peacocks and plant pots

It was a grey morning, but at least that meant there was no watering to do at work, except inside the tunnels, and even they were pretty damp, apart from a few odd things.  The manager had left his usual list of jobs to do over the weekend next to the till, and mine was to empty the two double-decker red trolleys, plus three of the silver ones that customers use.  That's what he left me to do the last weekend I was working, and I calculated then that it came to around 9.5 square metres of plant pots to put out for sale.

Moving that quantity of plants before left me absolutely shattered by Tuesday, and on Monday when the manager returned to work he didn't say anything encouraging, like gosh, well done for managing to move all those plants, or thank you, so I set about this weekend's trolleys at a more circumspect pace.  When I was at infants school I remember writing my first story.  The teacher gave me a gold star, and I was inordinately pleased, not withstanding the fact that the star had no value whatsoever.  I mean, you couldn't hand it in for sweets or a book or anything.  I immediately wrote another story.  I didn't get another star, and experienced a massive sense of disillusionment.  Managers take note.  Even middle aged people have their inner six year old lurking not so very far below the surface, and if they make a considerable effort and you don't recognise it at all, next time they will probably moderate their energies accordingly.

The peacock's tail is vast and resplendent.  I saw him perching on one of the finials over the door into the owners' private garden, looking very romantic, and the girl who runs the tea room at weekends found him displaying his tail outside the ladies' loo.  She has a reserved attitude to large birds, but her nervousness about approaching the peacock was outweighed by her urgent desire to go to the loo.  I heard a great deal of screaming while I was having my morning tea break, which was the peacock calling because it is the mating season, and the owners' child shouting at the peacock because he felt like it.  I have never been threatened by the peacock and think it is quite good natured, although it might not stay that way if too many children shout at it.

The manager's schedule of things to do included a long list of plants to be covered with fleece if frost was forecast.  One of my colleagues went up to the office to have a look at the weather forecast late in the afternoon, and returned baffled, since the forecast was for a minimum temperature of five degrees C, but with the possibility of frost if there were clear patches.  We compromised on fleecing the most tender and succulent herbaceous plants, like the delphiniums, and bringing some under cover in trolleys, while leaving shrubs like the pittosporums, which ought to be able to cope with 5 degrees above zero.  Really as a forecast it did not make sense, since if the minimum never dropped below five I wouldn't expect a frost, clear skies or no.  It was quite breezy, and some of the plants we were supposed to cover had grown so tall that the fleece wouldn't tuck in all the way round, so most of it will have blown off the plants it is supposed to be covering by the time it gets dark, and it felt rather like a token effort.

The goldfinches had finished their nest, or nearly done so.  I didn't like to inspect it too closely, but could see without going right up to the shrub that there was a neat rounded structure inside, where last Monday there had been just a few feathers and some moss.  I warned both of my colleagues, and put a Reserved notice on the plant.  I never saw a goldfinch in the plant centre all day, and have no idea if they will use the nest or have abandoned it, on the other hand maybe once it is finished they don't need to be in the plant centre.  The robins' nest in our greenhouse last year seemed deserted most of the time, once it was finished and she started laying, until the point where she started to sit on the eggs.  It is strange the way that most bird books are so geared to identification, without telling you much (or anything) about what the birds are actually doing when you see them.  I would like to have the nest, once the goldfinches have finished with it, or if they don't use it, because I would like to install it in the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone' in the conservatory at home, with a toy bird in it, a cheerful kitsch one made out of dyed feathers.

I got home to find that it had drizzled most of the day here, so we had the best of the weather to the north.  Not very good weather, but still better than drizzle.

even busier

It was a good day for bird spotting.  Driving to work I saw a pair of goldfinches flit into a hedge as I passed, the yellow bars on their wings and their red heads shining in sunlight that was already bright by 8 am.  In the early afternoon I looked up, prompted by customers who were doing the same, and saw three buzzards floating languidly high overhead.  They flapped their wings infrequently, gliding for long periods, and made strange high calls, a sort of descending mew.  Somewhere in the garden the peacock thought spring had arrived, and screeched periodically through the day.

My colleague caught up with the backlog of mail order, packaging plants up into strange improvised dalek-shaped parcels.  I took my branded box from Ashwood Nurseries in, which was re-used for a consignment of shrubs.  It would be rather smart, not to say time-saving, to have our own boxes in a variety of sizes, with our name and logo on the side, instead of fabricating parcels from multiple boxes and trays taped together, and topped off with old compost bags turned inside out.

We have got new flexible plastic covers for the tills.  The difference is remarkable.  The old ones were practically opaque through age and use, so that it was almost impossible to read the keys.  The replacements are crystal clear in comparison.  The keyboard has got to be covered with something to keep dirt and damp out of it, otherwise the tills would fill up with compost in practically no time.  I thought the new cover felt rather stiff, but presumed it would bed down with use, then the owner who had been puzzling why they had sent us only one cover discovered that it was in fact two, stuck together.  They seem extremely expensive, costing £20 a time for what is just moulded flexible plastic, but I suppose they have to withstand movement and UV without going brittle.  When I bought a boot liner for my Skoda six years ago I couldn't understand how a plastic tray could cost so much, but as it has survived this long without splitting it must genuinely be made out of superior plastic.

