We watched the news footage last night of the stall holders at the Badminton Horse Trials packing up to go home before they had the chance to sell a thing, as the entire event was cancelled due to waterlogging, and I hoped that some of those London based journalists who sneer at politicians and retailers who ever dare to suggest that severe weather might, just might, have an impact on economic activity were watching. There is an awful lot of surface water around. I know that we are still in drought, but surface water isn't the same as ground water.
The Systems Administrator downloaded our rainfall statistics for the year from the weather station, and gave me the edited highlights. In the year to the end of April 2012 we had 573.5mm, give or take. I don't suppose that the electronic rain monitor is accurate to the last half millimetre, but it's probably a more reliable figure than taking readings from a plastic rain gauge. That's quite a lot, by our standards. The Chatto Garden's website gives the regional average as 500mm, and they are barely more than a mile from us. Wikipedia identifies St Osyth, four miles or so up the road, as the driest place in the country with average precipitation of 513mm. It is curious that the driest place in the country should have 13mm more rain than the regional average, but it goes to show that statistics are tricky things, and that there is a certain amount of competition for the lowest rainfall (I have heard a spokesman for Cambridge Botanic claim the honour for that city).
Anyway, 573mm is quite a lot, for us. To put it in context, the average for England and Wales for the period 1971 to 2000 was 926.9mm, so we got a whole 62% of the national average. You can amuse yourself trying to guess which places in the Mediterranean get the same annual rainfall as coastal Essex. Our long term average is slightly below that of Jerusalem, and in the past twelve months we've had a little less than an average year in Palermo.
It gets really startling when you look at when the rain fell. In April 2012 we had 95.3mm. That's 17% of our annual total in one month. By way of comparison, in April 2011 we had 1.4mm. Yes, 1.4mm. This April it rained sixty-eight times as much as it did last year. In March 2012 we had 39.5mm, 7% of the year's total, giving us nearly a quarter of the whole year's rain in those two months. In March 2011 we had 6.3mm, bringing the grand total for March and April of last year to 7.7mm, versus 134.8mm in the same two months of this year. Since midnight last night we've had another 20mm, so May 2012 is off to a flying start.
The gunnera bed is a swamp. I walked around the back garden this morning to see what it was doing, because I hadn't been out there for such a long time, and the lawns squelched beneath my feet. Until it dries out a bit I really shouldn't walk on it at all. Every step will be compacting the soil.
Addendum I heard a cuckoo calling, the first I've heard this year, though a colleague thought they'd heard one at work. This one sounded loud and close, from the direction of our wood. The swallows and house martins are back, hunting for insects above the garden, though they don't nest here.
Showing posts with label rain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rain. Show all posts
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
Thursday, 19 April 2012
bird of dawning
I woke early, in time to hear the rooster crowing. I love the sound of the rooster. It is a cry of hope, heralding the start of a new day, and of reassurance. The chickens made it through the night. We remembered to lock the hen house, and the fox didn't break in. Sometimes, if I wake at four or so in the morning, I can't go back to sleep until I've heard the rooster, affirming that all is well outside.
It saddens me when I read in the local papers of disputes between neighbours over the noise made by someone's cockerel, especially if they live in the country. Why buy a house in a rural location if you don't like the sound of a rooster? It's like people who move in next to a medieval church, and then complain about the noise made by bell ringing practice or on Sunday mornings. It's a church. It has bells. They have been there for centuries. If you don't like them why did you move there? I think people who find the noise of their neighbour's rooster intolerable must at some deep level find their general proximity to their neighbour upsetting. The crowing of a cockerel inside a hen house is, objectively speaking, no louder than the dawn chorus, heard from a bedroom, even with a window open, and whoever heard of anyone complaining that the noise of the blackbirds and robins was preventing them from sleeping?
Once at work I was asked for advice on sound-deadening shrubs by somebody who had been ordered by an environmental health officer to plant them to shield the noise of their swimming pool pump from the next door neighbours, who had made a complaint about it. Fresh out of horticultural college and eager, I expressed my doubt that the amount of planting they could do in a domestic garden would make any difference at all to the noise, since academic research showed that you needed a buffer of shrubs and trees tens of metres deep to give a measurable improvement. I suggested that a better approach would be to go to an automotive parts supplier or yacht chandler and invest in some sound insulating foam for the pump housing, like that used around engine compartments in boats. With hindsight I think that although this was good technical advice, it may have missed the point, and that what the environmental health officer may chiefly have intended to do was give the neighbour visible reassurance that something was being done. Even though it didn't really cut down the noise, it might have stopped them worrying about it.
I mind the noise from the lettuce farm, when they are particularly busy, running lorry engines in the yard and charging about on their forklifts and tractors, much more than I do the background noise from the local main roads, even though the roads can be quite noisy when the air is damp and the wind is from the right (or rather the wrong) direction. I mind the noise of the roads more than an equivalent amount of noise from passing aircraft. That's because the lettuce farm noise seems to uniquely blight my house, and the other properties on the farm, whereas road noise affects lots of people, so doesn't make me feel so much as though I made an unfortunate choice of residence. And aeroplane noise affects absolutely everybody, no matter how carefully you chose the lie of the land where you live, so I take that even less personally.
