taking stock

The owner and I walked around the garden first thing, with the latest draft of the garden guide, checking that everything mentioned occurred at the point where the text said it would (it did) and adding in extra trees worthy of mention.  There was lots to see, with big fat bunches of snowdrops almost fully open, and camellias and witch hazels in bloom.  As Monday mornings go, being paid to walk around an interesting garden is well up there as a good way to start the week.  The dog came along, and more or less stayed with the owner for the entire tour.  Apparently on Saturday she was taken on a shoot and disgraced herself, charging around uncontrollably.  Today, truffling about in evergreens against the wall of the plant centre, she flushed out a large muntjac, which ran away in a lumbering and slightly non-urgent fashion.  After a long pause the dog followed, without conviction.  She is a terrier, not a hound, and doesn't seem to consider that chasing large beasts of the field is part of her remit.  It's just as well, really, as she gets lost often enough running after rabbits.

Things went downhill after the positive start, and I was required to scribe for the shop stocktake.  Stocktaking the shop is a task of such awful, tedious grimness that I think it is worse than doing my tax return, if that is possible.  The stuff in the shop comes from umpteen different suppliers, and we don't have bar-codes.  Records of stock brought forward and ordered during the year are entered on an excel spreadsheet so large that the printed version is stapled together in four separate sections, because it is too fat for our staplers to cope as a single document.  The person doing the counting announces what the stock item is, and the scribe has to hunt for it in the vast spreadsheet.  Sometimes whole minutes elapse between the counter saying how many items, and the wretched scribe finding the right page, by which time both have forgotten the answer and the counter has to count them again.

Insecticides.  Fertilisers.  Fungicides.  Garden lanterns.  Lamp oil.  String.  Gloves.  Mugs.  Watering cans.  Raffia.  Hose connectors.  Toiletries.  Vases.  Trugs.  Metal obelisks.  Garden hand tools.  Jam pot covers.  Vegetable peeling bins.  Bird boxes.  Bird feeders.  Plant supports.  Bird food.  Plant supports.  Books.  Greetings cards.  Tea towels.  Soil testing kits.  Plant labels.  Wooden fruit.  Notepads.  Bridge sets.  Candles.  Tea cosies.  Shopping bags.  Swiss army knives.  Seeds.  Door stops.  Boot jacks.  Garden kneelers.  Beneficial miccorrhizae.  Coat hooks.  Plastic tubs.  Toasting forks.  Nutcrackers.  Scrubbing brushes.  Tissue box holders.  Place mats.  Seed storage tins.  Kitchen roll holders.  Gift wrap.  Paper napkins.

We sell all of these and more, mostly in multiple sizes and colours and varieties.  You wouldn't believe how many different sorts of gardening glove we stock, or how many varieties of string.  Sometimes the boss has loaded the stock code on to the spreadsheet, but sometimes there is just a description.  Sometimes the boss's description doesn't pick up on the key word that appears on the packaging, so a 'power saw' is recorded as a 'folding saw' (probably a more accurate description, looking at it).  The scribe then spends a long time trying to match what the counter has told them to the spreadsheet, without success.  Sometimes similar items appear in more than one place on the spreadsheet, so gloves give way to wellington boots, but then over the page there are suddenly some more gloves, as the spreadsheet fails to run in stock code order.

It would be too simple if all of the watering cans were together, or all of the string in one place.  To make the shop appear more tempting there are themed tables and ornamental displays.  One of my colleagues put together a display of green things.  It was quite cute, in a sort of Gardens Illustrated shopping section way, and mixed up string, raffia, candles, vases, watering cans, candles, kitchen waste caddies, bottles for making infusions of herbal oil, gloves and a textile door stop, all coloured different shades of green.  In all it ran across at least a dozen different categories of the stock sheet.  My colleague would tell me that the next thing was a glove code TML406S.  I would spend five minutes trying to find my way back to gloves.  She would say 'There's one of those', and on we went, hunting this time for the green metal vertical sided vase.

