milk next time.  I wasn't convinced the grated apple added anything, and the tart would be quicker to make without it.  I did think it might work with a layer of cherry jam and some tinned cherries, or fresh if you had any.  The idea of the mixture of jam and whole cherries is not mine, I borrowed it from a slightly complicated looking Dan Lepard recipe for a cherry polenta cake I haven't tried yet.

The camera showed a procession of rabbits going up and down the line of the hedge, so our guess that it was a bunny highway was correct.  The Systems Administrator who viewed the camera footage said it was a veritable Mekong trail for rabbits, and we could bomb the garden and napalm the vegetation.  The camera is now set up on the lowest corner of that bed, to try and get some idea where they are coming from, though the first thing the SA will see tomorrow is a lot of pictures of chickens, because two of them headed straight down there when I let them out.

A really old loose end.  We got rid of the rats under the shed, but had to resort to poison when after a fortnight we had not zapped a single one in the electric rat zapper.  I fear the answer is to keep a very keen eye on the shed, and deploy warfarin at the first sign of infestation without messing about with other methods.  It would probably use less poison in the end than letting them establish themselves while trying unsuccessfully to electrocute or trap them.

I am delighted that the new Radio 3 controller, stung by the critical report on Radio 3's dumbed down wannabe Classic FM tendencies, has dropped the awful format of the current breakfast show. No more phone-ins, hurrah.  I am not a bit interested in hearing about why somebody I've never met or heard of likes Handel's Messiah.  Radio 3 lost me at noon last Thursday since the Composer of the Week was Judith Weir.  I really can't take to her music, nor the Thursday afternoon opera.  Opera on the radio so there is no dancing or costumes or set to look at, sung in a language you don't speak and when you don't already know the plot, tends to be pretty tedious.  Over the Easter break I've been listening to Classic FM's Hall of Fame.  The idea of voting for one's favourite three pieces of music is clearly preposterous, but the outcome is entertaining and on the whole the great British public has pretty good taste.  I don't think Judith Weir made it into the top three hundred, though.

the battle of the bunnies

The bunnies are winning.  The new anti-rabbit gate was installed, and the gales had passed so we set the camera at the top of the back garden for a couple of nights to see if the gate had done the trick.  Obviously we were hoping that it had, but we were rapidly disabused of that notion.  Rabbits appeared soon after dark on both nights, appearing as blurry black and white images on the infra-red camera, their eyes standing out as glaring white spots.  They were still hopping around in glorious technicolour well after dawn.

It was not an entirely random display.  They consistently appeared from the direction of the hedge, and headed back that way as they disappeared out of shot.  We wriggled our way among the mature shrubs to the back of the border that runs the length of the garden and surveyed the hedge line.  The double run of wire netting enclosing the hedge, professionally installed by the man who planted the hedge over twenty years ago, all appeared to be solid and intact.  He did a good job, that contractor, and used good quality posts.  However, we did find a weak spot right at the top of the slope, where we'd left a gap in the hedge in case we ever needed to get heavy machinery into the back garden.  The single run of netting installed by us had slumped, and it would have been possible for rabbits to hop over it.

I found a spare piece of netting, and stapled it fast to the fence post, a handy stake and an elder that had sprung up in the hedge line.  I wouldn't normally staple netting to my shrubs, but regarded the elder as a weed, and couldn't face trying to knock a post in at that moment.  The soil there is phenomenally stony because an old track lies underneath (it was the access to the integral garage when the house was built.  We do not keep cars in the garage, only lawnmowers) and a large sea buckthorn would have got in the way of the hammer.

Unfortunately today's check of last night's proceedings on the camera showed that there were still rabbits in the border, appearing and disappearing from the direction of the hedge.  We both prowled up and down the hedge line looking for obvious holes, and agreed that there were none at the top of the garden.  This made the bottom of the garden the prime suspect, where the contractor's fence comes to an end before the ditch.  It might be that the rabbits were coming in at the bottom of the slope, and using the cover of the border to move uphill rather than travelling that far in the open.  The Systems Administrator reset the camera pointing down the hedge line, on the grounds that then we'd see if they were coming into shot from downhill, or appearing from behind the camera.  One night should be enough, given that they seem to be here every night, then we can station the camera at the bottom of the garden and try and discover their movements around the area of the bog bed.  I know they've been active down there, because there are scrapes as well as droppings.