The weather forecast was for heavy rain by ten, but since it had stopped raining by the time I'd finished my breakfast I thought I'd go outside and get on with the garden until it started. We'd only had 6mm of rain in the previous 24 hours, but that was enough to have made the centre of the gunnera bed truly swampy. I moved operations to lighter ground further up the slope, although it would have been nice to actually finish a job. Half past ten came, and I ducked from the Radio 3 studio guest (a feature I find peculiarly annoying) to Radio 2 Popmaster, which is conveniently scheduled for the same time. There was still no rain by half past eleven, and at half past twelve the Systems Administrator came out to say that the weather was very peculiar, as the rain radar kept showing huge showers sweeping in our direction, which petered out about ten miles short of us. The SA had not got all the tools out to get on with the deck, on the basis that it had been about to rain all morning, but thought that the rain really would arrive in about forty-five minutes, and would I like to hold off lunch until it did? I agreed that was a splendid plan to make the most of the dry spell, and went on weeding until quarter to two, when it still wasn't raining, but I was extremely hungry.
There were showers in the afternoon, and I went and pricked out seedlings in the greenhouse, but it goes to show how sometimes the extra information we get from technology is counter productive. The SA, mesmerised by the high tech evidence of imminent rain, had missed out on a dry morning, while for me, working on the low tech basis that it wasn't raining until it was, it had been business as usual.
It saddens me when I read in the local papers of disputes between neighbours over the noise made by someone's cockerel, especially if they live in the country. Why buy a house in a rural location if you don't like the sound of a rooster? It's like people who move in next to a medieval church, and then complain about the noise made by bell ringing practice or on Sunday mornings. It's a church. It has bells. They have been there for centuries. If you don't like them why did you move there? I think people who find the noise of their neighbour's rooster intolerable must at some deep level find their general proximity to their neighbour upsetting. The crowing of a cockerel inside a hen house is, objectively speaking, no louder than the dawn chorus, heard from a bedroom, even with a window open, and whoever heard of anyone complaining that the noise of the blackbirds and robins was preventing them from sleeping?
Once at work I was asked for advice on sound-deadening shrubs by somebody who had been ordered by an environmental health officer to plant them to shield the noise of their swimming pool pump from the next door neighbours, who had made a complaint about it. Fresh out of horticultural college and eager, I expressed my doubt that the amount of planting they could do in a domestic garden would make any difference at all to the noise, since academic research showed that you needed a buffer of shrubs and trees tens of metres deep to give a measurable improvement. I suggested that a better approach would be to go to an automotive parts supplier or yacht chandler and invest in some sound insulating foam for the pump housing, like that used around engine compartments in boats. With hindsight I think that although this was good technical advice, it may have missed the point, and that what the environmental health officer may chiefly have intended to do was give the neighbour visible reassurance that something was being done. Even though it didn't really cut down the noise, it might have stopped them worrying about it.
I mind the noise from the lettuce farm, when they are particularly busy, running lorry engines in the yard and charging about on their forklifts and tractors, much more than I do the background noise from the local main roads, even though the roads can be quite noisy when the air is damp and the wind is from the right (or rather the wrong) direction. I mind the noise of the roads more than an equivalent amount of noise from passing aircraft. That's because the lettuce farm noise seems to uniquely blight my house, and the other properties on the farm, whereas road noise affects lots of people, so doesn't make me feel so much as though I made an unfortunate choice of residence. And aeroplane noise affects absolutely everybody, no matter how carefully you chose the lie of the land where you live, so I take that even less personally.
The weather forecast was for heavy rain by ten, but since it had stopped raining by the time I'd finished my breakfast I thought I'd go outside and get on with the garden until it started. We'd only had 6mm of rain in the previous 24 hours, but that was enough to have made the centre of the gunnera bed truly swampy. I moved operations to lighter ground further up the slope, although it would have been nice to actually finish a job. Half past ten came, and I ducked from the Radio 3 studio guest (a feature I find peculiarly annoying) to Radio 2 Popmaster, which is conveniently scheduled for the same time. There was still no rain by half past eleven, and at half past twelve the Systems Administrator came out to say that the weather was very peculiar, as the rain radar kept showing huge showers sweeping in our direction, which petered out about ten miles short of us. The SA had not got all the tools out to get on with the deck, on the basis that it had been about to rain all morning, but thought that the rain really would arrive in about forty-five minutes, and would I like to hold off lunch until it did? I agreed that was a splendid plan to make the most of the dry spell, and went on weeding until quarter to two, when it still wasn't raining, but I was extremely hungry.
There were showers in the afternoon, and I went and pricked out seedlings in the greenhouse, but it goes to show how sometimes the extra information we get from technology is counter productive. The SA, mesmerised by the high tech evidence of imminent rain, had missed out on a dry morning, while for me, working on the low tech basis that it wasn't raining until it was, it had been business as usual.
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
finally shopping in the sales
When I got up this morning, and wound the bathroom blind up, it didn't look too bad out of the window. Grey, yes, but I thought that maybe the rain that was forecast yesterday evening hadn't made it this far east. Going out to let the chickens into their run, I discovered that I was mistaken. It was raining, a gentle steady silt of water, the sort of rain that if you were to dash outside for a minute you could deceive yourself into thinking that it was nothing much, but if you were to work in it for half an hour you would be soaked.
At least it meant I sat down to the third re-write of the garden guide without the feeling that I was missing out on doing anything more exciting. It is supposed to read as though the visitor had somebody friendly, chatty and knowledgeable walking beside them (someone, in other words, just like me) but I've now read it so many times that I can't tell how it would seem, if you were coming to it cold. I think it's OK. The next step will be to send it off to the people who are going to print it, and we'll find out if it is far too long and needs to be cut down. The owner is using the same firm that designed the website, to get a unified look for the business, and presumably because she is used to working with them. They provided text for the website when it was first set up, which was written in a sort of mangled estate agent speak and was truly awful, so we ought to be able to do better than that. I have discovered, though, that if you want to avoid sounding like a magazine advertising feature, you do tend to end up rather jolly and hearty like the Boden catalogue.