The dangers of bringing plant growth on to appeal to customers desperate for an early shot of spring colour were demonstrated by an entire table of Anemone blanda, which had got badly frosted.  They arrived a few days ago as charming looking pots of blue flowers and dainty little leaves, a critical two or three weeks ahead of the ones growing in my garden, and lo, a sharp cold night caused the top growth to shrivel.  The manager's list of tasks for the weekend instructed us to remove the damaged leaves, and put any pots that looked too bad away out of the sales area to recover.  I soon discovered that on most of the plants virtually all of the leaves and flower buds came away from the pot with the gentlest pull, the stems resembling beansprouts that had been left for too long in the fridge.  The manager was hopeful that there were new leaves coming up, but many of those turned out to be damaged as well.  It will be interesting, in a rather depressing way, to see if they have sufficient reserves to make new foliage, or if they run out of oomph.

Having commented to the owner that yesterday we hadn't had many high spending customers, even though the day's total takings were respectable, today the high rollers were in.  One bought four large box balls, three olives and a big pot, and asked without much conviction whether as he was spending a lot he could have a discount.  Sorry, that's something people have to negotiate with the owner (the answer is almost always No).  Another couple bought six birch trees, and trolleys full of hellebores add up to three figure totals.  It was reassuring to be busy.  When it is very quiet we can't tell if that is just the time of year and the weather, or if it means that everybody has fallen out of love with gardening or stopped spending money on anything except the basics.

respectable finish from a slow start

The frost on the car this morning came as a bit of a shock, after the run of mild weather.  The car thermometer said that it was minus 2.5C, and I fretted slightly that I hadn't set the heaters to run in the greenhouse and conservatory.  I consoled myself with the thought that they should have some reserves of heat to see them through one chilly night, after those sunny days, and anyway, it was too late to do anything about it.

The manager's list of instructions for the weekend asked me to 'do what I could' with the ornamental end-table displays.  Given how little plant material we had in stock that was allowed to be outside rather than safely tucked away in a tunnel, but was not a leafless deciduous pot of brown sticks with no display value whatsoever, doing what I could didn't amount to doing very much.  I started rationalising the tables, so that each one used a limited range of plants and appeared to have some sort of theme, instead of being an indiscriminate jumble of whatever was not under cover.

Coloured stems featured heavily, and I found some willows with nice furry buds, to develop the stem theme further.  Skimmia are allowed to stay out, as are Sarcococca.  I have no idea why these two evergreen species are deemed safe to keep outside over winter, when most evergreens are taken in.  We offer quite a few varieties of both, and the display tables look better when you stick to one or two different sorts per table, rather than a licorice allsorts jumble.  Evergreen Euonymus stay out, and it's worth saving the yellow variegated ones for a yellow themed table, rather than dotting them around through every single display.  The Hamamelis were looking good, and there were some Chaenomeles in flower.  There is a lot of brown in Hamamelis flowers, and I tried to pick that up in the other plants I used with them, and found some Viburnum tinus that had an apple-blossom tinge in its pink flowers to go with the clear pink of the Chaenomeles.

We had the usual quota of regular customers, fortunately only nice ones, and not any of the ones whose appearance in the plant centre makes your heart sink into your wellingtons.  The pleasant couple from Dedham bought a shrub and a couple of bergenias.  A charming petite blonde came in, whose mother-in-law also shops with us, so we have to be careful when ordering plants to make it clear which Mrs C. they're for.  I could even remember without looking at the list which hellebore she is waiting for, but they haven't arrived yet.  There were only two of us on duty, and we only had one till going, which was ample for most of the day, then sudennly in the final hour it got busy with some big trollies going through, and we had a queue, but reached a respectable total for the day's takings in the end.

Back home I put the heaters on.  I've scarcely run them this winter, so I shall indulge myself.  The pots of Geranium maderense in the greenhouse and Streptocarpus in the conservatory looked fine, so no harm was done last night.  The Norfolk Island Pine had blown over.  I forgot to right it this morning, but as it still looks green and alive I left it resting in the embrace of the honeysuckle along the veranda, in the hope it might get some shelter.  It might make it through the next 6-8 weeks alive, and so on to spring, but it might not.  Better not to be optimistic.

a quiet day

The car was properly iced this morning, so I left it running in the drive to defrost.  We have no passers by, being a dead end beyond the farmyard with no public footpath running past the property, so the chances of someone arriving in the garden just as I'm defrosting the car and driving it away are vanishingly low.  When I got in I was disconcerted to see a red warning light shaped like a thermometer flashing on the dashboard.  That never happened before.  I tried the Skoda equivalent of switching it off and switching it on again, and the warning light disappeared.  This little piece of extra fiddling about, plus the fact that while I'd allowed extra time for the roads being icy I hadn't allowed quite enough, made me almost but not quite late for work.