Forget Peter Rabbit.  Forget Watership Down, Hazel and Bigwig and all that crew.  Put Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail from your mind.  Rabbits are not cute.  In a garden context they are vermin. They have grazed down the leaves of all the Crocus tommasinianus in the bottom lawn, when everybody knows they need to be left to die down naturally for the bulbs to build their strength up, and eaten most of the flower buds off the Pulmonaria 'Blue Ensign' (the bluest of blues, a superb form).  If you see the Easter Bunny, shoot it.

the art of pastry

I have just had a run-in with the most irritating dough I've encountered in any recipe for ages.  The source of my disappointment was the normally reliable Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (1978 edition) and the reason for my excursion into this retro territory was that I'd noticed a recipe for a mincemeat and apple round, and I had a lot of mincemeat.  I kept buying it at Christmas.  It doesn't have a regular place to live, not being a perennial store cupboard item like plain flour or syrup, and the shelves were quite full at the time, so I kept not being able to see any mincemeat or remember whether I definitely had bought some, and buying another jar.

The Systems Administrator was rather puzzled to discover we had so much, but I promised that mincemeat kept for years, and that it didn't all have to be eaten as mince pies that Christmas.  For weeks now I've been meaning to make the mincemeat and apple, but it's never been a good time. Once it morphed into bread and butter pudding, because we had bread that needed using up more urgently than the mincemeat, and the SA is reluctant to share space in the Aga when doing a roast, or anything involving more than one pot.  It wasn't really a good time this evening, as I let the chickens out because I felt sorry for them and they didn't go back in until half past seven, but I was determined to make the blessed pudding, after talking about it for so long.

The instructions said to rub the fat into the flour, stir in the sugar, mix in the egg and sufficient milk to give a fairly firm dough.  I quote.  Fairly firm dough.  The quantities were 3 oz butter, 6 oz self raising flour, 3 oz sugar, one egg, 3 to 4 tablespoons of milk.  To be on the safe side I only added three tablespoons of milk initially.  Never mind fairly firm, the dough was so sloppy it wouldn't hold together in the bowl.  I added some flour, consoling myself that I was only aiming at a leavened biscuity sort of thing and not cake, so the proportion of flour was probably not critical. The dough had to be rolled into two rounds, then you were supposed to put the mincemeat and grated apple on one and cover it with the other as a lid, sticking the edges together.

If only.  The dough was soft, fragile, and not keen on rolling into a round, or being picked up in one piece once rolled quite thinly (sic).  I managed to transfer a roughly circular sheet of pastry on to my greased tray, somewhat larger than a generous side plate but a lot smaller than a smallish dining plate which was as thin as I could get it.  The lid was even more reluctant to leave the pastry board in one piece.  I remembered I'd read somewhere that you could transfer fragile pastry by using the rolling pin as a support.  The lid consented to roll around the pin, unrolled in mid air, stuck to itself, and collapsed on the pile of mincemeat and apple about three inches off centre.  I discovered that you could not move it sideways at all, it simply tore, and was reduced to trimming the excess off the side that had overshot and blobbing it on to the opposite side where it was short. The second round of dough, which up to this point had stuck to the pastry board, the rolling pin and my fingers, resolutely refused to stick to the base of the tart.

I squidged the mess together as best I could, painted it with milk as instructed, and sprinkled it with much more than the given quantity of demerara sugar, hoping a sparkly shiny top of cooked sugar would hide a multitude of sins.  The book said to cut a small slit in the top but I wasn't touching that blasted pastry any more.  I put the tart in the oven, and set the timer for slightly less than the minimum cooking time given in the book, fully expecting to find the tray swimming in burnt liquid out of the mincemeat at the end of it, and the top marked by rivulets of brown ooze where the filling had erupted through the makeshift joins in the pastry.