Then I ordered some pots from the Whichford Pottery. In recent years they've done a January offer, with 10% off pots and free delivery on orders over £90, a minimum saving of £38.50. I wanted some more tulip pots, and while I won't need them until November when it is the right time to plant tulips, I thought I might as well get them cheap. I can use them for bedding over the summer, which will be pretty, and it's not as though I'm going to get ten per cent on the money from the bank between now and then. I was just beginning to worry that I hadn't had details of an offer this year, and wonder if they were going to do one, when the catalogue arrived. I have said it before, but they are wonderful pots, and will last you a gardening lifetime, unless you drop them (or run them over in a truck, as happened to one of mine once).
It was still raining. I arranged to meet up with various friends and relations, and trawled through my Amazon wish list. I always keep a long list. It acts as a reminder of things I've read about or heard on the radio that sound interesting, instead of keeping notes on scraps of paper which I invariably lose. Sometimes they sit on there for years, and I go off the idea and delete them again. Prices go up and down a lot, especially for second hand stuff. There was a folk album I tracked for years, that always seemed to have three vendors on at £38.50, before a used copy described as very good popped up for a tenner. I've gone off Amazon vendors for used books, after buying one too many that was grubbier and more battered than I would have expected from the description, but used CDs are generally fine. After all, every CD I own counts as 'used', and unless they get scratched there isn't much to go wrong. Or at least, we have been threatened with disc degradation and incompatibility with modern equipment, but it hasn't happened yet.
It is of course very quaint and old fashioned to still be buying CDs, and statistics show that the trend is against me. I still like them. Apart from a few that I have managed to scratch, every CD I have ever bought since they were first introduced still works, which is more than you can say for all the computers I've ever owned, most of which are completely dead. And no, I don't expect Apple to go bust, and the chances of my music collection being lost in the cloud are probably about the same as those of my house burning down with my CDs in it. But I like having information stored in discrete packages where if one gets damaged or lost the others are fine (eggs, baskets). As I'm not great at managing technology I like having a disc that I can put in a slot just like putting vinyl on a turntable, without getting caught up in an episode of Computer says No. I like the sleeve notes. I actually like the thing-ness of the row of cases in the shelf.
It's still raining. There's no more to be said.
At least it meant I sat down to the third re-write of the garden guide without the feeling that I was missing out on doing anything more exciting. It is supposed to read as though the visitor had somebody friendly, chatty and knowledgeable walking beside them (someone, in other words, just like me) but I've now read it so many times that I can't tell how it would seem, if you were coming to it cold. I think it's OK. The next step will be to send it off to the people who are going to print it, and we'll find out if it is far too long and needs to be cut down. The owner is using the same firm that designed the website, to get a unified look for the business, and presumably because she is used to working with them. They provided text for the website when it was first set up, which was written in a sort of mangled estate agent speak and was truly awful, so we ought to be able to do better than that. I have discovered, though, that if you want to avoid sounding like a magazine advertising feature, you do tend to end up rather jolly and hearty like the Boden catalogue.
Then I ordered some pots from the Whichford Pottery. In recent years they've done a January offer, with 10% off pots and free delivery on orders over £90, a minimum saving of £38.50. I wanted some more tulip pots, and while I won't need them until November when it is the right time to plant tulips, I thought I might as well get them cheap. I can use them for bedding over the summer, which will be pretty, and it's not as though I'm going to get ten per cent on the money from the bank between now and then. I was just beginning to worry that I hadn't had details of an offer this year, and wonder if they were going to do one, when the catalogue arrived. I have said it before, but they are wonderful pots, and will last you a gardening lifetime, unless you drop them (or run them over in a truck, as happened to one of mine once).
It was still raining. I arranged to meet up with various friends and relations, and trawled through my Amazon wish list. I always keep a long list. It acts as a reminder of things I've read about or heard on the radio that sound interesting, instead of keeping notes on scraps of paper which I invariably lose. Sometimes they sit on there for years, and I go off the idea and delete them again. Prices go up and down a lot, especially for second hand stuff. There was a folk album I tracked for years, that always seemed to have three vendors on at £38.50, before a used copy described as very good popped up for a tenner. I've gone off Amazon vendors for used books, after buying one too many that was grubbier and more battered than I would have expected from the description, but used CDs are generally fine. After all, every CD I own counts as 'used', and unless they get scratched there isn't much to go wrong. Or at least, we have been threatened with disc degradation and incompatibility with modern equipment, but it hasn't happened yet.
It is of course very quaint and old fashioned to still be buying CDs, and statistics show that the trend is against me. I still like them. Apart from a few that I have managed to scratch, every CD I have ever bought since they were first introduced still works, which is more than you can say for all the computers I've ever owned, most of which are completely dead. And no, I don't expect Apple to go bust, and the chances of my music collection being lost in the cloud are probably about the same as those of my house burning down with my CDs in it. But I like having information stored in discrete packages where if one gets damaged or lost the others are fine (eggs, baskets). As I'm not great at managing technology I like having a disc that I can put in a slot just like putting vinyl on a turntable, without getting caught up in an episode of Computer says No. I like the sleeve notes. I actually like the thing-ness of the row of cases in the shelf.
It's still raining. There's no more to be said.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
after the party
The remnants of Christmas have been cleared away. The last four cheese stars went on the bird table. The cards have been taken down, the greenery put on the bonfire, the festive tablecloths put in the wash, the tree dismantled, and the radiator in the sitting room turned off as we retreat to the study. Does anybody wait until Twelth Night nowadays? The Christmas season seems to begin so long before Christmas these days that by the end of the New Year Bank holiday it ought to be over. The shops have probably got their Easter stuff in by now. Tradition is all very well, but the decorations would have overstayed their welcome by Friday.
