another mild day

The flow of warm air from the Azores continues.  Last night was the warmest UK December night ever, and today was set to break the record for the warmest day.  I wonder what the bees are doing?  Do they have the sense to know that there are few flowers out, and short days, and now is not the time to make more bees, even if it is mild as May?  They won't need to eat much to keep warm in this weather, but suppose they are chomping through their stores raising brood?  The time around Christmas is reckoned to be ideal for applying oxalic acid as an antidote to the varroa mite, but that's on the basis that little brood will be present.  At this rate I'll be doing an inspection to see if they need emergency feeding.  And should I apply oxalic acid while it's so warm, or leave it in the hope that it will get colder in the New Year?  Not that I've bought the acid yet.  It goes off in storage, so you don't want to buy it until close to when you plan to use it.

In the meantime I'm still weeding and mulching the long bed.  Another four bags of mushroom compost went on this morning, and the tide of brown goo now reaches right across the bed. Progress in some areas is much faster than in others, depending on the nature of the weeds. Disentangling the bright green threads of the nameless fine leaved annual weed grass from the slumbering patches of prostrate gypsophila is a slow business, then a yard further on it's merely a question of pulling out the odd tuft of hairy bittercress.  The local garden centre closes for Christmas next Wednesday, and the woman I asked the last time I was there was not very certain when it reopened but thought it might be weather dependent, so I must make sure I go into the holiday period stocked up with muck.  Though when I run out there are plenty of other jobs to be getting on with.

In the back garden the stems of Salvia uliginosa are still green.  This is a very beautiful and slightly tender form of sage with electric blue flowers.  Rosy Hardy mentioned it in her Plant Heritage talk on late season flowers, and advised not cutting it back until it had died down naturally.  The mature stems are hollow, like dahlias, and her theory was that if you cut them before they had gone brown as the plant sealed them off then you were creating a route for damp and infection to get into the rootstock and your plant might rot over the winter.  I took her advice to heart, being eager to do the best for my S. uliginosa, but wasn't expecting them to still be green and leafy six days before Christmas.  And it has to be admitted that in past years I have chopped them down, still green, when I got to that part of the bed, and the plant has not died yet.  It runs at the root without forming a very dense patch, and this year there was not so much of it as I should like and it was rather hemmed in at the front of the border, so when I come to clear and tidy the bog bed I must remove some of the all too eager Persicaria and Iris to give the salvia some breathing space.

The chickens have forgiven or forgotten the boot liner incident, because they came out of their run readily enough, but after that they did not want to stray far from their front door.  In the summer I sometimes end up hunting around looking for them because they've wandered off, eventually catching up with them at the very bottom of the back garden, but today I was able to weed the herb bed next to the hen house without interruption.  Indeed, I stuck my head round the corner a few times to check that they were eating grass outside their run and hadn't gone back inside.  They came and poked around the herb bed with me after a while, but their rambling instincts seem definitely curtailed at this time of year.