This will be a short, not to say cursory, post, as I have only just finished the watering after getting in from work, and we are going to watch the Last Night of the Proms on the TV. And before that starts I need time to scrub the filth from under my fingernails.
The man who's taking over the cafe, his friend who's painting the walls, and his five year old were all in the plant centre today, getting things ready. The new colour of the walls, that looked depressingly like multi-storey car park concrete grey from the test patch, and equally dismal and grungy after only one coat, has come up quite well after the top coat was applied. It's a sort of greyish green, not as strong as sage, maybe lichen. They have co-opted two olive trees in cream glazed urns to go by the counter, and a bay tree. I suspect that the plants are going to have to be rotated inside and out again pretty regularly to keep them healthy, and I wonder if there's going to be an issue with the olives dropping dead leaves on the worktop, but it is starting to look quite Mediterranean and chic. And they've superglued soft feet onto the bottom of half the chair legs, to reduce the terrible scraping sound they make on the concrete floor, but they ran out of feet. The chiller cabinet hasn't arrived yet, which makes me think it won't be in use by Monday, since after moving it I presume the coolant needs time to settle, like the ice cream maker, but overall it's progress. And I have only one more day of having to potentially make pots of tea and dole out cake, before it is part of a separate business and nothing to do with me, and I can keep my compost covered shirt out of the kitchen.
The five year old was as noisy and rumbustious as five year old boys are. He had a go with a hose, and a radio, and got a lot of paint on himself, and pushed a sack trolley about. My young male colleague was so good with him, I thought he must have nephews and nieces of about the same age, and sure enough he did. The little boy latched on to him like a limpet, and was very disappointed to discover he wouldn't be working tomorrow. You read in the papers about the importance of adult male role models for boys, and the drawbacks of primary school teaching having become a predominantly female profession. I've read that and thought, yeah, OK. A couple of my female relations are primary school teachers and they are both brilliant with children. However, today I saw for myself how clearly and instinctively small boys, or at least some of them, really want to be around men.
The racks of seeds used to demarcate the cafe area from the shop had been moved again since the last time I was at work, and still weren't right, since anyone browsing though the seed packets would have been looming disconcertingly over the tables in the cafe, and half the racks of seeds had been moved to a far corner so they weren't in one section. The older of my two colleagues spent the morning shuffling racks and tables around, trying to fit everything in. Despite myself I got drawn into the sport. It is a good game, rearranging the shop, and I can see why they do it so frequently. In the end I decided that the task as being attempted was logically impossible, because he was trying to fit all of the seed racks into a space too small to hold them, no matter how they were arranged. I suggested that if we were to move the book cases and some of the display tables from the middle of the shop to the end where the odd seeds were, that would free up space to move the odd seeds to join the others, and to put the display of pots and seed trays that had somehow ended up with the gifts back with the seeds as well, and have all the gifts together, near the till and alongside the cafe. Then I left the chaps, including the five year old, to do the heavy lifting. I wouldn't dare try and shuffle the china cabinets around with all the mugs and things still on them, but they managed it without any breakages. I was relieved when they stopped trying to move the bookcase containing grass seed and lawn fertiliser while several bottles of lawn weed killer and a roll of galvanised lawn edging were still on top of it. It would be a ludicrous event to have to write in the accident book, if somebody was injured by a reel of metal lawn edging falling on their head.
Trade was better than it has been, with some expensive trolley loads going past the till, but it was still fairly quiet. On the other hand, it was very hot, and at least one customer said to me that she wasn't planting anything in her garden until we'd had some rain and the soil was a bit moister. I think lots of people were simply enjoying the sunshine.
Saturday, 8 September 2012
Friday, 7 September 2012
cutting the long grass
In the past couple of days we've cut down the bulk of the long grass. It seems sad to do it now, when there are still late flowers blooming like the field scabious, and insects buzzing about, but it has to be cut at some point, otherwise it would revert over a few years to scrub. Even after one season's growth there are young oaks, ash and cotoneasters springing up, plus the odd bramble that has gained a toehold. The Systems Administrator pushes the power scythe, and I follow behind and around with the rake, hauling what has been cut into piles, and so revealing the Mohican stripes and lumps that have escaped the first pass of the scythe.
The scythe is a great tool. Petrol driven, it consists of two horizontal sets of blades that snicker across each other, and the machine is self-propelling, otherwise the SA would die of exhaustion before we were a quarter of the way through. Even with the motor pushing it forward it is hard work to steer and control, particularly when it hits an ant hill. It's been a good year for ants. No other insects as far as I can see, just ants. Cutting the lower lawn was harder work this year than usual, because the wet weather has made the grass grow more than ever before, sprouting into great rank tufts that jammed the blades of the scythe periodically.
