We received a large delivery of herbaceous plants this morning at the plant centre, some in 9cm and 2L pots to be sold as they are, and some field grown bare root pieces of plant to be potted up, and sold once they are properly rooted in. It was a case of all hands to the pumps to unload the lorry, and we began to run out of space to put the trays and boxes down. One tray disintegrated in transit causing twenty Francoa to crash to the ground, sustaining minor damage, but as the manager was carrying that one there were no recriminations. A couple of Agapanthus got dropped in the excitement as well, and there was a moment of minor tension when two different sorts of grasses got mixed up, but overall it went quite smoothly.
I'd expected to spend the day potting, which I was looking forward to, but no labels were ready until late on so we couldn't make a start. Instead I found myself cleaning up pots containing tiny oak and thorn trees that arrived sometime in the past week. Some of the Crataegus had such lush crops of liverwort growing on the surface of the compost that I'm surprised the grower wasn't embarrassed to send them out in that state, but I suppose we are paying for the rarity value, not the presentation, and there's no benefit to them in having a staff member spend time cleaning them. We get these rare trees as very young plants, mostly 15-45cm tall, which comes as a disappointment to those customers who want to start with something at 2-3m. They retail at close to thirty pounds, which puts them among the most expensive plants per centimetre that we sell. Most of the cork oaks, Quercus suber, were horribly shrivelled. It's true that they were left outside last night, but it wasn't that cold, and cork oak is reasonably hardy (the most northerly specimen I've seen growing in the UK was at Gosforth in the Lake District). The pots felt normally moist, but the manager decided they had probably been allowed to dry out at some point during transit. To a plant lover it is sad to see a nice little young plant ruined by poor treatment.
It is exciting when the new stock starts pouring in. We're scheduled to get all sorts of things in the next couple of weeks, and they are harbingers of spring, like hearing the first skylark (as I did on Saturday). It's nice to see familiar plants reappear, and there's always the possibility of something new and unknown. Since I was last at work Prunus incisa 'Kojo-no-mai' had arrived, so I did buy one of those, as I know exactly where I am going to put it, in the middle of the long bed next to a dwarf pine, and the site is more or less ready.
The chippie was hard at work in the shop, fastening together the cabinets for the new kitchen. Apparently some customers have expressed disquiet that we are having a cafe, even an incredibly modest one, and asked whether that means that we are going to become like everybody else. I put it down to dislike of change (rather sad). There is no reason why starting to sell proper pots of tea and cake should be the precursor to halving the range of plants and diversifying into gas barbecues and novelty clocks.
Addendum Essex does not feature on today's list of additional counties that are officially in drought. I see that Thames Water are telling customers that there are simple steps they can take to save water, like not running the tap while cleaning their teeth, and only running full loads of laundry. I find that sort of advice completely unhelpful, as I only ever run full machine loads of washing, and haven't run the tap while cleaning my teeth for about three decades. It's like those headlines that promise savings of so many thousand pounds a year, and then in the article it turns out that I have to stop buying a latte every day, take my own sandwiches to work, and give up my gym membership to walk the dog instead. The theoretical savings would indeed be immense, if only I bought latte and sandwiches and had a gym membership to start with (or indeed a dog).
Showing posts with label potting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label potting. Show all posts
Monday, 20 February 2012
Monday, 13 February 2012
gone to pot
Today I was mostly potting. I rather thought I might be, given that I knew there was some potting left over from last week, and went dressed accordingly, wearing two pairs of socks and thermals over my thermals. The boss didn't allow us to pot over the weekend, as we had to be supervised by the manager. I don't know if the boss realises that the extent of the manager's supervision is to ask us how those hemerocallis or hostas looked, so that he can write it on his records. Today's plants were from the Netherlands, and were mostly pretty good, though there was one bag of Tradescantia roots that were five plants short.
There was a potting hiatus in the middle of the day, as we ran out of labels. The labels are stapled to the sides of the pots for herbaceous plants, and you really do need to staple them to the rim before filling the pot up with compost. It is possible to retro-fit them, but fiddly and time consuming, and impossible to do without spilling compost. Plus the finished potting is stood in large blocks so that you couldn't reach most of the pots to label them. Plus you would be practically bound to lose track of which varieties were in which pot. The hold-up with the labels occured because they were varieties that we hadn't sold before, so the boss had to write the descriptive blurb for each one before we could print them. Writing the descriptions is a task that the boss refuses to delegate, and he was supposed to have done it this morning, but it is half term and he took the children out riding instead. The manager, who had managed to prise both gardeners out of the garden to help, and called in an extra staff member who is normally laid off at this time of year especially to finish the potting, was rather irritated to have his crack potting team standing by with no labels. We all found other jobs to do in the interim until the boss produced labels, and finally got the last geranium roots safely encased in compost five minutes before closing.
