Sitting peacefully at the kitchen table this morning, drinking my second mug of tea and reading The Telegraph on-line, I was just thinking that (in my finely honed timetable for work day mornings) it was time to brush my teeth, when I realised I had completely forgotten to make my packed lunch. Nairns oat cakes and miniature packets of Boursin cheese are very useful inventions. Now that school dinners are not the norm that they were in my school days, lots of households are faced with the task of providing packed lunches, but I have read that the proportion of adults taking their own lunch to work with them is tiny. However, while the village has a shop that will do in emergencies (I have only once in eight years left my lunch box on the hall table) it is a good mile away, and I'm not overly keen on prepackaged pasties. No convenient Pret a Manger around the corner for us in rural Suffolk. By now I am quite bored of sandwiches, or at least the sort of sandwich I can make quickly at seven in the morning (forget sophisticated wraps or anything with more than two ingredients). Pasta shells with olives and tomatoes are good, so if we're having pasta the night before the chef makes some extra. And I like oat cakes.
Driving to work I saw a summer visitor return to the hedgerows, as the bikers assembled in increasing numbers at their usual rendezvous point close to the river Stour. I had my first solitary sighting a couple of weeks ago, but this morning as I went past there were four. They are all kitted out in the full proper protective gear, their bikes look powerful and expensive, and I don't think any of them are under forty. Our GP is a keen biker, who has ridden to some exotic places in aid of charity, and I suspect that this lot are of a similar ilk.
I volunteered to water at the bottom end of the plant centre, to make a change from watering the middle (yesterday) and the top (last Monday). Even though there is overhead irrigation in the tunnel where the azaleas and rhododendrons live, their foliage is so dense that in warm weather they need extra water directed below their leaves and into the pots. It was a good area to have chosen, as I discovered some Lamium orvala, which I thought we had sold out of, whereas it turned out to have been moved to a shadier spot. This is a handsome dead nettle, which given time makes a dense clump of leaves a good 30cm high, with large and attractive pinky-maroon flowers at this time of year. It is happy given some shade, and likes to be moist but not waterlogged. I have a plant already, that I almost lost when the water table rose under its original position, so that it was sitting wet all the time. I dug it up, took it to convalesce in the greenhouse, and it is now doing well in a drier spot, so I thought some more would be useful and good-looking ground cover for shady corners. Carol Klein demonstrated how to take cuttings on Gardeners' World a couple of weeks back, and I thought I should multiply mine, but then didn't. I am so busy still clearing out winter losses and replanting that it didn't seem the time to be adding extra projects like cuttings. And it was during a heatwave. And my existing plant by unlucky chance is immediately under the regular perch of some bird, so that it is rather streaked with guano, and I didn't fancy rootling around in it for cuttings material. It will be nice to have some more plants that aren't liberally daubed with bird excrement, as it is an attractive species.
The garden at work opened today in aid of the yellow book National Gardens scheme, which livened things up a bit, and meant there was cake, which helped plug the gap in the lunchbox.
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