It was another beautiful autumn day, and time to start potting up the tulips. The advice on planting tulips is always to leave it until November, since if planted earlier they are more susceptible to the disease tulip fire. I have never heard a technical explanation of why it makes a difference, but I'm happy just to follow the guidelines. There are some jobs that you are told to do at a certain time, or in a particular way, and you would like to get on with it at a different time, or by another method, and start wondering if doing it by the book is really important, or if you could get away with doing something else. The correct times to prune, move or split plants can fall into this category. But it doesn't matter to me whether I plants tulips in September or November, so I happily follow received wisdom. The collection of Whichford basket pots bought in their winter sale is building up nicely, though I might invest in just one more batch next January, depending on how lavish I am feeling. It seems rather a waste when the pots arrive too late for that year's tulips, and sit around unused all through the growing season, so it is nice to be finally planting them up. I have gone for hot colours again, purples, oranges and reds, from the excellent Peter Nyssen, and so far I have found one tulip bulb that had gone off, its basal plate having rotted.
I observed the two minute silence, standing head bowed by the shed, but the black cat didn't, and came and squeaked at me and sharpened his claws on a piece of wood. I like to listen to the service at the Cenotaph, and feel a pang in the years when Remembrance Sunday falls on one of my working weekends. We never manage to observe the silence in the plant centre. The phone always goes, or customers don't seem inclined to pause in their shopping for two minutes.
The stems from the ivy hedge that's developed gaps, that I dibbled into buried pots of compost back in the spring, all rooted, except for one that broke free from its pot, and I cut them away from the parent plants and gathered up the pots, ready to plant into the gaps. I still don't know why parts of the hedge died back like that, but wonder if it was starvation. It is the side facing into the gravel, that never gets mulched, that has gone, but since it's north facing it could be that cold, or snow piling up, were to blame for killing parts of it. I will give the whole thing a dressing of blood, fish and bone. A form of grass with running roots has taken up residence in parts of the hedge and I sprayed the green growth with Roundup. I will have caught the hedge as well, but experience tells me that a light dose of glyphosate is unlikely to kill it, given that ivy recovers from heavy doses of glyphosate when you're actively trying to get rid of it.
The chickens came out for a run and were pretty good about staying in the front garden, though the hens spent some time in the Eleagnus hedge. The rooster does not like it inside the hedge, never has, and stood all by himself in the turning circle. I gave him some sultanas to cheer him up, and he ate them all himself without trying to coax any of his ladies out of the hedge.
The Systems Administrator sawed up a cheap pine garden bench that had begun to rot and then disintegrated, to recycle as firewood. Beware cheap wooden garden furniture, also hardwood benches of unknown build quality. I once had a charming one, based on an historic design, but while the back, seat, legs and arms were hardwood, the joints turned out to be fastened with low grade, presumably softwood dowels, and the whole thing fell apart disappointingly quickly. Unless you are going for teak from a reputable manufacturer I'd stick to metal, where there is a good choice of small, lightweight benches in some quite attractive designs. The Museum Selection catalogue is generally a rich source, though probably more so in the summer than at this time of year.
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