food issues

We think that Our Ginger's diet is starting to work, a bit.  From some angles he looks slightly less like a rugby ball covered in acrylic orange fur with a leg at each corner.  From some angles.  When he goes into Clive Anderson mode and shrinks his neck down into his shoulders he still looks pretty chunky.  The Systems Administrator says there is a little less podge around the tummy, and I think that's probably right.  Our Ginger has been quite good about being dieted, finishing his breakfast and then spending the rest of the morning asleep rather than agitating for more food, though that could partly be down to the mild weather.  Cats need to eat significantly less when it's warm, a reminder that they have a higher surface area to volume ratio than us, and that in cold weather they need to stack away a lot of calories just to maintain their body heat.

We are trying to get him to lose weight for his own good, after staring one time too many at the poster in the vet's consulting room illustrating the health dangers of obesity.  Unfortunately, by the law of unintended consequences, the fat tabby has taken the non-constant availability of food as a personal threat, and started hoovering down any she can see, so as Our Ginger gets slimmer (possibly) she gets fatter.  The big tabby's nerves are still jangled, so that he is sometimes reluctant to eat at all, and sits staring at his food with a vague expression.  Standing with him talking to him nicely sometimes helps encourage him to eat, but we have had to resort to taking him into the kitchen with us while we eat lunch, and giving him extra rations behind closed doors.  He seems to like eating with us (his dish is on the floor) so the exclusive company and occasional sachet of Sheba generally persuade him he feels hungry.

The black cat knows what he's doing, eats what he wants, and remains at a healthy weight.  But in response to the Telegraph vet who says it is a tired old excuse among pet owners that they can't control the weight of their animals because they have to feed more than one, I say, try it.  If you happen to have four like the black cat then good luck to you, and no wonder you think it's easy.  For those of us who have one with gluttonous and one with paranoid tendencies, plus another with a borderline eating disorder, it's a challenge.

They are moulting as well, a sign of spring.  The Systems Administrator looked last night at the strands of fur that were rising one by one under the heat of an anglepoise lamp from a mat on the table in front of the TV and said 'Do you think you could move that thing?' and that it was no wonder we both had permanent runny noses and sore throats.  I sometimes think we are slightly allergic to them, but it's too late to worry about that now.

Addendum  The replacement gear part for the lawn tractor arrived in a little cardboard sleeve, and was the right, genuine Briggs and Stratton component.  Taking half the afternoon, and sustaining only minor flesh wounds, the SA managed to rebuild the starter motor.  The tractor now works perfectly, and it will be handy knowing how to disassemble the starter motor for the next time something breaks.

cutting back

The scene of my gardening operations has returned to the rose bed below the veranda.  It is referred to as the near rose bed in my garden diary, and does contain quite a lot of roses, but some other things as well, including a clump of Paulownia tomentosa and a patch of Helianthus salicifolius.  Both were included to add some height and some foliage interest to the roses, and are suckering with enthusiasm.  The perennial sunflower makes tall, largely unbranching stems with narrow, willow-like leaves, which are quite intriguing.  It has small yellow flowers in autumn, but they aren't really the point.  There are a couple of rusted metal tripods with clematis up them, and an Eryngium pandanifolium bought at Great Dixter, which grew far larger than I ever envisaged before being cut down by the cold of last winter.  That has since started making a good recovery, and I should really be brave and try and move some of its rosettes, since in the course of regenerating from the remains of the old clump it has migrated from its original position, which was already too close to a box hedge.  There's an Astelia chatamica too, which made a fine specimen before being mostly destroyed by last winter's cold.  It is regrowing from a couple of points, but doesn't look totally convinced about making the effort.  And there's a dome of box, included to give some evergreen volume, and a narrow leaved bay, which keeps growing larger than I should really like it, and is a pig to prune, since it is on a slope and all hemmed in with roses.

The near rose bed loomed back into my consciousness because the Systems Administrator began to murmur that I really needed to finish cutting back the climbers on the veranda before the birds started nesting.  They have to be cut back to give access for the SA to paint the barge boards and replace the gutter along the back of the house, and the desirability of finishing this job before the sailing and cricket seasons start has been looming in the SA's consciousness.  They need tidying up anyway, as a great mass of dead twigs and branches has built up beneath the outer living layer.  And when we're sitting in our steamer chairs on the veranda in the evenings, it would be nice to look out at the view, and not straight into the side of a mass of honeysuckle.  I spotted one old birds' nest in the tangle, confirming that it has been used as a nesting site in the past, though it probably won't be so appealing once it's tidier.