None of us are sure how the tea room is going to work out. Apparently the idea is that we will have somebody to run it during the busy season. The gig has gone to the gamekeeper's daughter, who has passed her foor hygiene exams and is also going to make the cakes (at this point I feel as though I might be living in The Archers, in one of the brief interludes when nothing sensational is happening). In the quiet season the plant centre staff are going to dish out the tea and cakes. We are? When I get home from work it generally takes me ten minutes to scrub the dirt from my hands, and my cuffs and the front of my jacket are always covered in a dusting of compost and the odd smear of green slime. How exactly are we going get this past the environmental health officer?
We do have one splendid new piece of equipment. Last year a couple of us said that what we needed for the plant centre was a mobile potting bench, so that we had a working surface on which to clean pots that was at the right height to work all day, and not 15cm too low, which the display tables are. Working for eight hours on a surface that is uncomfortably low would give anybody backache, even the fit youngsters, and the two of us grumbling about it have combined ages of over 110. I discovered today that the older gardener has indeed made a mobile potting bench, with proper wheels, a sturdy metal frame and elegant wooden handles. I asked, fascinated, what it was made out of, and it turned out to be based on an old ice-cream cart which had been sitting in one of the sheds for the past fifteen years. I have no idea whatsoever why the boss possessed an old ice-cream hand-cart, but it goes to show that you should never throw things away. Eventually they do come in useful.
There was a potting hiatus in the middle of the day, as we ran out of labels. The labels are stapled to the sides of the pots for herbaceous plants, and you really do need to staple them to the rim before filling the pot up with compost. It is possible to retro-fit them, but fiddly and time consuming, and impossible to do without spilling compost. Plus the finished potting is stood in large blocks so that you couldn't reach most of the pots to label them. Plus you would be practically bound to lose track of which varieties were in which pot. The hold-up with the labels occured because they were varieties that we hadn't sold before, so the boss had to write the descriptive blurb for each one before we could print them. Writing the descriptions is a task that the boss refuses to delegate, and he was supposed to have done it this morning, but it is half term and he took the children out riding instead. The manager, who had managed to prise both gardeners out of the garden to help, and called in an extra staff member who is normally laid off at this time of year especially to finish the potting, was rather irritated to have his crack potting team standing by with no labels. We all found other jobs to do in the interim until the boss produced labels, and finally got the last geranium roots safely encased in compost five minutes before closing.
None of us are sure how the tea room is going to work out. Apparently the idea is that we will have somebody to run it during the busy season. The gig has gone to the gamekeeper's daughter, who has passed her foor hygiene exams and is also going to make the cakes (at this point I feel as though I might be living in The Archers, in one of the brief interludes when nothing sensational is happening). In the quiet season the plant centre staff are going to dish out the tea and cakes. We are? When I get home from work it generally takes me ten minutes to scrub the dirt from my hands, and my cuffs and the front of my jacket are always covered in a dusting of compost and the odd smear of green slime. How exactly are we going get this past the environmental health officer?
We do have one splendid new piece of equipment. Last year a couple of us said that what we needed for the plant centre was a mobile potting bench, so that we had a working surface on which to clean pots that was at the right height to work all day, and not 15cm too low, which the display tables are. Working for eight hours on a surface that is uncomfortably low would give anybody backache, even the fit youngsters, and the two of us grumbling about it have combined ages of over 110. I discovered today that the older gardener has indeed made a mobile potting bench, with proper wheels, a sturdy metal frame and elegant wooden handles. I asked, fascinated, what it was made out of, and it turned out to be based on an old ice-cream cart which had been sitting in one of the sheds for the past fifteen years. I have no idea whatsoever why the boss possessed an old ice-cream hand-cart, but it goes to show that you should never throw things away. Eventually they do come in useful.
Thursday, 20 October 2011
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.
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.
Monday, 21 February 2011
another busy day at the plant centre
Today was a busy day. There are still odd bits of potting: this afternoon I potted up some rootballed lilacs and yew and a few bare-root crab apples. A couple of colleagues were on a roll creosoting (it is actually creosote substitute now that old fashioned creosote is banned. 'Creosoting' is like 'hoovering'. You can't say that you spent the day creosote substituting, any more than you would say that you had been dysoning).
Plants are moving around the plant centre in great swirls and eddies. The polytunnel on the far side of the car park ('the other side') is so full that the aisles are mostly reduced to half a trolley's width and the potting bench is jammed into the smallest possible space just inside the tunnel door, but bulbs that we potted last autumn, like tulips, daffodils and alliums, have started going out for sale. Some shrubs that were put under cover in the plant centre to protect them in the worst of the winter have also been put out again, which keeps us all on our toes when it comes to helping customers find things. Viburnums were in the tunnel with the climbers last time I was at work, but today they were back outside on the opposite side of the walled garden.
