It was another foggy day, and the air felt astonishingly moist. You would not think air could hold that much water without it leaking out as rain. It is forecast to continue like this until the end of the week, when it is supposed to turn cold, which was my cue to get on with moving pots of tender plants into the greenhouse for the winter. I started doing that ages ago, then progress ground to a halt. I'm not exactly sure why, except that I must have been doing something else instead, or it was raining, or I didn't feel very well. The greenhouse is looking ominously crowded already, and I'm still not sure exactly where all these pots are going to go.
I took my jacaranda seedling inside, that was a present from a friend back in the spring. The gardener yesterday was telling me how the jacarandas in Africa were just coming into bloom, and I didn't see how a plant that grew in Zimbabwe and Botswana was going to be happy in a frost free (no more) greenhouse in north Essex. The leaves were looking rather brown and tired at their tips, and I realised that I didn't even know whether jacaranda was deciduous or evergreen. Wikipedia let me down for once, since the entry on jacaranda listed forty different species, but didn't say whether brown leaves in late October were a natural sign of autumn (= deciduous), or meant that my plant had already caught a chill (= evergreen). Somebody on a gardening forum who sounded as though he knew what he was doing (thought that's no guarantee) said that frost free plus pretty dry at the roots was OK, better than keeping the plant indoors where the combination of warmth, low light and dry air would result in nothing better than weedy growth and an attack of red spider mite.
After lunch we returned to the pot shed roof. The felt we attached ten days ago has survived without ripping, which is a great relief, since we never meant to leave the job half-finished for so long, but rain and colds intervened. I was nominated to attach the final roll of felt along the ridge. The Systems Administrator had reassured me a large number of times that the shed was massively over-engineered, and that the roof was easily able to bear my weight. It's true that it survived having a large tree fall on one corner a few years ago, but I was concerned that rot might have set in since then, given the leaks. As I lay on a ladder running up the side of the roof that one can get at properly I asked the SA whether I was the chosen one to go up there because crawling on the ladder would wreck the SA's knees, or because I only weighed two thirds as much. The SA said it was mainly due to the knees, but also the weight. I didn't find this degree of caution about the load-bearing capacity of the shed entirely reassuring, but it seemed solid enough. The only way to get at the roof to fasten the felt along the top section on the far side was to reach right over the apex and fix the battens and tacks from above, so the ridge did have to bear pretty much the full weight of one of us.
The other shed with loose felt was easier to access, and the SA was able to get on with that single-handed, until running out of battens, so I let the chickens out for a yomp for the first time in ages. They were very happy to come out, and started off by burbling a great deal while gorging on grass. Then they were happy to play in the turning circle in the front garden, instead of charging off to the far end of the back, which is what they had taken to doing before our holiday, to the Systems Administrator's exasperation. Perhaps it was so long ago they had forgotten, or perhaps the afternoon was so dark, foggy and discouraging by half past three that they didn't feel the urge to go that far from their hen house. I was able to keep an eye on them, and half an eye on the SA on the roof, while removing the black netting from the front of the dahlia bed and cutting down the dahlias. It feels wrong doing it before the frost has blackened them, but that's due to happen on Friday, and I can't believe that three days will make any difference to the tubers.
I cleaned out the chicken's house as well before lunch. If you have a romantic attitude to the idea of keeping chickens then don't get any. They are thoroughly entertaining animals, and the eggs are nice when they lay them in sensible places, but what with the ordure and the trouble with foxes it is quite hard work, one way and another.
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