in the garden

I used up the last two bags of mushroom compost on the ditch bed, and rang the local garden centre to find out whether they had reopened yet after the New Year break.  Yes, said the voice on the phone, they were open and did have heaps of mushroom compost.  I know who you are, said the voice, you're the one with the red car.  True, and outside landscapers buying by the truck load they probably don't have many customers for mushroom compost at this time of the year.  Maybe eventually they'll offer to let me have the bulk rate as a frequent purchaser.  It's not my fault I can only fit eight bags at a time in the car.

I nipped round before lunch, and saw that they had had a fresh delivery of compost since the last time I was there, proof perhaps that landscapers really are buying it.  The great heap was wet and very squelchy, and if I were not such a keen gardener I would not have wanted to have anything to do with it.  After filling my first bag I gave up with trying to measure it to the last litre using their bottomless 30 litre bucket, because it was so wet it wouldn't shake through the hole at the bottom, and just used the first bag as a guide to how full the others ought to be.  Nobody came over to object.

After lunch I thought I'd better let the chickens out, as they hadn't been out for a while.  The last time I opened their pop hole it was a grey and horrible day, and they simply stood in the run looking at me, until I gave up and shut it again so that I could go away and get on with some work without having to worry about them.  If they didn't feel that strongly about coming out of their run I thought they might as well stay in it.  Today they were a little hesitant to come out, but once one did the other two followed, and after nibbling at the grass by their house and a brief sojourn on the terrace they came and fussed around the gravel with me while I weeded.

There is an extremely good form of iris growing in the gravel.  I think it is Iris florentina, or at least was sold to me as that, the original source of orris root.  I'm bound to admit I didn't notice its roots smelling of violets, but it was a cold day and I was only weeding round them, not chopping them up.  The iris is a very good doer in extremely poor soil, and makes dense mats of rhizomes as described in the Wikipedia entry for Iris florentina.  Unfortunately a creeping grass has made its way among them.  I dug the iris up a few years ago, replanted some elsewhere in the gravel, dug over the original site exhaustively looking for grass roots, and put the rest of the iris back.  The grass returned, as creeping grasses tend to do.  They always send the odd root deep underground, and it's almost impossible to find all of them.  I am reluctant to keep digging the iris up, so I think I'll just have to pull out each bit of grass as I see it, hoping to weaken it, and live with it.  In the meantime I have two patches of iris when I had one before, and it's a very nice plant.