Customers sometimes find it confusing that shrubs like hollies, that they thought were hardy, have been put away in a tunnel for the winter, but there is a great difference from the plant's point of view between spending the winter outside in a black plastic pot, which may well freeze solid in cold weather, and having its roots safely in the ground. Even during periods of frost the ground is rarely frozen more than an inch or two deep (though I don't know how far the frost penetrated last December). Frozen roots can be particularly tricky for evergreens, because they can't take up water, while their leaves are still losing moisture through transpiration. Anyway, the hollies, viburnums, osmanthus and arbutus have all been turfed outside.
There will be a lot of deliveries in the next few days, and some of the plants will have customers waiting for them. Unfortunately the system for matching new stock to eager would-be purchasers is rather basic. We have a list of customer names and their desired plants. Plants arrive. The staff try to spot which of the arrivals are on the customers' wish-list, in between interruptions and distractions while we do lots of other things as well. Occasionally well-meaning customers who have obviously been conditioned by too much supermarket shopping wave their purchases at us at the till, enquiring 'don't you want to scan the bar code?'. Er, no thank you. We don't actually use bar codes.
Plants are moving around the plant centre in great swirls and eddies. The polytunnel on the far side of the car park ('the other side') is so full that the aisles are mostly reduced to half a trolley's width and the potting bench is jammed into the smallest possible space just inside the tunnel door, but bulbs that we potted last autumn, like tulips, daffodils and alliums, have started going out for sale. Some shrubs that were put under cover in the plant centre to protect them in the worst of the winter have also been put out again, which keeps us all on our toes when it comes to helping customers find things. Viburnums were in the tunnel with the climbers last time I was at work, but today they were back outside on the opposite side of the walled garden.
Customers sometimes find it confusing that shrubs like hollies, that they thought were hardy, have been put away in a tunnel for the winter, but there is a great difference from the plant's point of view between spending the winter outside in a black plastic pot, which may well freeze solid in cold weather, and having its roots safely in the ground. Even during periods of frost the ground is rarely frozen more than an inch or two deep (though I don't know how far the frost penetrated last December). Frozen roots can be particularly tricky for evergreens, because they can't take up water, while their leaves are still losing moisture through transpiration. Anyway, the hollies, viburnums, osmanthus and arbutus have all been turfed outside.
There will be a lot of deliveries in the next few days, and some of the plants will have customers waiting for them. Unfortunately the system for matching new stock to eager would-be purchasers is rather basic. We have a list of customer names and their desired plants. Plants arrive. The staff try to spot which of the arrivals are on the customers' wish-list, in between interruptions and distractions while we do lots of other things as well. Occasionally well-meaning customers who have obviously been conditioned by too much supermarket shopping wave their purchases at us at the till, enquiring 'don't you want to scan the bar code?'. Er, no thank you. We don't actually use bar codes.
Monday, 14 February 2011
roots and music
A couple of us finished the last of the herbaceous potting that arrived last Thursday. The hardy geraniums and Thalictrum are prototypical plants, with a neat solid central crown and a tuft of roots beneath. You know where you are with them. Aconitum carmichaelii 'Arendsii' has great chunky roots like giant molars. The new leaves are already emerging and it's clear which way up they should go. (I like these autumn flowering monkshoods. They bring an attractive shot of blue to the border usefully late in the season. All parts of the plant are poisonous, but I'm not going to eat them so that's fine). Veronica consists of a tangled mass of wiry roots and things that might be thicker roots or stems, and it is frankly a puzzle with some of them which way up to put them or how deep they should go. Lily of the valley has long brittle-looking white roots, with nodes from which emerge quantities of frizzled white side roots. There are shoots at one end of the long white root, which I kept at the surface. The roots look fragile and as if they could rot at the slightest provocation, and I'm not surprised that the plant has a reputation for being tricky to establish in the garden, or that once it is happy it can run like hell. Hemerocallis roots are neat and chunky like pencils. Hosta roots are funky, brilliant white and crinkly. They make me think vaguely of some deep fried Far Eastern delicacy. The roots of Mertensia, the Virginia cowslip, look like petrified dog turds.
Listening to the car radio on the way home I got exasperated with Eddie Mair and flicked over to Radio 3, where I found the most unearthly, etherial singing which turned out to be Trio Mediaeval, a Scandinavian three voice female polyphonic outfit who do mediaeval music plus Scandinavian folk and recently written material in the same vein. I never heard of them, although having looked them up they have been around for years, tour extensively and have a fair-sized discography. They are singing tonight at the Wigmore Hall and then not again in the UK for the foreseeable future. I rarely manage to get to concerts in London anyway, but I shall certainly add one or two of the discs to my (admittedly over-optimistically long) Amazon wish list.
