keeping track

I was shocked when I wrote up my gardening diary for Thursday to see that it was apparently the first day I'd spent working on the garden since January 27th.  Indeed, my initial reaction was that I must have forgotten to enter a couple of days, but when I checked against my pocket diary and February's blog entries, it was true.  I'd been ill, or busy, or at work, or the weather had been impossible, and I hadn't done a thing for over a fortnight.  It's so easy to lose time.  The Systems Administrator said that I probably ought to budget for bad weather and colds in the winter and assume that I would lose a few weeks, which is sensible, but not what I want.

I've kept a gardening diary since moving in.  I use A4 ruled hardback books from the stationery section of Tesco or Staples, nothing bound in moleskin or anything fancy, and I'm halfway through the fourth book.  The daily entries are short, noting where in the garden I was working and roughly what I was doing, and listing anything I planted and where I planted it.  It doesn't represent a complete record of all the work done in the garden, partly because I sometimes forget to write it up and have to try and remember what I was doing several days after the event, and because it is my diary and I don't record each time the SA cuts the grass or has a bonfire.  Also I don't keep detailed notes in the diary of every packet of seed sown, though I sometimes do a spreadsheet for that growing season when I'm feeling organised.  It isn't a descriptive diary, with records of what is blooming or how nice things are looking, or not.  I've sometimes tried writing that sort of thing down separately, and always petered out by February at the latest.

The records of things planted in the garden are transferred to a spreadsheet when I get round to it, though at the moment it's about a year out of date.  It is helpful, when looking at a plant I can't put a name to, to at least have a short-list of possible identities.  It doesn't always work, because occasionally I forget to write down things I've planted in the book, and a few have probably missed being transcribed from the diary on to Excel.  Some plants came to me without names, or obviously misnamed, and I've never discovered what they are.  When it does work it allows me to check quickly when something was planted, which can produce a sense of gratification if it has made a lot of growth in the time since, or more often a crushed feeling of disappointment that the shrub or tree is still so small after that many years.  Consulting the spreadsheet does force me to acknowledge how many things have been planted and are no longer extant.  Some gave a good account of themselves and reached their natural span, but many reached untimely ends, failing to thrive in the spot where I'd put them, or falling prey to wildlife or extremes of weather.

Labelling plants in the garden is difficult.  I have bought and used a great many aluminium stick-in labels over the years.  They tend to get lost, scratched up by birds or cats, or trodden on and broken at the base.  They don't always remain legible when I can find them, as pencil can rub off over the years.  Ink is pretty indelible, but requires me to have the special pen for writing on aluminium, which I don't seem to most of the time.  I've tried tie-on copper labels, that you write on with ballpoint pressing hard, to indent the name.  These often disappear into the centre of the plant as it grows, or get removed without noticing during pruning.  Herbaceous plants often travel around the garden, via division or by cuttings, which aren't always accompanied by the correct label, or by self-seeding, which makes labelling individual clumps absolutely hopeless.  There are parts of the garden, such as the gravel, where I actively don't want to be looking at a sea of labels, like a hamster's graveyard.  Labels are not easy.  Those professionally printed black plastic rectangular labels with plant names, families, date of planting and accession number, used in some professionally managed gardens, represent a considerable effort and expense on the part of the garden management.

I was making good progress today clearing weeds from the sloping bed in the back garden, and cutting back the field hedge, a job that needs to be finished soon, before birds start nesting in it.  Work was brought to a premature close when it began to rain so much that I could no longer ignore it and pretend that it wasn't really raining.  We do need the rain, but that's another couple of hours gardening time lost.