We rescued two large and fine toads from the bottom lawn in the back garden, and I found a third making its way to safety. There were a couple of little dark scuttling things but I didn't manage to see clearly what they were. Mice or voles, probably. We have never yet caught a toad in the mower. They seem to have the knack of pressing themselves down into the grass and letting the blades pass overhead, though it must be a horrible experience for them, with all the noise. They are very strong, for such small animals, and don't freeze on contact with humans, unlike newts. When you hold one cupped between your palms to move it you can feel it pushing against you, trying to break free.
I cut most of the bank along the side of the daffodil lawn with shears before lunch. It is one of those jobs where after ten minutes you seem to have done pathetically little, and start to feel tired and discouraged, and then after an hour you have done a good amount, and can see that the task is achievable. Half way along the bank I heard a strange hissing noise, like a water leak. After a while my brain cranked into gear that this was not irrigation coming on in the neighbouring field, and that the last time I heard that noise it turned out to be a bumblebee nest. I backed off for a moment and looked carefully, and sure enough there were small wild bees flying around one area of moss. Bumbles are generally peaceful animals and will not attack you, but if you plonk yourself right on top of their nest and brandish a pair of shears by the entrance they will sting, and it is excruciatingly painful. I identified the patch of moss which, if I touched it, started the hissing noise again, and worked my way carefully past that section.
The meadow was comparatively easy to scythe, because the soil is so light in that part of the garden that even with all the rain, the grass has not grown so thick. Two thirds of the way through raking, the blister on the palm of my right hand at the base of my fourth finger became too large to ignore any more, and I had to stop. Blisters there are not so bad, since that part of your skin is designed for hard wear, forms callouses easily and heals quickly. The key with raking (I said this last year but it's important) is not to rest the rake on the soft skin between your thumb and index finger. It's easily done without thinking, and you will lift a piece of skin in no time at all, which will hurt a lot, and take ages to recover, during which period you will be going around with a series of disgusting pieces of elastoplast on your hand, which get wet whenever you wash.
It's good to have that done, before any more of the grass topples over and lodges close to the ground, at which point the scythe has little chance with it. There have been years when the daffodil lawn and even the meadow haven't been cut until after Christmas, when there is a sudden panic because the first leaves of bulbs are emerging. There is still a lot of finishing off to do by hand, around the edges, and tidying up the tufts that the scythe never caught, but the bulk of it is done. It filled a great many trailer loads, carting all of it off to the bonfire site. The next challenge for the SA will be to try and burn it, mixing it with whatever woody prunings we have to get some sort of a blaze going. I need to cut the grass near the beehives, but that will have to wait for a day when it is cooler, so that the bees aren't as active as they are today, and I won't faint with the effort and the heat, wearing my bee suit over my gardening clothes.
The cut areas look starkly brown and barren at first, but will green up soon enough, especially once we get some rain. It's a look I associate with early autumn, and reminds me of our first ever visit to Great Dixter, in mid September (ten years ago), when the meadows had just been cut. While sad to see the scabious go, it is satisfying to get one of the most tangled and jungly parts of the garden back under control, and feel that a step has been taken towards the stripped down, pared back neatness of winter.
The scythe is a great tool. Petrol driven, it consists of two horizontal sets of blades that snicker across each other, and the machine is self-propelling, otherwise the SA would die of exhaustion before we were a quarter of the way through. Even with the motor pushing it forward it is hard work to steer and control, particularly when it hits an ant hill. It's been a good year for ants. No other insects as far as I can see, just ants. Cutting the lower lawn was harder work this year than usual, because the wet weather has made the grass grow more than ever before, sprouting into great rank tufts that jammed the blades of the scythe periodically.
We rescued two large and fine toads from the bottom lawn in the back garden, and I found a third making its way to safety. There were a couple of little dark scuttling things but I didn't manage to see clearly what they were. Mice or voles, probably. We have never yet caught a toad in the mower. They seem to have the knack of pressing themselves down into the grass and letting the blades pass overhead, though it must be a horrible experience for them, with all the noise. They are very strong, for such small animals, and don't freeze on contact with humans, unlike newts. When you hold one cupped between your palms to move it you can feel it pushing against you, trying to break free.