Listening to the car radio on the way home I got exasperated with Eddie Mair and flicked over to Radio 3, where I found the most unearthly, etherial singing which turned out to be Trio Mediaeval, a Scandinavian three voice female polyphonic outfit who do mediaeval music plus Scandinavian folk and recently written material in the same vein. I never heard of them, although having looked them up they have been around for years, tour extensively and have a fair-sized discography. They are singing tonight at the Wigmore Hall and then not again in the UK for the foreseeable future. I rarely manage to get to concerts in London anyway, but I shall certainly add one or two of the discs to my (admittedly over-optimistically long) Amazon wish list.
Monday, 7 February 2011
potting
At work the financial year end has passed, the days are lengthening, and new stocks of herbaceous plants have started to arrive at the plant centre. This morning a ten tonne lorry arrived from Norfolk with six thousand plants for us, which was the entire lorry load. Some were already potted, on Dutch trollies (those multi-storey aluminium trolleys with wheels you may have noticed in garden centres) and some were bare root divisions in cardboard boxes for us to pot up. These are in addition to the roots needing potting that arrived last Friday, and are starting to get a bit etiolated and sweaty in their plastic bags.
I enjoy the occasional day potting. I wouldn't want to do it five days a week all year, as it would get repetitive, and standing all day at a potting bench is actually harder physical work than walking about, but it is interesting to see what has come in, and what the root systems of different species and varieties are like. There is a certain Goldilocks art to potting everything to the correct depth, not too deep and not too shallow, and a detective art to working out which way up some of them should go. Indeed there is an art to unloading the lorry when you have half a dozen people involved. The suppliers make one label do for all 20 or 30 of the same variety, stacking them on the same shelf on a trolley and relying on us to keep like with like when unloading. Once two different sets of dormant hostas have been mixed up you are completely sunk, until they come into growth and you can see which is which. We pot into a herbaceous compost which has an anti vine weevil chemical in it, and nothing is allowed out for sale to the public until we can see roots at the bottom of the pot. A few things like Incarvillea have the exasperating habit of flowering before they have rooted in properly, which is a nuisance.
The ready potted stuff just has to have labels stuck into every pot, but of course they are at ankle level while you do it.
Addendum regarding Fitzroy I got yesterday's biographical details from the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia, since the main thing I knew about him was that he founded the Met Office. In passing I had noted that the BBC (why does the BBC website have an entry on Robert Fitzroy?) said that he was the fourth great grandson of Charles II. At the time I thought little of it, but returning later in the evening to Jenny Uglow's splendid book about Charles, 'A Gambling Man' (a Christmas present) my brain belatedly tottered into gear. Charles II did not have any legitimate children, but there on page 199 is a little black and white reproduction of Lely's portrait of Charles' beautiful and temperamental mistress Barbara Castlemaine, with their son Charles Fitzroy. At school I was taught that the Norman name Fitz denoted son. My informant who read history at university and did include the medieval period (more than I did) tells me that Fitz specifically denotes illegitimate son. Fitzroy, Fitz Roi, bastard son of the king.
I enjoy the occasional day potting. I wouldn't want to do it five days a week all year, as it would get repetitive, and standing all day at a potting bench is actually harder physical work than walking about, but it is interesting to see what has come in, and what the root systems of different species and varieties are like. There is a certain Goldilocks art to potting everything to the correct depth, not too deep and not too shallow, and a detective art to working out which way up some of them should go. Indeed there is an art to unloading the lorry when you have half a dozen people involved. The suppliers make one label do for all 20 or 30 of the same variety, stacking them on the same shelf on a trolley and relying on us to keep like with like when unloading. Once two different sets of dormant hostas have been mixed up you are completely sunk, until they come into growth and you can see which is which. We pot into a herbaceous compost which has an anti vine weevil chemical in it, and nothing is allowed out for sale to the public until we can see roots at the bottom of the pot. A few things like Incarvillea have the exasperating habit of flowering before they have rooted in properly, which is a nuisance.
The ready potted stuff just has to have labels stuck into every pot, but of course they are at ankle level while you do it.
Addendum regarding Fitzroy I got yesterday's biographical details from the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia, since the main thing I knew about him was that he founded the Met Office. In passing I had noted that the BBC (why does the BBC website have an entry on Robert Fitzroy?) said that he was the fourth great grandson of Charles II. At the time I thought little of it, but returning later in the evening to Jenny Uglow's splendid book about Charles, 'A Gambling Man' (a Christmas present) my brain belatedly tottered into gear. Charles II did not have any legitimate children, but there on page 199 is a little black and white reproduction of Lely's portrait of Charles' beautiful and temperamental mistress Barbara Castlemaine, with their son Charles Fitzroy. At school I was taught that the Norman name Fitz denoted son. My informant who read history at university and did include the medieval period (more than I did) tells me that Fitz specifically denotes illegitimate son. Fitzroy, Fitz Roi, bastard son of the king.
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