back to it

The trouble with being officially over the worst of my cold was that then I had to muck out the chickens' roosting board, since noticing yesterday that it was badly in need of doing.  I've never known an animal for apparently crapping in its sleep the way chickens do.  For those of you who are not poultry keepers, and have no idea what on earth a roosting board is, hens are instinctively programmed to perch at night, and conventionally designed hen houses include a ledge underneath the perch to catch their droppings.  Then you can clean the board periodically while the rest of the hen house remains relatively clean.  There, now you know.

In the unspoken division of labour that lies at the heart of a long term cohabiting relationship, cleaning out the hen house is my job.  Always has been, always is, unless I suppose if I were to fall seriously ill for more than a week or two.  I can't grumble, since under the same convention the Systems Administrator gets the job of unblocking the drains each time they choke up, and dealing with any half dead things brought in by the cats.  Although the last is not part of the unspoken agreement but vehemently argued by me, that as the SA is keen student of military history and voluntarily watched Saving Private Ryan whose first twenty minutes forged new ground for the graphic depiction of violence in war, and I am extremely squeamish and would as soon undergo root canal surgery as watch Saving Private Ryan, dead and half dead things should fall into the SA's department and not mine.

Then it was back to the hedge.  By a perverse logic, although the most urgent things to trim are the grape vine and the hornbeam hedge by the compost bins, because they could bleed if left too late, I spent today working on the boundary hedge by the entrance.  That was where I'd left the shredder, and I reasoned that it was more efficient to finish in that area including shredding the prunings, then move the equipment, rather than take the shredder up to the meadow and have to bring it back again.  Some of the holly in the hedge has died, which puzzles me slightly since the specimen hollies in the borders all look fine, and the wild ones in the wood are rampant.  Maybe the hollies in the hedge couldn't cope with the competition from the neighbouring hazel and dogwood?  Perhaps in that situation and on such light soil the very dry spells we've had in recent years were just too much for them?

A plain green cordyline, which I grew from seed and had thought was dead after the dire winters and droughts, turned out to be alive and relatively healthy in the back of the bed.  It is not growing, though, and what I really wanted was a big exotic tree on an eight or ten foot trunk, not a rosette at ground level.  I had better feed it lavishly in the spring and see if I can persuade it to get going.  At least it has a powerful will to live, which is a start.  An everygreen euonymus which was supposed to be making a glossy dark green column is still a miserable, straggling little thing.  I saw three doing equally badly in the garden at Fuller's Mill where they had been given a much nicer situation than mine, which settles things.  The euonymus is for the chop.  It isn't a corner of the garden I want to spend much time on or that anyone is going to spend a long time looking at, right by the entrance, and what I want are some big, healthy shrubs that will help screen us from the industrial farming landscape of the polytunnels, while conveying a sense of arrival, which is where the cordyline was supposed to come in.

A cotinus has finally got going, after a slow start, and a camellia leaved holly has started growing vigorously though wonkily.  A pine that went in relatively recently hasn't grown yet, but looks as though it might be poised to do so.  Progress of a sort is being made.  I'd better dose the bed with mushroom compost and blood, fish and bone, take stock of the remaining gaps, and rack my brains as to what might grow in that corner, that could cope with the competition from the hedge, the rubbish soil and the south westerlies.  If it had at least some horticultural or wildlife interest that would be a bonus.