I potted the daffodil bulbs this morning. I was rather relieved that I had enough compost left after potting on the seven and nine centimetre pots. Daffodils start making roots early in the autumn, as you will know if you have ever dug one up by mistake in late summer, and the first week of September is none too soon to be planting them. And now they can get on with starting to grow while we're away, probably a fortnight before I'd have got round to planting them otherwise. One of my favourite pieces of gardening advice is from Sir Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian: Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping.
And that was my last bit of gardening until after we return from holiday. I will refill the brown bin once it's been emptied on Friday, so that the next load has plenty of time to settle and I fit as much in as possible, and I must make sure I move my last bags of long grass cuttings from the lawn so that they don't sit there for the whole week marking the grass, but there won't be time for anything much else before we go, and once we get back we'll already be into the second half of September. Really there is no good time for gardeners to go away.
I hope it rains while we're off. Here, that is, not in North Yorkshire. The box of bulbs also contained a bag of a hundred Crocus tommasinianus for the bottom lawn, and I don't fancy dibbling a hundred holes until the ground is softer, while the stash on the concrete includes dozens of seed raised mallows and knapweeds for the daffodil lawn, and I'm certainly not planting them until I can dig comfortably. The human wrist is a engineering marvel, but if there's one sure way to knacker it for a month it's persistently trying to push a trowel into hard ground.
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