more compost needed

My plants from Crocus came.  I had only just followed the link on their email informing me that the order was with the courier to arrive today and seen that there were no deliveries ahead of mine when there was the scrunch of white van wheels on gravel and they arrived.  The driver did not even want a signature, so if I wanted to order anything else I could risk doing it in a week when I couldn't guarantee to be around.  The box was encouragingly tall, and was handed over to me the right way up and uncrushed.

It had a little lid which I removed, and looked down lovingly at the plants while wondering how I was going to lift them out, before discovering I did not need to lift them out of the box, instead I could lift the box off them.  You pulled a tab near the base, like the ones on detergent powder boxes, and the whole of the top of the box ripped off, leaving the plants sitting nestled into a shallow inner tray inside the base of the big box.  Each pot was wrapped in polythene and taped securely to the tray, so even if the main box had been tipped over in transit the pots would probably have stayed put.  I love it when mail order plant companies invest in proper packaging and don't just try to wedge everything in with balls of newspaper.

The cats now have the lid, the base of the box, the inner tray, and a tunnel formed by the body of the big box which I've put by my desk for them to play with because they like tunnels.  Mr Fluffy spent part of the morning sleeping in it.  I have the plants, and they all look very healthy, while the tamarisk is taller and bushier than I thought it might be, and the buddleia that was described as being in a 9 centimetre pot and which I thought might have to be potted on for planting out next spring looks substantial enough to go out now.

All I have to do is get the border ready for them.  I went and bought another eight bags of bag-your-own spent mushroom compost, and dug that in, and used all the home made compost that was ready the last time I turned the compost heaps earlier in the summer.  That means the new bit of border has had sixteen bags of bought compost and ten bags of home made.  The mushroom compost bags held thirty litres because that's the size of the bucket the garden centre sells it by, while I didn't measure out the home made compost but on average there must have been more than thirty litres in each bag, so the new stretch of border has had over 780 litres of organic matter added to it but needs more.  I haven't even covered all of it yet, and some of it is still so sandy and meagre when dug over that it looks quite unfit to plant anything in.

I shall have to go and get another load mushroom compost in the morning.  I wish they would give me a loyalty card like coffee shops do, buy ten bags of bag-your-own mushroom compost, get an extra one free.