Stock is now arriving in the plant centre in quantity, ready for the autumn selling season. I hope we do sell it. The manager ran a stand for us yesterday at the Helmingham Hall rare plant fair, and trade was slack. Everybody seems to have had a bad year, so our sales weren't helped by the fact that other stallholders were knocking out plants (by now potbound) at massive discounts to avoid being left with them over the winter.
A delivery of shrubs came in some time last week, while I wasn't there. Some of these were lined up in confusing trolley loads behind the shop, the same variety split between more than one trolley but not yet carrying our labels with price, description, and most crucially, name. The grower just sends them out in batches with a single label to cover all ten or twenty plants of each variety, and it is a very good idea to keep them in their groups and not muddle them up until you've tagged them. Some of the plants were intended to go out for sale straight away, and others to be stored behind the scenes in the tunnel on the other side, to replenish stock in the plant centre as needed over the coming months. It wasn't clear to me which were which, and it didn't seem to have been clear to the staff working over the weekend either. The manager startled me with a howl of rage as I was watering in one of the tunnels, which initially made me think that maybe he wanted the abutilons and Lobelia tupa to be really dry and that it was my mistake to have watered them, but it turned out that they were not supposed to be in that tunnel at all.
The boss is in the process of buying a new tractor. I thought this was quite an encouraging sign, but it turned out that his hand was forced, because the old tractor had begun to give off such copious amounts of smoke that it was unusable. This may have had something to do with our attempts to run it on paraffin (left over from the old tunnel heater) instead of diesel. There again, it was a very old tractor. The proposed new model was delivered for the gardeners to inspect, and they looked as engrossed as you would expect two blokes to be, given the prospect of a shiny new mechanical toy.
While the gardeners and the boss were putting the potential new tractor through its paces, an articulated lorry-load of trees arrived. We ask our suppliers not to send artics, since they won't go up the drive, but I expect that an artic is all some of them have. This one had to park out on the road, and the boss refused to interupt the tractor trials so that the gardeners could help unload the trees, so the rest of us had to plod up and down the drive with trolleys out of the garden centre, six trees at a time. The driver must have thought that we were taking the piss. Eventually the gardeners came to help with a big trailer, and things speeded up. Our most long-standing employee came to help, who works part time behind the scenes potting and weeding, but the manager's self-appointed guardian told her that we could manage without her, and that it got confusing with too many people. The longest-serving member of staff said that the manager had told her to come over, but that she would go back to her proper work, and retreated fuming to the polytunnel.
We were one member of staff down, due to illness, and so after the excitement of the trees I found myself largely confined to the shop. Occassionally the manager would suggest I could move trolleys of this and that, but customers can get into the shop and feel as though they have been unattended for a very long time in less than the time it takes to unload a trolley of plants, so that isn't a very easy piece of multi-tasking to pull off. I did manage to make some phone calls to let people know that their stuff had arrived. Sometimes I just got their anwerphone, but one woman sounded really pleased.
The extra-tender and extra-beautiful 'Azureum' form of Teucrium fruticans had come in since the last time I was at work, so I put one aside with my name on it, to go in our turning circle in due course. No ginger scented rosemary yet, but I live in hope. I was tempted by a rather tender species of buddleia, B. crispa, with lovely rounded felty leaves, but I'll ponder that before committing. I do have a collection of plants waiting to go in the ground, and am trying to deal with them before buying too many more. It is easy to be tempted when rarities turn up, though, since if I don't grab my chance I might not get another for a year, if not longer. I still wish I'd bought a plant of a particularly long-flowering white Weigela I'd had my eye on, before the grower supplying us and the liner nursery supplying them both ceased trading. I've never seen one since.
At home the Systems Administrator had the sad task of disposing of the body of the old lady hen, who took bad yesterday and died in the night. She was pretty old, for a chicken. I think we got her in 2005, and she lived through a fox attack and was a feisty creature in her day. In recent months she had got reluctant to venture out of the run, though she did come out for a nice walk about on Friday afternoon, and we guessed her time was drawing to a close. It is sad to see her go, when we had known her for so long, but maybe less sad than when young hens fall prey to the fox. Chickens seem a bit like fighter pilots. If they survive the first few weeks of conflict their chances of survival rise considerably.
No comments:
Post a Comment