cold and slow

There was a frost this morning.  It was forecast, and I had shut the conservatory and greenhouse up last night, but was still surprised at the amount of ice on my windscreen.  Fortunately the hebe I borrowed from work last week, that was still sitting on the gravel with the other unsold plants, was protected by the house and my car and hadn't gone brown at all.  I remembered to put the unsold plants in the car before setting off to work, which was fortunate, as trying to remember to do anything outside normal routine before half past seven in the morning can be rather hit and miss.

The boss revealed that the dog is expecting puppies, her first litter.  As she is a sweet little thing the puppies will presumably be almost unbearably cute.  The boss praised her nice nature, saying that she had never growled at anybody, not even the children.  It is true, she is an amiable dog, and didn't try to bite me the time I plucked her away from her hedgehog hunt.  It's just a pity that she has such a tendency to abscond, though that is improving with age.  It turns out that the old dog fell in the pond last week, and couldn't get out, and the gardener had to wade in and rescue her.  I think the pond is about three feet deep, so it's fortunate that he is a gardener and not a fire fighter, and so wasn't inhibited by his lack of training for entering water deeper than knee height.

The children were pressed into service to run the tea room, as they are back from school for the holidays.  The young boy took to this with enthusiasm.  I think he's quite a keen cook, and he looked in his element wiping tables and making pots of coffee.  His sister seemed less enamoured of the tea room.  Still, there's nothing wrong with a bit of child labour in a family business.  There were two pieces of left over chocolate cake in the staff room, the first I've seen there, but by the time I got in for my tea break somebody else had eaten them.

Trade was sluggish.  It's not just us.  The driver from one of our suppliers, who brought us 50 trays of one litre herbaceous plants, said that we were his first delivery of the week, and that last week they hadn't had any.  It's hard to say whether that'd down to the cold weather making people not feel like shopping for plants, or the hosepipe ban make them not feel like planting them, or just the state of the economy.  Given that things were booming when it was warm, a couple of weeks back, weather must have something to do with it.  Today was cold, another when I kept having to grope among my various pockets searching for a hankie as my nose wouldn't stop running.  When I came back out into the plant centre after my (rather late) lunch, I had to go and get my coat from the car because I was cold, and I was already wearing a fleece, a shirt and two t-shirts, plus thermal leggings under my trousers and a fleece hat.


The door company has not fixed the doors.  The boss says they are crooks.  It is a reminder how, when buying anything mechanical, the quality and availability of after-sales service is really important.  The Systems Administrator and I learnt this the hard way with our Stanley range, a fuel-inefficient and unreliable monster that no local firm was prepared to service, except for the one that sold us the horror in the first place, who charged royally for the privilege.


I bought myself some Primula bulleyana to go in the gunnera bed.  They are a candelabra type with apricot flowers that are supposed to like really wet, even boggy, soil, and I am going to try them in the wet seep that runs across the bed.  If the site suits them they should self sow.  As I walked around the plant centre on various errands, and putting plants out for sale, quite a large part of my mind was occupied, in the absence of customers, with noting what we had available and trying it against gaps in the garden.  As I took them out to my car I met the manager in the car park, and explained that I had a damp patch.  He said I should keep quiet about that.