a mystery solved

The mystery of the Marie Celeste pottery was solved when I got a rather apologetic email from them saying that they had just discovered their reply to my email about post and packing costs was still in their Draft folder, and did I still want the pots?  After a little flurry of email courtesies confirming that yes, I did still want them, although none are ready to send out at the moment, I learnt that moreover if you ring while they are on the phone and leave a message it gets put on a Sky answering machine where they can't retrieve it.  Despite all this they are ridiculously busy. Unfortunately the new batch of pots won't be dry enough to fire for another three or four weeks by which time it will be too late to repot the auriculas this year.

My own email has a habit of saying there is still a message in the Draft folder even after I've pressed Send, and I am quite neurotic about checking whether there is really a Draft message there, or whether the message I thought I'd sent is in the Sent folder and the so-called Draft will vanish when I refresh the page.  In the light of the auricula pots experience this now seems not so much neurotic as sensible.

The pottery liked my idea of asking the specialist auricula nurseries if they would put links on their websites to the pottery, since new handmade auricula pots are so hard to find.  I'd have thought it was a blindingly obvious suggestion.  I eventually stumbled across them after a long internet search, but they weren't easy to find.  Now I know their name I have noticed one reference to them in a magazine article about an Arne Maynard garden mentioning that the pots were from Littlethorpe, but they don't advertise in any of the national magazines.  There again, if they are already ridiculously busy why should they?

I spent most of the day weeding up by the wildlife pond, and was rather worried to see that that the water level had dropped right down.  The pond has the shallow sloping beach on one side that you are supposed to create for wildlife ponds, so that things can creep and hop in and out, so it always tends to dry out in summer because the surface area is large relative to the volume, but after the wet summer we've had I wouldn't expect it to be that low.  I am horribly afraid it must have a leak.

I put syrup on the bees as well.  The book says to do it in the first week of September, so I am only a week late.  I have been meaning to do it since last Monday.