The timer rang.  I opened the door and looked inside the oven, to find a roughly circular, evenly risen, pale gold, gently sparkling mound of pastry, unmarked by any leaking juices from within. You just never know with cooking how it is going to turn out.

spring cleaning

It was a damp and a drizzly day, and I set about tidying up the conservatory.  It wasn't too bad, but there were some fallen leaves to sweep up, my new Clivia had been sitting in its plastic bag on the hall table ever since the Plant Heritage meeting, and I had reluctantly to admit that the conservatory windows needed washing.  I had a colleague once, a fastidious man with very definite ideas about design, who was having his house done up, and I was quite interested in the progress of his conservatory until he mentioned that the carpet was due to arrive.  Our conservatory does not have a carpet.  It has a tiled floor with a central drain, glass on three sides, a polycarbonate roof that lets a certain amount of light through, and is full of plants.  Sometimes too full.  There used to be an Acacia by the door for several years that covered anyone using the door with yellow bobbles when it was in flower, followed by the grey remains of its dead flowers for months afterwards.  The Systems Administrator used to mutter hostile remarks about the Acacia.

It is currently slightly better organised than that.  One of the things I have begun to grasp over the years is the necessity of observing the principle Harold Nicolson  attributed to Vita, that of having the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful plants.  Today I evicted a plumbago.  The fact that ours was a miserable, skinny specimen was brought home to me months ago, on holiday, when we saw one doing really well (possibly in the conservatory at Hidcote?) and I was forced to contrast its lush, dense foliage and smothering cover of bright blue flowers with my thin, spindly plant and its miserable scattering of blooms.  I messed around repotting it, and made vague plans to move it off the back wall so that it would get more light.  All in vain and putting off the inevitable.  Today I chopped off its lank branches, disentangled them from the neighbouring jasmine, and lugged the truncated pot outside.  I felt better as soon as I'd done it.

The jasmine got a hard pruning a while back, and is being slow to respond, but I think I'll give it this summer and see how it does with regular feeding.  It is Jasminum mesnyi, a tender (you might get away with outside in a really warm and sheltered garden) scrambler whose large yellow flowers ought to start opening about now.  The foliage of mine tends to go rather pale and mottled, and I peer at it suspiciously for signs of red spider mite and try to work out what it is about a slightly shady garden room in north Essex that fails to make it believe it is in its native Vietnam.

Patience with cutting back can work.  I have an evergreen clematis, again one of those species on the cusp of tenderness, that has had a chequered conservatory career.  It started off at the front in the light, which it liked, but massively outgrew its aluminium tripod despite my efforts to persuade it to twiddle round and round the support, and began to block the view out of the window.  I moved it to the back wall to give it more height, but it shot up to the top of the wall and only flowered at the very ends, just under the roof.  I guessed the back wall was too dark for its liking.  By now I had a thirteen foot plant, bald for most of its height and with a flimsy aluminium tripod embedded in its lower limbs, so I chopped it off at the three foot mark, which left it with no leaves at all, and stuck it in the sunniest corner next to the standard Eriobotrya 'Coppertone', hoping that it might reshoot and twine through the shrub.  Nothing happened for months, and I wondered if it was dead, but the truncated stems still looked plump and were green under the bark when I scratched at them with my fingernail.  Trying to judge how much and how often to water it was tricky, in the absence of any feedback because there were no leaves.  Finally this spring it has begun to throw out new shoots, which I think will look better popping out of its host here and there than thinly spread out against a wall.

The Clivia gave me an anxious moment when I extracted it from its black plastic pot, cutting it free because some of the thick, fleshy roots had gone out through the drainage holes and I didn't want to chop them off.  Compost instantly began to fall off the rootball, revealing quite a few dead roots, and I wondered whether I had managed to overwater it during its fortnight's sojourn in the hall.  Then I worked out that there were plenty of healthy new roots, and decided that it must be one of those fat-rooted things, like my kitchen orchids and the ginger lilies, that do give up on their oldest roots, and that part of normal hygiene when repotting was to remove them and clean the plant up.

Washing the windows took longer than titivating the plants, but was not so interesting.  There are times when I'm gardening and could wish that I were taller or had more upper body strength, but wriggling in among the plants to get access to the windows is one of those tasks that leaves me relieved to be small and flexible.  I did make one interesting discovery as I was worming my way up the ladder wedged in between the glass and the Wollemi Pine, and some flattened brown discs fluttered to the ground.  I traced their source to one of the higher branches on the Wollemi, and I think they must be seeds.  They certainly look like conifer seeds, though larger than anything I've seen drop out of a fir cone before.  I collected them carefully and put them in a pot pending further investigation.  I have no idea if Wollemi are self-fertile, or the age at which they normally start setting seed, but it would be very gratifying if they were seeds and triply so if any germinated.

sowing seeds, planting bulbs

Finally the wind dropped, and I was able to go and sow some more vegetable seeds, and make a start with the flowers for cutting.  I realised as I began that I had no idea how long to make the rows or how large the patches of the cutting flowers.  Would a four foot row of Calendula, the width of the bed, give me about the right quantity of flowers, or so many I'd be pressing bunches of marigolds on my friends whenever I saw them, as well as eggs?  And how densely should I sow, to allow for losses in the uncontrolled open ground of the vegetable patch?

