back to the big chop

Today, after I had potted up the substitute hyacinths that arrived later than the rest of the order, I returned to the mammoth task of cutting the Eleagnus hedge.  The main part still to be done is the top, which is a fiddle, because after carefully positioning the pole lopper and snipping through the longest shoots I then have to flick them off the hedge.  Sometimes they refuse to be flicked, and I have to try and grasp them gently with the jaws of the lopper, like a retriever holding a dead pheasant in its jaws without breaking the skin.  I don't know how much the pole lopper weighs.  The Amazon website puts the cutting head and the extendable pole at exactly two kilos each, which seems remarkably tidy, not to say a coincidence, but at any rate it feels quite heavy, particularly when operated while balancing on a step ladder.

The warm weather brought Our Ginger bustling out into the garden, and he kept me company while I worked, sitting either at the base of the step ladder so that I had to disturb him each time I wanted to move it, or else in the spot I needed to move the ladder to.  He stared intently into the base of the hedge, but nothing came out.  In the final days of the old cats there were sometimes baby rabbits scuffling around under the Eleagnus, but not any more.

I think I am on the home straight with the hedge, and that one more day's work might do it.  Realistically that probably translates to two, on the basis that I am an incurable optimist about how long gardening jobs are going to take, but it should be a matter of days now rather than weeks.  I need to get it done because the daffodils need to go in the ground pronto, and then that will be this year's bulb order planted, except for the tulips that don't get done until November.  I always feel a slight pang that I didn't get more bulbs, and have to remind myself that I ordered quite as many as I could afford or had time to plant.

We were going to take a day off from it all tomorrow and go and visit Sandringham, as a consolation prize for not making it to Westonbirt or Stourhead this autumn.  Sandringham is supposed to have a fine collection of trees, and is open until next weekend.  But the Systems Administrator has just checked the weather forecast for King's Lynn, prompted by a big lump of rain showing on the rain radar, and it seems that tomorrow is going to be wet all day up there.  There seems no point in driving all the way to north Norfolk for the sake of going if it is going to be pouring with rain, especially as the rain band is due to miss north east Essex so we could be getting on with things here.  Perhaps I will finish the hedge tomorrow after all.