Even so, it's sad taking them down. I checked one last time through the cards, putting aside those that have useful bits of information in them, like new addresses, telephone numbers, and reminders of what stage of schooling and university people's children have got to (or indeed their names). It's particularly sad taking down the tree, though it shouldn't be. Apart from the fact that the needles would have started to fall off pretty soon (they hung on well. Fresh tree, cold house), it was already starting to shower the room with small winged seeds as the cones opened. And I'd get bored with it, if it were there all the time. So the special glass baubles all went back into their dedicated boxes, the red and clear drops from Heals into long thin trays with internal card dividers and a concertina of tissue paper, the big Polish balls into a square box like a cake carton. The heavier and scratchier decorations go in the bottom of another box, the bread and butter baubles on top of those, and the most delicate of the rest form the top layer, along with a red Ikea cookie cutter that we found as we were taking the tree outside. We always find one after taking the tree out, sometimes not spotting it for days.
I saved the cones in case they came in useful. I'm not exactly sure what they will be useful for, and in the meantime they will emit a steady stream of seeds, but it seemed a dreadful waste to burn them. If we were suddenly to build a rustic folly anywhere in the garden we would definitely need fir cones. All the best rustic summerhouses are decorated with them. The branches will be shredded, and used as mulch for the blueberry bushes, since conifer litter is acid and blueberries like acid conditions and dislike manure. The trunk will be sawn up and burnt in the stove, unless we have something that needs propping up, in which case it could have a second career as a pole. A couple of branches of the wild gean, that were sagging badly under the weight of the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', are supported with old rhododendron branches, to stop them from collapsing over the Mahonia japonica that was supposed to be growing in the shade of the gean (the Mahonia itself is collapsing over the clipped box that was supposed to be surrounding it as ground cover).
There is a last bit of Christmas food to eat up, as I made the chicken carcass into stock. That is one reason for buying free range birds, the fact that they have good strong bones and make proper stock that sets to a jelly when cold, quite apart from the welfare argument. I used half the stock just now for leek and potato soup, with an experimental squeeze of lemon juice, and the Systems Administrator was muttering about using the other half in a Thai soup or stew. It is blowing a hooley, and raining extremely hard from time to time, mixed with hail. I've never seen the surface of the pond whipped to a chop like that before. The cold I felt I might be fighting off through most of December began to develop on New Year's Eve and has got to a Dame Celia Molestrangler level of huskiness, so it could be an afternoon for the Christmas books. I am befuddled by not working yesterday and the day before, plus the cold, and keep feeling as though it should later in the week than Tuesday.
Even so, it's sad taking them down. I checked one last time through the cards, putting aside those that have useful bits of information in them, like new addresses, telephone numbers, and reminders of what stage of schooling and university people's children have got to (or indeed their names). It's particularly sad taking down the tree, though it shouldn't be. Apart from the fact that the needles would have started to fall off pretty soon (they hung on well. Fresh tree, cold house), it was already starting to shower the room with small winged seeds as the cones opened. And I'd get bored with it, if it were there all the time. So the special glass baubles all went back into their dedicated boxes, the red and clear drops from Heals into long thin trays with internal card dividers and a concertina of tissue paper, the big Polish balls into a square box like a cake carton. The heavier and scratchier decorations go in the bottom of another box, the bread and butter baubles on top of those, and the most delicate of the rest form the top layer, along with a red Ikea cookie cutter that we found as we were taking the tree outside. We always find one after taking the tree out, sometimes not spotting it for days.
I saved the cones in case they came in useful. I'm not exactly sure what they will be useful for, and in the meantime they will emit a steady stream of seeds, but it seemed a dreadful waste to burn them. If we were suddenly to build a rustic folly anywhere in the garden we would definitely need fir cones. All the best rustic summerhouses are decorated with them. The branches will be shredded, and used as mulch for the blueberry bushes, since conifer litter is acid and blueberries like acid conditions and dislike manure. The trunk will be sawn up and burnt in the stove, unless we have something that needs propping up, in which case it could have a second career as a pole. A couple of branches of the wild gean, that were sagging badly under the weight of the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', are supported with old rhododendron branches, to stop them from collapsing over the Mahonia japonica that was supposed to be growing in the shade of the gean (the Mahonia itself is collapsing over the clipped box that was supposed to be surrounding it as ground cover).
There is a last bit of Christmas food to eat up, as I made the chicken carcass into stock. That is one reason for buying free range birds, the fact that they have good strong bones and make proper stock that sets to a jelly when cold, quite apart from the welfare argument. I used half the stock just now for leek and potato soup, with an experimental squeeze of lemon juice, and the Systems Administrator was muttering about using the other half in a Thai soup or stew. It is blowing a hooley, and raining extremely hard from time to time, mixed with hail. I've never seen the surface of the pond whipped to a chop like that before. The cold I felt I might be fighting off through most of December began to develop on New Year's Eve and has got to a Dame Celia Molestrangler level of huskiness, so it could be an afternoon for the Christmas books. I am befuddled by not working yesterday and the day before, plus the cold, and keep feeling as though it should later in the week than Tuesday.
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
rain and incipient wardrobe failure
It rained this morning, slow, steady, persistent rain, that will do the garden some good (7mm altogether) but left us stuck in the house. The Systems Administrator spent a couple of hours trying to diagnose the problem with our broadband, which is apparently running at one fifth of its normal speed. There was no Eureka moment so I think the Mystery of the Missing Broadband remains unsolved.