The new member of staff starts tomorrow.  Poor sod, he is going to have a baptism of fire.  After the stocktake things can only get better for him.

a walk in the woods

The music society is starting to look ahead to 2012-13 season, and the process of putting together a programme turns out to be fascinatingly Byzantine in its complexity.  There is a trio we would like to book, but the dates of their other tour bookings would push their visit to us into the first Sunday in Advent.  Churches have other things to do on that day than give their church over to a chamber music concert so that doesn't work.  There are a couple of interesting sounding string quartets, but we don't want the season to be completely dominated by strings.  One of them might be available with a clarinetist to make up a quintet, but if we were to have the quintet we wouldn't want another concert with a clarinet or oboe as well.  Young singers are apparently inherently unreliable, because if we have booked one for an evening for, say, £300, and they get the offer of five nights of opera work at, say,  £1000 a night for dates that clash with us, they have to have incredibly high principles (and a rather dense eye for the main chance career-wise) not to dump us in favour of the opera.  We can't have too many concerts requiring us to hire a piano, since that costs extra (although patrons do sometimes sponsor piano hire).  The branches of the decision tree soon spread into an incomprehensible tangle, and I have nothing but admiration for the person who goes away with notes of the committee's deliberations, and turns it into a programme.

Today I  drove my father to a Woodland Trust charity day for loyal supporters.  It was organised by their Legacies team, but to my relief the fundraising part was done with a light touch.  Monitoring and assessing the performance of staff employed to get legacy income for a charity must be tricky, as most of today's guests looked pretty healthy, even if not in the first flush of youth, and the lead time between making the pitch and discovering if you've won the jackpot must be quite long in many cases.  We met at a hotel outside Stowmarket, and were taken in a coach for a tour of one of their local woods.

This was Priestley Wood, which is an ancient wood, with a rich ground flora, SSSI status, and the remains of mediaeval wood banks still clearly visible.  We were shown around by the area manager for the Trust's sites in Suffolk and Norfolk.  He led us to something we were promised would be special, which turned out to be a medium sized tree with angular branches and dark, crazed bark.  This was a true wild pear, not an escaped garden pear tree, but a European native at the very northern edge of its range.  It is thought to be the only surviving one in Suffolk, and is considered by some experts to indicate that the area covered by Priestley Wood has been under continuous tree cover since the last ice age.  Somebody has apparently succeeded in taking cuttings from it, but wild pears are on a long-term losing streak.  They used to be much more common in Saxon times.

The other piece of forestry information which amused me was that many of the standard oak trees in the wood are thought to have been planted, rather than having sprung from natural regeneration, and were probably grown from stock taken from the Low Countries, which produced better timber for local purposes than the native trees.  Given that the local versus foreign provenance debate assumes almost religious dimensions at times, locally collected seed being assumed to be superior because it will produce individuals suited to the local conditions, I think it is really rather funny if some of the 'local' trees were grown from Dutch acorns.  (The League of Gentleman completely hijacked the word 'local' anyway, so that I can't help placing it in mental inverted commas whenever I hear it).

For anyone who is not deeply into woodland management, 'standard' trees in this context means trees that have been allowed to grow up to their full height.  Looking like a normal tree, in fact.  Many of the trees in Priestley Wood are coppice, which are regularly cut down and regrow as multi-stemmed plants, to be harvested again and again.  Priestley Wood is in active management with plenty of coppice work going on, thanks to volunteers.  The wood they harvest is allowed to season for a year and sold for firewood.  Nowadays they leave the piles of logs in the wood, well away from the road, until they are ready to sell them, since a couple of years ago they had several hundred pounds worth stolen.  With the rise in the cost of heating oil and the growth in popularity of wood burning stoves, the price of firewood has shot up, and if you leave it lying around it is liable to get lifted.

There are doormice too.  They had died out in that wood, and were reintroduced a dozen years ago in co-operation with the Suffolk Wildlife Trust.  Since then the population has sustained itself.  Muntjac are less welcome, and nowadays owners of the local woods manage them.  'Manage' in this context decodes as shoot, following a survey of their numbers and the extent of grazing damage.  Some of our party did see a muntjac faun lying among the undergrowth.  I didn't go and have a look myself.  I'm sure it was very cute, but in my book they are garden pests and tree murderers.

day two in the plant centre

Switching on the radio in the kitchen at twenty past six this morning, I deduced from the fact that the news was covering a story about the failure of US policy to support job creating businesses, that the riots had not escalated overnight.  Watching last night's live TV cover of the flames spreading through the Croydon furniture store, with never a fire engine in sight as the fire ran out of control, was quite surreal.  Though for students of London history the only true novelty was the real-time aerial view.  Amanda Vickery's fascinating programme of tales from the Old Bailey looked at rioting just a couple of weeks ago.  The mob ye have always with ye.  Human nature doesn't change that quickly, even if the young nowadays do possess more electronics than put the first man on the moon, and believe that potatoes grow on trees.