There were only two of us in, as the manager had the day off, and we didn't make much of an impact on the great jumble of plants that arrived from Italy last week.  In fact, as a delivery of trees arrived mid-morning from Norfolk we ended the day with more plants on the grass at the back of the plant centre than when we started.  I was still avoiding using my left hand for lifting, and my colleague had a bad cold, so we made a feeble pair unloading the Norfolk consignment, and as the delivery driver helped us he asked if we were short staffed.  Yes, we were.  I have no idea why someone booked the tree delivery for a day when there would only be two people in.  Some of the Norfolk trees were bare root, their nether regions swaddled in black plastic sacks.  My colleague made noises about maybe heeling some of them in later, which looking at the state of her cold I doubted was going to happen.  I was certainly not going to volunteer to dig holes, and thought that if the manager had wanted them got into the ground he could have left instructions for the gardener.  I did find some fleece, and cover the black plastic bags with that, in case tonight was another frosty one.

It was very quiet.  The weekend was apparently quite busy, but people weren't coming to buy plants on a Monday morning in late November.  My colleague said she was willing to stay late, as she likes being able to come in later, not being a morning person, so I left before she tilled up, but we won't have taken much.  A couple of people came to collect plants on behalf of other people, but they were already paid for.

And that really was that.  Back at home the boiler man came, could find no reason for the boiler to have cut out, and serviced it.  It is running at 92% efficiency, which is one per cent down from last year.  This is apparently normal.  I don't know if it loses a percentage point every year.  The Systems Administrator installed my new printer (the old one was very cheap, a false economy, and never worked very well and then didn't work at all) and spruced up my laptop with downloads and a sort-out.  A programme called Turbo Chickens had got in somehow.  I have no idea what that is.  I didn't put it there.  Further investigations on the net revealed that the new component in the upstairs loo had a flow restrictor that you are supposed to remove if you have low water pressure.  We have, so the SA (who now wishes to be known as the Cistern Administrator) removed it, and the tank now refills in less than twenty minutes.  It still makes a faint squawk when it's finished filling, like the dying exhalation of Monty Python's parrot, but the annoying low hum has stopped.

first frost, not many killed

There was a very light frost, just the merest dusting of silver on the grass.  The dahlias haven't blackened and collapsed, so it couldn't have been very cold.  Their last flowers are rather poignant.  Winter is going to get you, flowers, any day soon.

My bare root plants arrived from Mr Fothergill.  Back in early September I succumbed to temptation, and ordered a few things from their plant catalogue.  Who could resist purple flowered Iberis sempervirens?  They came as plug plants in the middle of last month, and were potted into 3 inch pots (that must equate to something in metric terms except that I think of it as a 3 inch pot, as probably do all other gardeners).  I checked this morning, and a few roots were showing through the drainage holes, so they've made it out of their mesh bags.  Today's delivery was a box of three Geranium sanguineum in a new (for G. sanguineum) purple colour break, and three white oriental poppies that promise a second repeat flowering in summer, after the traditional spring one.  All of these are destined for the front garden, on the light sand, where G. sanguineum seeds itself with great determination, and I am so grateful that anything wants to grow in the sand that I let it.

The bare root plants were packed in bags, with almost every scrap of soil washed off them, and looked alarmingly small, if you weren't used to that sort of thing.  They were the same size as the ones we get at work, and I treated them the same way, putting them straight into 2L pots.  They should have formed a potful of roots by early next summer.  My conscience impelled me to get peat free compost, the last time I bought any, and I'm still getting the feel of it.  It has the knack of looking dry on top, while the pots are still heavy when hefted, and I can see that accidental overwatering could be an issue.  (I like 'the pots are still heavy when hefted'.  It sounds like a translation from a gardening version of Beowulf).

Still to come are the frost proof gazanias, though I think I'll pot those too, and plant them outside after the winter.  Gazania are almost frost resistant, as I found a couple of survivors yesterday when I was weeding the gravel by the entrance, that were planted last year.  One even had a flower on it, better late than never.  I also found what were definitely seedlings of Morina longifolia, that strange plant with scallop edged bristly leaves and whorls of pink flowers.  Next year I'll add some Puya to the mix, which are currently growing in the greenhouse and taking up rather a lot of space after a seed packet gave a good rate of germination.  I ought to try selling them on e-bay, but shrink from the hassle of packing and posting.  How exactly do you package a rosette forming semi-succulent, armed with backwards facing spines designed to trap sheep, so that the plant can live on the juices when the unfortunate animal expires in its clutches?  That sounds almost as much as trouble as dealing with irate e-bay customers, whose parcels have been lost or taken hostage for the weekend in a warehouse twenty five miles from their house, by some delivery company.