It was foggy when I got up, so much so that I couldn't see the wind turbine on the neighbouring farm, my usual benchmark for bad visibility. There was a gleam of sunshine around mid-morning, then the fog rolled in again, to the extent that the Systems Administrator couldn't see the avenue of lime trees leading on to the farm from the kitchen window. When the trees disappear from view that's foggier than when it's just the turbine. It was very localised, as the SA went out to buy metal strips to finish mending the chicken house, and said that there was bright sunshine in Colchester. The fog was cold, clammy stuff that chilled your legs and penetrated through thermals. As the hours of daylight continue to diminish I console myself with the thought that it's only five weeks to the shortest day, but that doesn't work for cold, since we don't usually see the worst of it until February. Another three months of this to go. Good grief.
I have got to the bottom of the current crop of home made compost. There is some leaf mould, but since I let weeds grow up around the leaf bin I need to think carefully about where I use that. It will be full of goose grass burrs, and the seeds of a tall, rampant dead nettle relative whose name I don't know, and which I could happily do without. In an ideal world the utility area with the compost bins would be the tidiest, most weed-free part of the entire garden, but Dr Pangloss hasn't yet arrived in this part of Essex.
I had to trim the Osmanthus delavayi on the corner of the island bed in the back garden, because it was spilling out over the lawn on two sides, and the other plants in the bed on the other two. It is an evergreen with small, neat, dark green leaves, and sweetly scented white flowers in April. If this were a pub quiz, and you knew nothing of Osmanthus delavayi but were asked what colour its flowers were, or whether they were scented, you would be pretty safe in saying White and Yes, since all Osmanthus seem to have fragrant, unshowy white blooms. O. delavayi is a slow grower, and mine remained a pathetic little mite for several years, but the wet weather has obviously suited it, and after a trim earlier in the year it has pushed out another twenty to thirty centimetres of growth. Once a shrub is a couple of metres across and approaching that in height, twenty centimetres of growth all round adds alarmingly to its bulk.
I hope I have not removed too many of next spring's flowers in the process. I don't know when they are initiated, or if the early loss of some buds at this stage will encourage the production of more. Trimming a plant makes you look at it closely, and it is striking how much denser the shrub is on the sides, where it has been pruned regularly, compared to the top, where it hasn't been stopped so much. I copied the idea of trimming it and using it as a formal feature on the corner of a bed from the writings of Christopher Lloyd. Left unpruned, it makes an open, graceful shrub. Mine is in full sun and seems to relish it, but I have seen them do OK in light shade.
The ritual of the big tabby's special lunch continues to evolve. He started getting a pouch of Sheba in the middle of the day to encourage him to eat, because he was too thin, and had to have it in the kitchen to stop the other cats from taking it. He quickly got used to the idea, and started hanging around the kitchen from mid-day onwards, waiting for the treat. If the other cats were getting normal cat food at lunchtime he learnt not to eat that, having discovered that if he held back from the ordinary food and loitered about the kitchen looking sorrowful he would get the expensive sort. Then he began to jump on to my usual kitchen chair as lunchtime got closer, and now does that daily as a signal that he would like his Sheba. Unfortunately his powers of sustained concentration are not good, and today he got bored of special lunch about three quarters of the way through it, and wanted to be let out of the kitchen. He came back in half an hour to polish it off, but by then Our Ginger had eaten it.
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