I went and did some of my ironing, since rather a lot of my clothes were lying in a rumpled pile on the spare bed. As I ironed I was forced to confront the unhappy truth that I might need to buy some new ones. We don't go to many evening dos or other events requiring special glamorous outfits, so most of my clothes start life as quite nice daywear, and over the next ten to twenty years descend through a hierarchy, from being kept for best to being worn for gardening. Best Clothes occassions are generally those outside the house, visits to other people's houses, holidays, or days out with friends. A key feature is that I probably won't spend at least half the time with a cat sitting on me, bestowing stray hairs and pulling threads. After a few years of ranking as Best, clothes are allowed to be worn for tidy occassions at home, such as when we have guests, where a degree of sartorial effort is appropriate but the clothes will get the cat treatment. They are now Everyday Clothes. After a few more years the clothes are deemed too grotty to be worn to receive visitors, but will still do for wear at home, maybe not on Saturday night when the Systems Administrator has done a full roast and we are eating at the table with candles, but fine for watching the gardening programme with pizza. They are now Shabby Clothes, and suitable for long walks likely to involve mud. Finally they become Gardening Clothes, which is a tradition with an honourable precedent. Sir Roy Strong claims never to buy clothes specifically for gardening, and to just wear his old ones, and as he has a much more adventurous sense of fashion than I ever did, I believe this has involved some astonishing appearances.
Unfortunately several things in the ironing pile have reached the point where they really don't count as Everyday anymore. A couple of linen shirts have faded beyond the point of chic, one with an additional bleached patch in the middle of the front where I managed to get a drop of fountain pen ink on it. The ink scrubbed out, but so did most of the colour. A third shirt tore through at the elbow the last time I wore it. I managed to patch that quite neatly using an old handkerchief that was a remarkably good colour match (the boss at work just goes for the elbows out look, but I don't think I'm sufficiently upper class to carry that off). A pair of moleskin trousers are getting dangerously close to wearing through in an embarassing place. As you have gathered, I don't do throwaway fashion, or at least I do, but only in the sense that things that have dropped to pieces get thrown away. The local charity shops don't see much from my wardrobe.
Originally most of them were quite good quality. I got briefly excited when Tesco began to offer T shirts for under a fiver, but they went saggy and faded to remarkably nasty colours terribly quickly, while pima cotton shirts I bought twenty years ago are still doing fine service, albeit that nowadays their role is generally to be layered under something else. I was about to say that good quality fabrics wear better as well as feeling nicer and hanging better, then remembered my occassional brushes with cashmere, and had to revise that statement. But you can't go wrong with good quality cotton.
I went and did some of my ironing, since rather a lot of my clothes were lying in a rumpled pile on the spare bed. As I ironed I was forced to confront the unhappy truth that I might need to buy some new ones. We don't go to many evening dos or other events requiring special glamorous outfits, so most of my clothes start life as quite nice daywear, and over the next ten to twenty years descend through a hierarchy, from being kept for best to being worn for gardening. Best Clothes occassions are generally those outside the house, visits to other people's houses, holidays, or days out with friends. A key feature is that I probably won't spend at least half the time with a cat sitting on me, bestowing stray hairs and pulling threads. After a few years of ranking as Best, clothes are allowed to be worn for tidy occassions at home, such as when we have guests, where a degree of sartorial effort is appropriate but the clothes will get the cat treatment. They are now Everyday Clothes. After a few more years the clothes are deemed too grotty to be worn to receive visitors, but will still do for wear at home, maybe not on Saturday night when the Systems Administrator has done a full roast and we are eating at the table with candles, but fine for watching the gardening programme with pizza. They are now Shabby Clothes, and suitable for long walks likely to involve mud. Finally they become Gardening Clothes, which is a tradition with an honourable precedent. Sir Roy Strong claims never to buy clothes specifically for gardening, and to just wear his old ones, and as he has a much more adventurous sense of fashion than I ever did, I believe this has involved some astonishing appearances.
Unfortunately several things in the ironing pile have reached the point where they really don't count as Everyday anymore. A couple of linen shirts have faded beyond the point of chic, one with an additional bleached patch in the middle of the front where I managed to get a drop of fountain pen ink on it. The ink scrubbed out, but so did most of the colour. A third shirt tore through at the elbow the last time I wore it. I managed to patch that quite neatly using an old handkerchief that was a remarkably good colour match (the boss at work just goes for the elbows out look, but I don't think I'm sufficiently upper class to carry that off). A pair of moleskin trousers are getting dangerously close to wearing through in an embarassing place. As you have gathered, I don't do throwaway fashion, or at least I do, but only in the sense that things that have dropped to pieces get thrown away. The local charity shops don't see much from my wardrobe.
Originally most of them were quite good quality. I got briefly excited when Tesco began to offer T shirts for under a fiver, but they went saggy and faded to remarkably nasty colours terribly quickly, while pima cotton shirts I bought twenty years ago are still doing fine service, albeit that nowadays their role is generally to be layered under something else. I was about to say that good quality fabrics wear better as well as feeling nicer and hanging better, then remembered my occassional brushes with cashmere, and had to revise that statement. But you can't go wrong with good quality cotton.
Monday, 18 July 2011
quiet, too quiet
It was another blustery day, too lively on the weather front and too quiet as regards customers. The manager is beginning to wear the stressed and haunted look of someone with family and financial responsibilities, working in a sector that is under the cosh. If you add up the retail failures of the past year it is not a reassuring prospect.