I managed to neither stab myself on a thorn nor poke myself in the eye today, and as the afternoon wore on switched to hand weeding for the last part of the day.  When I think about the times when I've scratched myself gardening badly enough to need a trip to the doctor, most of the accidents do seem to have occurred in the last couple of hours before the light goes.  It could be coincidence, but I suspect that increasing tiredness and decreasing visibility have something to do with it.

I'm not even cutting back the climbers very hard, and it may be that when we try to get the scaffolding in, everything will have to suffer another, more severe chop.  They are yielding up an extraordinary volume of debris as it is.  The old lawn tractor, which is used minus its cutting deck to haul the garden trailer, disgraced itself yesterday by breaking down in a place where it was blocking the drive, and the trailer was hanging behind it on a slope.  What should have been a ten minute job for the SA, emptying the trailer by the bonfire and putting it back by the veranda, took most of the afternoon, working out how to detach the trailer, pushing the tractor out of the way, and investigating the cause of the breakdown.  That turned out to be the catastrophic failure of a component in the starter motor.  A new part has been ordered (from Amazon.  They sell everything) but in the meantime we are without the tractor.  The current lawnmower will haul the trailer at a pinch, but as it is new, expensive, and not really up to the job, the SA is reluctant to use it for that purpose, and once I've filled the trailer again that may be my lot until the spare part arrives.

If I run out of space in the trailer then I will be free to return to my primary objective, which is to confine the yellow stemmed bamboo in the gunnera bed within the two rolls of galvanised lawn edging.  It's got personal between me and that bamboo.

investing through the downturn

Apparently the boss was on the radio just before seven this morning, talking about the problems the dry weather is causing for trees and shrubs, not to mention plant centres.  That was presumably Radio Suffolk.  I didn't hear it, but the interview was shorter than the boss was expecting, so the plant centre didn't get quite such a plug as he'd been planning, with no time to mention the forthcoming open weekend.

The open weekend is an annual jamboree, with talks, guided garden walks and cake.  It is now only five days away, and so we are all tidying frantically.  By an irritating twist of fate, one of the gardeners has to go on jury service, starting tomorrow.  There's probably never a convenient time for a small business to lose a member of staff, but this week is even less convenient than most.

The start of the jury service was delayed by one day, for some reason, so the gardener was at work today to share in the excitement of the new tractor being delivered.  I gather it will do all sorts of things that the old tractor couldn't do, as well as not produce gargantuan quantities of black smoke.  I find it quite encouraging that the boss feels able and willing to invest a new bit of kit.  Not only the tractor, but the front wall that was threatening to collapse on to the pavement has been rebuilt (I think the council did have something to do with that, as they don't like collapsing brick walls along the public highway).  And it turns out we are going to recruit a new full time member of staff.  This is probably a good thing, as we are permanently one person short at weekends, and covering for any illness or holiday at all depends on a constant flow of goodwill (plus availability given other commitments) from everybody.  And we are going to have a tearoom.

Words almost fail me about the tearoom.  All the staff have been telling the owners for ages that we need a tearoom.  Potential visitors ring and ask if we have one, and actual customers express disappointment that we haven't.  I've thought that given the cost and effort that goes into presentation in the plant centre, and the fact that we have a garden open to the public, we are pitching ourselves as a destination, attraction, day out, whatever you want to call it, not just a shop where you can buy a lot of plants.  And English people expect tea and cake on their days out.  Bill Bryson has identified this as an endearing characteristic of ours, that a cup of tea and some cake (or even a biscuit) makes us so happy, and he is right.  You can't be a proper destination without a tea room.  What swung it, according to the manager, was that when the HTA came the other week to do their co-operative critique of the business, they all said very loud and extremely clear that we NEED A TEAROOM.  Never mind the display tables, they're very nice, but what about the TEAROOM?  The owners are going to chisel a piece out of the back of the shop to make room for it, and keep it simple.  Tea and cake.  Maybe soup.  I think they should have soup, or jacket potatoes.  Not everybody likes sweet stuff.  Before I get too excited about the tearoom I should remember the new plant catalogue and the garden guide, both of which have been promised but on hold for an age.  But a builder did actually come and look at the shop today.  And the tractor and the wall are facts.  I have seen them.

stocking up for autumn

Stock is now arriving in the plant centre in quantity, ready for the autumn selling season.  I hope we do sell it.  The manager ran a stand for us yesterday at the Helmingham Hall rare plant fair, and trade was slack.  Everybody seems to have had a bad year, so our sales weren't helped by the fact that other stallholders were knocking out plants (by now potbound) at massive discounts to avoid being left with them over the winter.