Yesterday's wind had dried things out considerably at work, and meant that we couldn't run any of the automatic irrigation overnight.  There were a lot of fallen pots to pick up this morning, and only two of us working in the plant centre, and we hadn't quite finished the watering by the time the first customers arrived.  Two of them very nearly got soaked when the automatics in the herbaceous section started up, but fortunately managed to skip out of the way in time.  The fact that we were a lot wetter than they were also mollified them.

The gardener has been removing trees this week that have succumbed to honey fungus.  This disease is a risk to any garden, and in one that has been in cultivation for over a hundred years is probably almost bound to strike somewhere.  The boss is admirably philosophical about it, saying it's a pity to lose them, but it's a chance to plant new things and he'll try something fungus resistant in their place.  Styrax was mentioned.  Two of the casualties are good sized acers, a snakebark and a nice specimen of A. vitifolium which I always liked, but it can't be helped.

The boss has an odd habit of meeing suppliers and contractors in the back of the shop, instead of the house.  Yesterday's visitor was a salesman the boss knew, who has recently moved to a new firm dealing in pet supplies including bird food.  They spent most of the time actually talking about chickens, discussing breeds, auto-sexing chicks, methods of hatching eggs, and treatments for scaly leg.  Today it was somebody who must be allowed to shoot muntjac on the farm, and the talk was of deer routes, where to put towers on which to watch and wait, gun in hand, the difficulties of stopping children playing on the towers, and the impracticability of shooting deer from horseback.  It was all timeless and oddly soothing.  Generations of Suffolk men have sat discussing poultry and hunting (though not muntjac given they were only introduced to the UK in 1925).

We were given the pet food literature to compare margins with those on bird food from our existing supplier.  The new firm's leaflet didn't make it clear which prices were inc. and which ex. VAT, and when I rang them up the person who answered the phone didn't know, and by close of play nobody had rung me back.  I found out the answer (or at least an answer) by calling the salesman on his mobile.  The potential new supplier offers lower prices to us, and suggests lower selling prices which would give us a lower percentage margin and smaller absolute mark-up.  This might or might not work to our disadvantage depending on the price elasticity of bird food.

Travelling home, the drawback of having to cross the main railway line was again brought home to me as the underpass was shut, leaving all traffic to go over the level crossing.  Between trains.  The queue had backed up a good mile across the marshes, and I began to wish that I hadn't not bothered to stop for petrol the previous evening, as the Skoda's indicated range was down to 55 miles.  The tank and gauge seem curiously non-linear in slow traffic, and 55 miles can drop down to 20 in a lot less than 35 miles.  I was caught at the top of the ramp to cross the line by the barriers going down again.  Once they lifted and I switched the engine back on I revved it ostentatiously (which is unlike me) to reassure myself that it would lift me up the last few feet and over the line without stalling on the tracks.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator has an idea for controlling rioters, which is to spray them with pig slurry.  Not high pressure water cannon that knock people off their feet, just hoses of stinking ordure.  The theory is that you exploit the Yuk factor, since once rioters and looters have slurry dripping down their faces, running around throwing missiles at the police or anything else won't seem fun, and anything you steal will be ruined, not to mention unsellable.  Detection ought to be easier for the next couple of days as well.  The S.A. is a fan of the Goon Show, and this idea does seem to owe something to Rice Puddings Shot from Catapults.  It is almost a joke, except that it might even work.

fixing the wire

I spent today working on the boundary anti-rabbit (and muntjac) fence.  We know from the grazing and digging, plus photos from the trail camera, that both are coming into the garden regularly.  When we started the garden we installed conventional rabbit fencing, which for a long time worked pretty well, though the odd determined bunny used to jump over.  However, it is not high enough to stop muntjac, and over time it does get broken down in places where tree branches fall on it, or extra-determined animals gnaw holes in it.  I'd been stopping these up as I noticed them, but have now done a more systematic search and block exercise.

To stop muntjac jumping I'd added a second higher layer of wire netting in places, but unlike the original rabbit wire it wasn't attached to a strand of heavy wire along the top, and over time it had fallen down again, so I've been adding a top wire and attaching the second layer of netting to that, and fixing a higher layer along stretches where there wasn't one before.

It is all rather dull, when there is so much weeding and clearing and planting and mulching still to do, and pulling the next crop of goose grass seedlings out of the bed by the ditch while admiring the pulmonarias and cyclamen seedlings is so much more fun.  Wire is not pleasant stuff to handle, and  I've collected a few more scratches and my fingers hurt.  But there's no point in planting things for them to be dug up again, and in worrying about weeding when established plants are being regularly browsed down to stumps.  A friend commented that by now the rabbits were probably living in the garden anyway.  I hope this is not true, but if they are she can give me the name of somebody who will Deal with Them.