One of my colleagues had tidied up the small Edwardian greenhouse at the back of the plant centre, so I took advantage of the space to clean up yet more herbaceous plants under cover, out of the wind and drizzle with a proper work bench at a sensible height, and my prunings not blowing half way across the plant centre instead of landing in the bucket. It is much more comfortable and productive than trying to weed and deadhead the plants one-handed, while using the other hand to hold the pot against my stomach, which is how I end up working half the time. As I weeded I mused on how we could bring in more customers. Yesterday's coach party was a welcome boost. I would like us to contact as many garden clubs in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Herts as we can find, and invite them to include a stop at the plant centre when they're planning their summer excursions. I would target these counties because they are within reach for a day trip, so people who had been once with a tour and been impressed could return under their own steam. Happy customers from Wales and the north of England are very nice, but they aren't likely to turn into regular visitors. I don't know how you find the contact details of all those garden clubs, but I would start with the RHS to see if they can supply a list of affiliated societies, and then I guess sit down with a road atlas and start shoving the names of likely looking villages into Google. I would try and build up the exisiting mailing list of individuals as well, by offering existing customers some sort of deal in return for the names of their garden-loving friends, who could have a deal as well. It seems to work for Boden. I'm convinced that even in a difficult retail climate there are people out there who would shop with us, if only they knew we existed. Reducing the number of days the casuals work, and delaying replacing the person who left recently, conserves a tiny bit of cash but doesn't really get us anywhere.
I mused too on the futility of trying to organise other people's gardens. Two of yesterday's customers were another mother and daughter pair, but not a happy and collaborative one. The mother presented me with the problem in her daughter's garden, that of a large patch of dry shade. I showed them to the tunnel where we keep the shade loving plants. Mahonia was rejected because the daughter already had one of those, and Ma didn't like the suggestion of Fatsia either. Would it survive another winter like the last one? I replied that she hadn't told me that guaranteed hardiness to withstand a once in twenty years cold winter was required in addition to drought and shade tolerance Mother was a thin woman with a hard face, daughter a podgy one who displayed minimal interest in her own garden. I made a few other suggestions, including Sarcococca, and the thought that if the shade were really very dark and dry then a nice statue might be the answer. They thanked me and let me get back to the coach party. The next time I saw the daughter she hadn't chosen any plants, and was looking at things in the gift section of the shop with much more enthusiasm than she had shown for anything growing outside. It seems to me not merely futile but counterproductive to take command of any garden except your own, unless you are a professional and the garden owner has made the conscious choice to subcontract the problem in exchange for money. The unenthusiastic garden owner just feels even less sense of ownership and involvement at the end of the exercise than they did before, once their friends or relatives have tried to boss them around.
Tidying the Hemerocallis I found that some of them had made small plantlets mid-way up their flowering stems. I snapped these off the stems (not spoiling the flowers) and potted them up, a trick I tried last year and got a very high strike rate. Free plants are hard to resist, and if I don't use the shoots as propagating material they will only be thrown on the compost heap when the stems are cut down after flowering. Last year's haul yielded me several 'Chicago Knockout', which have made good sturdy plants, and a couple of 'Eleanor', which are still rather small but are growing. This year I got a 'Lemon Bells', a 'Joan Senior' and four 'Pink Damask', three of which already had one little root at the base of the sideshoot so should be fine. We'll see if they take. I've put them in the greenhouse inside a propagating case to conserve moisture, but another hot spell could simply cook them.
The day dried out briefly over lunchtime, but in the middle of the afternoon it rained torrentially. It was a monsoon. A river ran down the middle of the climber tunnel and a small lake enveloped the shade structure. After the rain had passed and the puddles began to drain away there were tide marks in the car park, where the fallen flowers from the lime trees had been swept up. When I got home I discovered that the rain had made it on to the national BBC traffic news, and that the A12 had been shut on the Essex-Suffolk border. At home we hadn't had any, and the Systems Administrator had been able to sand off another section of the front of the house, and let the chickens out for a run.
One of my colleagues had tidied up the small Edwardian greenhouse at the back of the plant centre, so I took advantage of the space to clean up yet more herbaceous plants under cover, out of the wind and drizzle with a proper work bench at a sensible height, and my prunings not blowing half way across the plant centre instead of landing in the bucket. It is much more comfortable and productive than trying to weed and deadhead the plants one-handed, while using the other hand to hold the pot against my stomach, which is how I end up working half the time. As I weeded I mused on how we could bring in more customers. Yesterday's coach party was a welcome boost. I would like us to contact as many garden clubs in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Herts as we can find, and invite them to include a stop at the plant centre when they're planning their summer excursions. I would target these counties because they are within reach for a day trip, so people who had been once with a tour and been impressed could return under their own steam. Happy customers from Wales and the north of England are very nice, but they aren't likely to turn into regular visitors. I don't know how you find the contact details of all those garden clubs, but I would start with the RHS to see if they can supply a list of affiliated societies, and then I guess sit down with a road atlas and start shoving the names of likely looking villages into Google. I would try and build up the exisiting mailing list of individuals as well, by offering existing customers some sort of deal in return for the names of their garden-loving friends, who could have a deal as well. It seems to work for Boden. I'm convinced that even in a difficult retail climate there are people out there who would shop with us, if only they knew we existed. Reducing the number of days the casuals work, and delaying replacing the person who left recently, conserves a tiny bit of cash but doesn't really get us anywhere.
I mused too on the futility of trying to organise other people's gardens. Two of yesterday's customers were another mother and daughter pair, but not a happy and collaborative one. The mother presented me with the problem in her daughter's garden, that of a large patch of dry shade. I showed them to the tunnel where we keep the shade loving plants. Mahonia was rejected because the daughter already had one of those, and Ma didn't like the suggestion of Fatsia either. Would it survive another winter like the last one? I replied that she hadn't told me that guaranteed hardiness to withstand a once in twenty years cold winter was required in addition to drought and shade tolerance Mother was a thin woman with a hard face, daughter a podgy one who displayed minimal interest in her own garden. I made a few other suggestions, including Sarcococca, and the thought that if the shade were really very dark and dry then a nice statue might be the answer. They thanked me and let me get back to the coach party. The next time I saw the daughter she hadn't chosen any plants, and was looking at things in the gift section of the shop with much more enthusiasm than she had shown for anything growing outside. It seems to me not merely futile but counterproductive to take command of any garden except your own, unless you are a professional and the garden owner has made the conscious choice to subcontract the problem in exchange for money. The unenthusiastic garden owner just feels even less sense of ownership and involvement at the end of the exercise than they did before, once their friends or relatives have tried to boss them around.