My ideas about how many vegetable plants to try and grow to meet the needs of two people are scarcely more accurate.  Vegetables seem so entirely in the lap of the gods anyway.  The last time I got a decent courgette crop I tempted fate by buying a little recipe book called What Shall I do with All These Courgettes.  Hubris followed, and I have never successfully grown courgettes since. Still, I sowed some leeks, turnips, beetroot and peas.  In the past I've started leeks in modules in the greenhouse, but I'm really tight for space in there, not to mention the root aphid problem, and the packet said you could sow them in a drill outdoors, so I thought I'd give it a try.  Note to self: the carrots, turnips and leeks will all need fleecing against their respective pests, if they ever come up.

I planted some Ranunculus corms for cutting, bought from Peter Nyssen, orange and pink ones. They came in a minimum quantity of 25, which seemed like an awful lot when I opened the packets, and I wondered whether to keep some to plant later to try and stagger the flowering period, but didn't know if they would keep or would simply dry out.  They are funny looking little things.  I was expecting a knobbly tuber like Anemone, but Ranunculus turn out to have lots of little fleshy roots, like a miniature cross between an Eremurus and a shuttlecock.

As I scraped planting drills in the beds and tried not to think about the crop of weeds that would shortly appear I realised that I not only didn't know how many plants to grow for flowers, I had no idea when any of them would be ready to pick.  I re-read Sarah Raven's book on the cutting garden before ordering my seeds, but whether any of my carefully chosen combinations will actually happen at the same time so that I can display them together in a vase is anybody's guess.

I have grave doubts about my cheap Cyclamen cilicium though, now that I've seen them.  This species is more or less hardy in southern England, though not so easy and cast iron guaranteed as C. coum and C. hederifolium, and it likes a little more sun than some cyclamen (so the books say).  I have one in the gravel in front of the house that is doing reasonably OK, and as I gazed in wrath one day at the scruffy mess of self seeded bladder campion that had taken up residence at the foot of that wall, it struck me that what I wanted was not a weedy and rampant wildflower, but a carpet of cyclamen.  Peter Nyssen were offering them for a very modest amount, far less than I had paid for my existing plant, and I ordered ten.

The parcel arrived yesterday, and as I opened the bags with the cyclamen in it I realised two things.  The flattened, knobbly disc that I fished out of its surrounding sawdust looked very dried out, and I remembered that cyclamen do not like drying out and wondered how many of the ten would ever come back to life.  The second thing I realised was that I did not have a clue which way up to plant them.  Google was little help.  Which way up to plant cyclamen was out there as a topic, but generally focused on the better known species.  I gathered that the side with old growth coming out of it should go on top, but some of these tubers had wispy growth and lumps on both sides.  The concave side was the top, the convex the underneath, but most of my newly acquired wizened discs didn't have detectable concavities.  The website of The Cylamen Society acknowledged that it could be very difficult to tell which the top was and warned that I might end up having to take pot luck, and so I did with some of them.

the illusion of free plants

If there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is almost no such thing as a free plant.  Volunteers that self-sow in situ come closest, but even then they require some care and thought in terms of weeding and maintenance.  If the parent plant is over-enthusiastic with its progeny you'll have to spend some time editing the results, while if you are too enthusiastic with the hoe or insist on smothering your garden with weed-suppressing landscape fabric you won't get much in the way of self-sown additions.