The great unknown is whether the badgers will accept having their runs and routes blocked up.  In the past they've been quite amenable, but it may be that one of today's holes could be on a sort of badger version of Elephant Walk.  There is another solution to try if that happens, which is to build them a badger gate.  I've seen such a thing at Waddesden Manor.  It is like an extra-large cat-flap.  Rabbits couldn't move it, and I don't imagine muntjac would, though they are quite stout little deer.  But given there are loads of other things to do it really would be better if we didn't find ourselves having to fabricate badger gates.

muntjac

As I was leaving work on Saturday afternoon a muntjac ran right across the car park and disappeared by the bonfire heap.  It was around first thing this morning, so the gamekeeper was called and the member of staff working in the polytunnel on the far side of the car park evacuated.  Then the dog escaped from the house and ran after the deer, which bolted in a direction where the gamekeeper couldn't get a safe shot at it.  It'll be back.

The question of culling deer is a sensitive one, which conservation bodies like the National Trust and Woodland Trust don't seem keen on addressing head-on.  I can see their dilemma.  Many of their supporters, probably especially town-based ones (the majority of the population) may think that killing deer is cruel and wrong, like of the death of bambi's mother.  But muntjac do an enormous amount of damage in the countryside.  In woodland they graze on the ground level plants such as oxlips to the point where they may be unable to seed, or killed outright, and they eat the emerging shoots of coppice stumps so that traditional woodland management through coppicing may be impossible.  They are equal wreckers of gardens, given half a chance, and damage crops.  Muntjac were only introduced to Britain in the last century, and their numbers are rising rapidly.  Oliver Rackham, fellow of Corpus Christi and one of the leading experts on British woodlands considers damage by deer to be one of the major threats facing our native woods.  So I'm not averse to properly qualified people shooting them, who are licenced to hold firearms and skilful enough to make it a merciful clean shot.  And I don't see how anyone is entitled to say that shooting muntjac is cruel and wrong if they themselves eat factory farmed chickens or battery eggs.

creatures of the night

We invested in one of those motion activated waterproof cameras I was talking about.  It turns out they are called trail cameras, and there is a whole internet community chatting about them and posting pictures of nocturnal animals.  Deer, wild boar (not in north Essex), all sorts.  You can set it to do time lapse photography as well, and short videos.  A new world of technology and wildlife spotting beckons, once we've got the hang of it.  We put the camera up by the chicken house, and I was convinced that the fox would go past, but all we got were a couple of shots of the cats wandering out in the early morning, and one blackbird (we're going to train the camera on the cat door one night, and see if any of the rodent operatives bother to stir themselves outside after we've gone to bed).  Then due to an error in setting up the camera it ran continuously and the batteries went flat before it could capture anything.  Last night, getting anxious to see something, we put it by the far end of the wood.  We got lucky.

A fox did go by.  I knew there were foxes, given they've taken several chickens over the years, we've seen them (I kicked one once, but that's another story), we hear the vixens call, and something had the carcass of last week's roast out of the dustbin.  It was running fast, so only stayed in camera shot for one picture, and that's blurry, but it's quite clearly a fox (photo).

There were also muntjac, two in fact, so they hunt in pairs (photo) .  Again, I knew we had muntjac.  I've seen them, and heard them bark, and they come into the garden and eat the leaves of the evergreen shrubs.  We need to use the camera to work out where they are hippity-hoppitying over the wire, then I'll raise it, and pile brushwood outside to make it the muntjac equivalent of a Grand National fence.

There was also a badger (photo).  I'd never seen one before in seventeen years, but thought they were around.  They are very fond of peanuts, so if we regularly set bait out for them we should get some more photos.  Badgers are clean animals that rather than soil their setts create latrines for themselves at a distance.  I once heard a R4 interview with someone whose job required him to monitor the territories belonging to different badger setts.  His method, which he had been using for about twenty years, was old-fashioned and low-tech science, as he cheerfully admitted.  He fed the occupants of each sett peanuts, laced with a mixture of golden syrup and non-toxic coloured plastic balls, a different colour for each sett.  Then he meticulously recorded which coloured balls appeared in each badger latrine.  I think we'd better skip the golden syrup.  With the beehives on the premises I don't want to encourage these badgers to develop a sweet tooth.