A delivery of shrubs came in some time last week, while I wasn't there.  Some of these were lined up in confusing trolley loads behind the shop, the same variety split between more than one trolley but not yet carrying our labels with price, description, and most crucially, name.  The grower just sends them out in batches with a single label to cover all ten or twenty plants of each variety, and it is a very good idea to keep them in their groups and not muddle them up until you've tagged them.  Some of the plants were intended to go out for sale straight away, and others to be stored behind the scenes in the tunnel on the other side, to replenish stock in the plant centre as needed over the coming months.  It wasn't clear to me which were which, and it didn't seem to have been clear to the staff working over the weekend either.  The manager startled me with a howl of rage as I was watering in one of the tunnels, which initially made me think that maybe he wanted the abutilons and Lobelia tupa to be really dry and that it was my mistake to have watered them, but it turned out that they were not supposed to be in that tunnel at all.

The boss is in the process of buying a new tractor.  I thought this was quite an encouraging sign, but it turned out that his hand was forced, because the old tractor had begun to give off such copious amounts of smoke that it was unusable.  This may have had something to do with our attempts to run it on paraffin (left over from the old tunnel heater) instead of diesel.  There again, it was a very old tractor.  The proposed new model was delivered for the gardeners to inspect, and they looked as engrossed as you would expect two blokes to be, given the prospect of a shiny new mechanical toy.

While the gardeners and the boss were putting the potential new tractor through its paces, an articulated lorry-load of trees arrived.  We ask our suppliers not to send artics, since they won't go up the drive, but I expect that an artic is all some of them have.  This one had to park out on the road, and the boss refused to interupt the tractor trials so that the gardeners could help unload the trees, so the rest of us had to plod up and down the drive with trolleys out of the garden centre, six trees at a time.  The driver must have thought that we were taking the piss.  Eventually the gardeners came to help with a big trailer, and things speeded up.  Our most long-standing employee came to help, who works part time behind the scenes potting and weeding, but the manager's self-appointed guardian told her that we could manage without her, and that it got confusing with too many people.  The longest-serving member of staff said that the manager had told her to come over, but that she would go back to her proper work, and retreated fuming to the polytunnel.

We were one member of staff down, due to illness, and so after the excitement of the trees I found myself largely confined to the shop.  Occassionally the manager would suggest I could move trolleys of this and that, but customers can get into the shop and feel as though they have been unattended for a very long time in less than the time it takes to unload a trolley of plants, so that isn't a very easy piece of multi-tasking to pull off.  I did manage to make some phone calls to let people know that their stuff had arrived.  Sometimes I just got their anwerphone, but one woman sounded really pleased.

The extra-tender and extra-beautiful 'Azureum' form of Teucrium fruticans had come in since the last time I was at work, so I put one aside with my name on it, to go in our turning circle in due course.  No ginger scented rosemary yet, but I live in hope.  I was tempted by a rather tender species of buddleia, B. crispa, with lovely rounded felty leaves, but I'll ponder that before committing.  I do have a collection of plants waiting to go in the ground, and am trying to deal with them before buying too many more.  It is easy to be tempted when rarities turn up, though, since if I don't grab my chance I might not get another for a year, if not longer.  I still wish I'd bought a plant of a particularly long-flowering white Weigela I'd had my eye on, before the grower supplying us and the liner nursery supplying them both ceased trading.  I've never seen one since.

At home the Systems Administrator had the sad task of disposing of the body of the old lady hen, who took bad yesterday and died in the night.  She was pretty old, for a chicken.  I think we got her in 2005, and she lived through a fox attack and was a feisty creature in her day.  In recent months she had got reluctant to venture out of the run, though she did come out for a nice walk about on Friday afternoon, and we guessed her time was drawing to a close.  It is sad to see her go, when we had known her for so long, but maybe less sad than when young hens fall prey to the fox.  Chickens seem a bit like fighter pilots.  If they survive the first few weeks of conflict their chances of survival rise considerably.