Tidying the Hemerocallis I found that some of them had made small plantlets mid-way up their flowering stems. I snapped these off the stems (not spoiling the flowers) and potted them up, a trick I tried last year and got a very high strike rate. Free plants are hard to resist, and if I don't use the shoots as propagating material they will only be thrown on the compost heap when the stems are cut down after flowering. Last year's haul yielded me several 'Chicago Knockout', which have made good sturdy plants, and a couple of 'Eleanor', which are still rather small but are growing. This year I got a 'Lemon Bells', a 'Joan Senior' and four 'Pink Damask', three of which already had one little root at the base of the sideshoot so should be fine. We'll see if they take. I've put them in the greenhouse inside a propagating case to conserve moisture, but another hot spell could simply cook them.
The day dried out briefly over lunchtime, but in the middle of the afternoon it rained torrentially. It was a monsoon. A river ran down the middle of the climber tunnel and a small lake enveloped the shade structure. After the rain had passed and the puddles began to drain away there were tide marks in the car park, where the fallen flowers from the lime trees had been swept up. When I got home I discovered that the rain had made it on to the national BBC traffic news, and that the A12 had been shut on the Essex-Suffolk border. At home we hadn't had any, and the Systems Administrator had been able to sand off another section of the front of the house, and let the chickens out for a run.
Saturday, 16 July 2011
a wet day at the plant centre (and not much happened)
It rained most of the day. This was forecast, and late into last night we could hear the rumble of combine harvesters, and see their headlights work back and forth across the fields, as the neighbouring farmers laboured to bring in as much as possible before the rain came.
Wet days bring fewer customers, and time dragged a little as I cleaned up pots of agapanthus and aconite in the shelter of the back of the shop. It was difficult to tell quite how slowly time was passing, as yesterday my outdoor watch, which had been looking alarmingly misty for a couple of days, ceased to go. I wish it hadn't done that so soon after being fitted with a new strap. Actually I wish it hadn't broken at all. I know it isn't just the battery running down, because that is almost new as well. I do have another watch, but that is a good one, gold, a present from the Systems Administrator years ago, and I don't wear it for gardening, or sailing, or in the plant centre. Finding a nice water resistant outdoor watch is harder than you'd think, if you don't want a great stainless steel bulbous thing with a stopwatch and umpteen functions guaranteed to work 100m under water. I don't. I just want something classic and discreet, that doesn't interfere with the seal on the cuff of my waterproof jacket.
My wellington boots have sprung a leak as well. I was afraid they had cracked over the toes, but hadn't had a really wet day to test them for a while. Today they were tested, and found wanting. I think B&Q do good plain ones. Hunters make me anxious. I don't really want my feet to be screaming 'Okay, yah' at fifty paces.
The customers who came in were mostly nice. There was a regular one, whose name I must try and learn sometime since she shops with us often enough, and I also see her at the music society concerts in the village. Today she was not actually shopping, but I gather a colleague was able to reunite her successfully with some mislaid personal item. Then there was the woman who last year organised a splendid novelty dog show, and the design correspondent of one of the broadsheets with his wife, small child and three dogs. I guessed they were on the premises somewhere when I looked out of the window and saw a tiny blonde girl in complete command of a large basset hound. Also a buddhist I met a while ago when I tried meditation classes.
The only customer I wasn't so sure about was one returning a dead Cornus kousa var. chinensis. She bought it this April, and didn't give out the vibes of a plant lover, so I wonder if she ever watered it after planting. She said she spoke to someone in the week and was told to bring it in, and we didn't have a replacement plant to give her at that moment anyway, so I took her details and left it for the manager to sort out on Monday.
The pea hen appeared late on, so must have been released from her pen. One of the chicks died, but the other was looking healthy enough. One of her chicks died last year as well. I don't know what the normal mortality rate for pea fowl is, but they don't seem very good doers on this record.
Wet days bring fewer customers, and time dragged a little as I cleaned up pots of agapanthus and aconite in the shelter of the back of the shop. It was difficult to tell quite how slowly time was passing, as yesterday my outdoor watch, which had been looking alarmingly misty for a couple of days, ceased to go. I wish it hadn't done that so soon after being fitted with a new strap. Actually I wish it hadn't broken at all. I know it isn't just the battery running down, because that is almost new as well. I do have another watch, but that is a good one, gold, a present from the Systems Administrator years ago, and I don't wear it for gardening, or sailing, or in the plant centre. Finding a nice water resistant outdoor watch is harder than you'd think, if you don't want a great stainless steel bulbous thing with a stopwatch and umpteen functions guaranteed to work 100m under water. I don't. I just want something classic and discreet, that doesn't interfere with the seal on the cuff of my waterproof jacket.
My wellington boots have sprung a leak as well. I was afraid they had cracked over the toes, but hadn't had a really wet day to test them for a while. Today they were tested, and found wanting. I think B&Q do good plain ones. Hunters make me anxious. I don't really want my feet to be screaming 'Okay, yah' at fifty paces.
The customers who came in were mostly nice. There was a regular one, whose name I must try and learn sometime since she shops with us often enough, and I also see her at the music society concerts in the village. Today she was not actually shopping, but I gather a colleague was able to reunite her successfully with some mislaid personal item. Then there was the woman who last year organised a splendid novelty dog show, and the design correspondent of one of the broadsheets with his wife, small child and three dogs. I guessed they were on the premises somewhere when I looked out of the window and saw a tiny blonde girl in complete command of a large basset hound. Also a buddhist I met a while ago when I tried meditation classes.
