When I got up this morning the rain was gurgling loudly through the metal downpipe outside the bathroom window. It was almost melodic, and would have been worth sampling, if you happened to be a producer of electronic music, but I'm not. I went to let the chickens out into their run, and the ground in their enclosure has got much too muddy. I wished the boss had come up to scratch with the small bales, instead of the owner just remembering at intervals that I'd asked if they had any spare, or that I'd seized the moment to make contact with the farmer friend of a friend who had some, instead of leaving it because the weather was so cold and the Systems Administrator had toothache. As it is we do not have any straw, and we need some, urgently. The SA says I should not contact the farmer this week, as he will be taking time off from the farm and be busy with his shoot, and will not want to think about work or straw bales until the New Year. I can sympathise with that.
The whole world is wet. The garden, the lawns and borders and shrubs and hedges, all disgustingly wet, waiting to dump a great load water on you if touched, or deform with hideous squelchings if walked upon. The cats go into the garden to do their business, and come in again with wet feet and damp fur. The damp is worming its way into my bones and lungs, reminding me that while the SA melts in warm weather, I am probably better suited to somewhere hot and dry, not on the cold, rain-sodden margins of northern Europe. I can see why so many rich, keen Edwardian gardeners busied themselves in the winter months making a second garden in the south of France. It must have been more rewarding than staring out at the soggy mess of their English one, and better for their rheumatism and bronchial health.
I went out to check the watering in the greenhouse and conservatory. I hadn't checked them for days, and felt a guilty concern that I might have left it too long and that things might be getting dry. Not a bit of it. Overwintering plants use very little water at this time of year, when the sun is so weak and the days so short, and while a few evergreens in the brightest spots needed a drink, most pots were still wet enough. I was pleased to see quite a few of the bulbs starting to come through, and relieved that after the opening skirmish with mice, most of them had escaped without being eaten.
I made a bad error when we had the greenhouse put up, one which no garden writer I've come across has owned up to in print, or warned against. Take this therefore as a warning, in case you are thinking of buying a greenhouse. When we moved into the property it had no greenhouse or sheds, or parking area other than the edge of the turning circle, and so we had an area of concrete put down to give us somewhere to park cars and boats, and put up outbuildings. The process of getting the concrete laid is a story for another day, of which all that I will tell you now is that you should never leave a builder alone and unsupervised on your property with a mechanical digger. The concrete itself was fine, and he managed to lay it with a slight slope so that all of it drains, and scored the surface so that it is non-slip. The plan was that the greenhouse would stand in one corner of the concrete.
The greenhouse is made of wood, which is bolted down to purpose-made concrete footings like giant kerb stones, supplied by the same firm that sold me the greenhouse. The man who put it up did a good job, and well into its second decade it has stood through many gales without shifting. Not a single pane of glass has shattered in all that time. However, the rain water that falls on the concrete, or runs on to it from the next door field, drains over the continuous concrete raft on which the greenhouse stands. It does not stop when it gets to the greenhouse, but just carries on under the base slabs supporting the sides, and through the greenhouse. This means that in weather like this, when you would like to keep the atmosphere inside dry and buoyant, to prevent fungal diseases attacking your plants, the inside of the greenhouse is as damp and dismal as a 1960s bus station. The overwintering pelargoniums are suffering from mildew, and all is not as it should be. The answer would have been to put the greenhouse on its own separate piece of concrete, with a drain around it, so that water could not run in, but I didn't think of that at the time, and nobody told me.
The Systems Administrator retrieved the weather data from the old laptop. With a couple of days to go until the end of the year it looks as though we've had 820 millimetres of rain, which would be about sixty per cent more than normal. The total is slightly suspect, since the weather station threw a wobbly in July and the SA had to borrow the total for that month from the Epping Weather Site. The Clacton coastal strip is generally drier than Epping, so we should probably shave something off their July figure of 132 millimetres. However, with four days of the year to go, Epping has already recorded 944.9 millimetres of rain for 2012, so our 820 millimetres doesn't sound too wildly implausible.
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