the strulch arrives

The Strulch arrived today.  Strulch is wonderful stuff, chopped straw mulch which is what the name stands for, and it stops weeds germinating and cuts down on evaporation from the soil and is altogether great, and I dislike having it delivered more than almost any gardening task.  I buy it in bulk direct from the manufacturer because it is so much cheaper per bag that way, and it arrives on a pallet swaddled in yards of plastic film.  Because we live up such a tiny lane I daren't go for the free delivery option in a big lorry, and pay a premium for a little, 7.5 tonne lorry.  The delivery firm the Strulch company uses don't have space on their paperwork for detailed instructions on how to find us, so I have taken to simply asking that the driver ring me when the lorry gets to the lettuce farm.

That leaves me hovering in earshot of the phone for an unknown proportion of the day, which is always obscurely unsettling.  It's pot luck whether the driver will see the instruction to ring from the farm, or stick to it, or how grumpy he (or it might be a she but so far has not been) is by the time he has reversed up the little track.  I tell them to reverse in because otherwise the offloaded pallet and the truck end up blocking each other's further progress, but there's always the chance the driver will just drive up the lane anyway.  The driver certainly won't like the gravel, since you can't use a pallet trolley on gravel at all.  Sometimes he won't manage to wheel the trolley off the tail lift and we'll end up having to break the whole load down in situ and offload it bag by bag.  Some drivers have refused to have anything at all to do with the gravel and broken down the pallet on the back of the truck, passing every individual bag down to us.  I know it is not the easiest delivery, but one or two have been so grouchy I've felt like spelling it out forcibly that if it wasn't for people buying things they wouldn't have a job delivering them.  And there was the time that delays on the M25 and the M40 were so bad that it got dark and I had to go out before the Strulch ever arrived, leaving the Systems Administrator to help unload it from a truck with no internal light, until the tail lift collapsed half way through, spilling bags of chopped straw mulch all over the drive.

Today's driver arrived mid morning, which was nice as it got the waiting out of the way, and was cheerful, which always helps.  He rang from the public road, and it turned out he had made it as far as the lettuce farm before only he could not get a phone signal there.  He pulled and the Systems Administrator pushed and they managed to get the pallet right off the tail lift, which was almost a first, and meant he could set off on his way.  The postman did arrive while we were unloading, but I managed to squeeze past the truck to take our letters and the postman laughed at my joke that all we needed now was for the binmen to turn up, before he had to reverse all the way down the lane.  He is a nice postman.  I thought that with such a magnificent pile of straw we should have manned the barricades and sung a few verses from Les Miserables, but instead we carted all fifty bags out of the way, and I moved the pallet, and the SA announced that he was now going to Sit Down.

This afternoon I used one bag.  I am not really ready to apply the Strulch yet, but had a discount code valid until the end of October, and it will be handy to have it in stock as I cut down and weed each bed in turn.

Addendum  I made a happy discovery in the Guardian.  Several years ago I went to an exhibition at the RA of photographs by five early twentieth century Hungarian photographers.  It was a very good exhibition, and I liked one photo in particular of trees in a park in snow, and was disappointed that it wasn't one of the pictures the RA had chosen to turn into a postcard, though not surprised since the picture you really like so often isn't available as a card.  In the years since I have fretted occasionally about my lost photograph, while forgetting the photographer's name.  Today in the Guardian's art section I saw an article about an exhibition by a Hungarian photographer, and scrolling down the page found the scene of the park and the trees in the snow.  His name was Andre Kertesz, and the park was Washington Park.  It seems that every museum in America has a copy of the print, and the Met website has a Print button which the SA has promised to investigate when the printer has the right paper and some ink in it.  A home printed copy would not be as good as an original silver gelatin, but still, I love the image.  Alas, the exhibition is in Amsterdam so I won't be going.