another damp day

I was hoping that the boss would print out the labels for a delivery of plants that arrived last week, then I could have put them out for sale, using the in-bloom hydrangeas to jazz up some of the display tables.  Quite a few of them were things customers had been asking for, so I could have reserved those and rung the customers to let them know their plants were now here.  But the boss had other ideas of how to spend Sunday, so that didn't happen.  I hope he does the labels tomorrow.  I want to buy one of the shrubs myself, a Colutea which has had a place marked for it with a cane in the long bed for months.

Instead I weeded the Tradescantia.  They have pretty flowers, but the plants after flowering become such a mess that I don't see how you could use them, except in the wilder bits of a large garden.  Then I wandered about dead-heading the dahlias and day lilies.  Dahlia buds are rounded and face downwards, while spend flowers are elongated and held facing upwards, and if you touch them with bare fingers they always feel slimy.  Then I started on the Kniphofia, but it began to rain.  I'm not madly keen on working in the shop, but it beats standing in the rain weeding the herbaceous section, so I volunteered to fetch an order of birdfood and sundry garden items from the shed where it had been stacked after delivery, and price it up.  I count the colleague who is now back in charge of the shop as a personal friend, so don't mind helping her out with shop stuff.

Things got lively after lunch as a coach party arrived (we were expecting them).  They were keen to use the loos, and to have a cup of coffee, but quite a few of them did do some shopping as well.  We were struck by the sad sight of a group of chatting around one table, while a solitary old lady sat all alone at the other, until her companion appeared with a trolley load of plants, and it turned out that they were mother and daughter and nothing to do with the coach party.  The accomplished lady gardener from the village (who gave me tea from a silver pot the day I delivered her tree stake) pitched up in the middle of the coach party shopping spree, and we talked about the merits of early music, so one way and another we had a busy couple of hours.

Once it all quietened down again I returned to the boxes of bird food.  I am baffled that somebody thought it necessary to label the box of dried mealworm tubs NOT FOR HUMAN BEING.  Would it occur to anybody to eat mealworms?  Though some food experts on R4 were confidently predicting the other day how we would all be eating insects soon for the protein, so maybe it would.

Addendum  On getting home I found there had been 15mm of rain, and rumbles of thunder here as well as at work.  The grey tabby goes and stands outside in the rain during thunderstorms, and shrieks.  I don't know what goes on inside her head, but I never feel it's very amiable.