Sowing seeds can yield an astonishing quantity of plants relative to the outlay in materials, not to mention home saved seed and the packets that come enclosed with magazines, and taking cuttings can produce a similar bonanza.  The big cost is your time.  I love propagating.  Making more plants is all part of the fun of gardening, quite as much as buying new plants.  I was always surprised by how few of the customers at the plant centre seemed to have any notion of growing their own plants, to judge from their lack of enthusiasm if I told them how they could increase their purchases, and equally surprised at how many of the amateur run gardens opening under the Yellow Book scheme don't seem to have a greenhouse or any kind of facilities for propagation.  If you are keen enough to open your garden to the general public then surely you would enjoy working your way through some of the marvellous seed catalogues that are out there at the click of a mouse, not to mention having the facility to bulk up what you've already got.  Apparently not.

It does take time, I admit that.  Maybe it's one reason why Yellow Book owners don't always run their own mini plant factory on the side.  Perhaps they need all their available time to maintain their gardens to Yellow Book standards.  I, meanwhile, have my own Erythrina crista-galli germinating in the heated propagator.  It's a thrill to see the shoot emerge and the leaves unfold, and I'll save at least a tenner compared to buying a grown plant if I manage to bring one through to the planting-out stage, but I also have lawn edges that are untrimmed, and borders that are still only partially mulched as we get into April.

Today was definitely a day for hiding in the greenhouse rather than trying to spread mulch or cut the edges of the lawn to neat curves.  It blew, and it was cold.  I'm glad I moved the outdoor dining chairs away from the conservatory windows, given that the teak bench on the terrace (or patio) has blown backwards into the Eleagnus hedge.  The top of the hedge, meanwhile, has sagged out over the drive under the force of the wind, and once things calm down I am going to have to get the ladder, or probably the Henchman, and cut back the now overhanging portions.  We learn some lessons in life too late, and now I know that I should have planted yew.

There is no such thing as a free plant (only £5.95 for postage) in a magazine readers' offer either.  I belatedly noticed that Amateur Gardening magazine was offering two dozen each of the lavenders 'Hidcote' and 'Munstead' courtesy of Thompson and Morgan, the offer still valid until 7th April.  They would only be tiny little plugs, but plugs grow fast enough and £5.95 is a very good price for forty-eight lavenders.  I considered the space I wanted to cover by the blue shed, and the number of rooted cuttings and box plants I'd accumulated, and the fact that lavender does quite well on the light soil in the front garden, and would fit in nicely with my vague Nicole de Vesian rip-off plan (or if not Nicole de Vesian then about half the Chelsea show gardens you have seen over the past decade), and decided that it would be £5.95 well spent.

Thompson and Morgan's website was not working properly.  It was not obviously not working, and let me input everything up to and including my credit card details, then nothing happened when I pressed Submit Order.  I reflected that 7th April was quite close with Easter in the way, and decided I'd better ring them and see if the order had gone through.  I got a recorded message that said something about how they were aware that they had problems with their website, and that my call was progressing forward in the queue, in between scratchy fragments of Vaughan Williams. When eventually I got through the person I spoke to said she could not tell me whether my order had reached them, though it probably hadn't, and my best bet was to leave it and try again tomorrow.

Is the wrong answer.  A customer is trying to buy something from you.  They have spent fifteen minutes on the phone waiting to speak to a human being because your website is not working.  If when they get through to an actual person that person can't tell them anything about the website problem then put that in the recorded message and spare us the bad Vaughan Williams.  Something along the lines of We are aware that you may have experienced problems with our website.  We will not be able to help you further at this time so don't bother holding.  The readers' offer was limited to one per customer, so I thought that if my website order had gone through, which it probably hadn't, as the lavenders were not due to be sent out until the end of the month Thompson and Morgan would probably be able to sort it out in the next four weeks if I somehow managed to place two orders, and I was buggered if I was spending any more time in their queue.  So I placed another order.

The phone operator told me that I must quote the Offer Code.  There was nothing in the magazine labelled Offer Code, so I tried the code from the order form I'd have used if I'd got round to the question of cheap lavenders in time to order by post.  She told me that was not the Offer Code, without telling me what format an Offer Code would be in.  Eventually I worked out which part of the quite small print in the ad I was supposed to read out to her.  Once she'd told me everything had gone through and rung off I realised that she hadn't given me any kind of reference number in case of further problems.

I admit that only going for the cheap offer and not adding other items to it is not in the spirit of Readers' Offers from T&M's point of view.  They haven't even added a new customer to their mailing list because I've bought seeds from them in the past and they already know I exist.  But as customer experiences go that gets about two out of ten.