The only customer I wasn't so sure about was one returning a dead Cornus kousa var. chinensis. She bought it this April, and didn't give out the vibes of a plant lover, so I wonder if she ever watered it after planting. She said she spoke to someone in the week and was told to bring it in, and we didn't have a replacement plant to give her at that moment anyway, so I took her details and left it for the manager to sort out on Monday.
The pea hen appeared late on, so must have been released from her pen. One of the chicks died, but the other was looking healthy enough. One of her chicks died last year as well. I don't know what the normal mortality rate for pea fowl is, but they don't seem very good doers on this record.
Monday, 6 June 2011
it rained
It rained. That is really the most interesting thing that happened all day. It was raining at the plant centre until late afternoon, while I hoped it was raining on my garden at home. When I got back we had had 12mm, so half an inch. We need much, much more, on our own account here, and to revive trade at work. However, 12mm is not to be sneezed at.
Customers trundled in despite the rain. One wanted a variety of elm whose name I didn't recognise, but I worked out from Hillier's directory which one he meant, and looked up local stockists for him in the Plant Finder. There are three nurseries in the Eastern region that list it, but we don't. I don't grudge spending time helping people search for plants that we don't list. Plants are our business, and other nurseries do the same for us.
Someone else telephoned and said that she knew we didn't stock bark, but could I let her have the name and phone number of a supplier who did. I told her the name of the firm I knew locally. She wanted the phone number. I apologised that I didn't have the number to hand, but was sure they would be in the Yellow Pages or on the net. She didn't have a Colchester Yellow Pages or a computer, and pressed for me to give her the number. I apologised (with diminishing sincerity) that I didn't have a Yellow Pages myself. You have to draw the line somewhere. She knew we don't stock bark, and we are a shop attempting to make a profit, not a free telephone number finding service.
Other than that I tidied up dahlias and crocosmias that had overwintered in the greenhouse at work, and after lunch when it was still raining, but not as hard, started putting that morning's delivery of herbaceous plants out for sale. A customer in search of dahlias was disappointed that we only had singles. I saw his point. I know they are more tasteful than the quilled and cactus varieties, but I like the big, elaborate, multi-petal ones myself. Tasteful is all very well, and I can appreciate small green flowers as well as the next person (better, in fact, since they leave the Systems Administrator cold), but dahlias should be fun.
A week ago somebody put orange paint around the potholes in the back lane on my way home. This still hasn't been followed by anybody filling them in, but I live in hope. Today they had water in them. Did I say that it rained, nearly all day?
Customers trundled in despite the rain. One wanted a variety of elm whose name I didn't recognise, but I worked out from Hillier's directory which one he meant, and looked up local stockists for him in the Plant Finder. There are three nurseries in the Eastern region that list it, but we don't. I don't grudge spending time helping people search for plants that we don't list. Plants are our business, and other nurseries do the same for us.
Someone else telephoned and said that she knew we didn't stock bark, but could I let her have the name and phone number of a supplier who did. I told her the name of the firm I knew locally. She wanted the phone number. I apologised that I didn't have the number to hand, but was sure they would be in the Yellow Pages or on the net. She didn't have a Colchester Yellow Pages or a computer, and pressed for me to give her the number. I apologised (with diminishing sincerity) that I didn't have a Yellow Pages myself. You have to draw the line somewhere. She knew we don't stock bark, and we are a shop attempting to make a profit, not a free telephone number finding service.
Other than that I tidied up dahlias and crocosmias that had overwintered in the greenhouse at work, and after lunch when it was still raining, but not as hard, started putting that morning's delivery of herbaceous plants out for sale. A customer in search of dahlias was disappointed that we only had singles. I saw his point. I know they are more tasteful than the quilled and cactus varieties, but I like the big, elaborate, multi-petal ones myself. Tasteful is all very well, and I can appreciate small green flowers as well as the next person (better, in fact, since they leave the Systems Administrator cold), but dahlias should be fun.
A week ago somebody put orange paint around the potholes in the back lane on my way home. This still hasn't been followed by anybody filling them in, but I live in hope. Today they had water in them. Did I say that it rained, nearly all day?
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
rain today
It rained for most of the morning. I didn't mind this as much as I might have, as I was making the second batch of marmalade. I'm confident that with only a few brief breaks it is going to rain all afternoon, so I'm not changing into my gardening overalls. This prediction is not based on the Met Office's five day forecast. I still look at that, in a hopeless way, but it changes so often that it isn't really much use. If information is defined as that which reduces uncertainty then a forecast that predicts that sometimes during the next five days in England during January, it is going to rain, has informational value of approximately nil. Much more use, at least for deciding whether to head out into the garden, is the rain radar site. This does what it says on the tin, which is lets you see a radar shot of rain in your chosen area. The rainfall of the past few hours is shown, with rain clouds colour coded for the intensity of the rain sweeping across the screen, and then the projected passage of the rain over the next few hours. Access to the basic service is free, or if you want to be able to zoom in on smaller areas you pay a modest annual fee. The predictions don't always work, but they are pretty good, and it's helpful being able to see whether you are dealing with just one lump of rain, in which case it might be worth hanging around in your gardening clothes for half an hour until it's gone, or whether there are numerous bands of precipitation coming across and you might as well give up and make alternative plans for the rest of the day. The snow did slightly fox it, because that only formed as the wind from the north sea hit the coast, so the snow clouds that were sweeping down across East Anglia kept materialising out of thin air just off Lowestoft.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)