I cut most of the bank along the side of the daffodil lawn with shears before lunch. It is one of those jobs where after ten minutes you seem to have done pathetically little, and start to feel tired and discouraged, and then after an hour you have done a good amount, and can see that the task is achievable. Half way along the bank I heard a strange hissing noise, like a water leak. After a while my brain cranked into gear that this was not irrigation coming on in the neighbouring field, and that the last time I heard that noise it turned out to be a bumblebee nest. I backed off for a moment and looked carefully, and sure enough there were small wild bees flying around one area of moss. Bumbles are generally peaceful animals and will not attack you, but if you plonk yourself right on top of their nest and brandish a pair of shears by the entrance they will sting, and it is excruciatingly painful. I identified the patch of moss which, if I touched it, started the hissing noise again, and worked my way carefully past that section.
The meadow was comparatively easy to scythe, because the soil is so light in that part of the garden that even with all the rain, the grass has not grown so thick. Two thirds of the way through raking, the blister on the palm of my right hand at the base of my fourth finger became too large to ignore any more, and I had to stop. Blisters there are not so bad, since that part of your skin is designed for hard wear, forms callouses easily and heals quickly. The key with raking (I said this last year but it's important) is not to rest the rake on the soft skin between your thumb and index finger. It's easily done without thinking, and you will lift a piece of skin in no time at all, which will hurt a lot, and take ages to recover, during which period you will be going around with a series of disgusting pieces of elastoplast on your hand, which get wet whenever you wash.
It's good to have that done, before any more of the grass topples over and lodges close to the ground, at which point the scythe has little chance with it. There have been years when the daffodil lawn and even the meadow haven't been cut until after Christmas, when there is a sudden panic because the first leaves of bulbs are emerging. There is still a lot of finishing off to do by hand, around the edges, and tidying up the tufts that the scythe never caught, but the bulk of it is done. It filled a great many trailer loads, carting all of it off to the bonfire site. The next challenge for the SA will be to try and burn it, mixing it with whatever woody prunings we have to get some sort of a blaze going. I need to cut the grass near the beehives, but that will have to wait for a day when it is cooler, so that the bees aren't as active as they are today, and I won't faint with the effort and the heat, wearing my bee suit over my gardening clothes.
The cut areas look starkly brown and barren at first, but will green up soon enough, especially once we get some rain. It's a look I associate with early autumn, and reminds me of our first ever visit to Great Dixter, in mid September (ten years ago), when the meadows had just been cut. While sad to see the scabious go, it is satisfying to get one of the most tangled and jungly parts of the garden back under control, and feel that a step has been taken towards the stripped down, pared back neatness of winter.
Thursday, 6 September 2012
take good care of yourself
Trying on a pair of trousers the other day, and craning my neck to try and get a rear view of myself in the bedroom mirror, I saw a dark something in the middle of my back that I didn't think had been there the last time I looked (which isn't very often). After I'd digested the information I thought that I'd better follow the medical advice to get any change in the appearance of a mole checked out by my GP. It turned out that the soonest I could get an appointment with the only GP at the practice I actually like was ten days, or sixteen days for another that I'd met once and didn't much take to. I could see the locum in only forty-eight hours, so on the basis that his or her lack of popularity probably reflected deep-seated conservatism on the part of most patients rather than any medical deficiencies, and the fact that the first of the other two dates fell on my birthday and the second during our holiday, I settled for the locum.
The locum looked at my back and said that the moles were fine, but there was an outsize blocked pore that he could deal with if I liked. He did, and professed himself pleased with the result, saying I was the first person he'd cured all morning. He commented that dark skinned people like me were relatively unlikely to contract melanoma, which mainly afflicted redheads, but agreed it was sensible to get moles checked when in doubt, and that it is hard to see the middle of your own back. I have known two people with melanoma, though they were both redheads, and one of them died of it, so I am more hawkish about it than I might be otherwise.
When the Archers scriptwriters decided that Siobhan's adulterous behaviour was punishable by death and gave her malignant melanoma, she said that not having a partner to look at her back she had been late in picking it up. It may be that new lovers observe each other's bodies with that level of detail, despite middle age, but in my experience by the time you are embarking on your fourth decade with your life's partner, you have both begun to develop the art of glossing over physical defects. Minute inspection of each new emerging blemish would just be too demoralising. I was looking at my legs in the mirror recently, and discovered that my knees had gone baggy. I mean, when the hell did that happen?
After the doctor came the dentist, booked in a fit of panic because I hadn't been for a long time, and the surgery reserves the right to chuck you off the NHS list if you don't go for regular check-ups. The dentist said that my the teeth were fine, with no fillings needed, and that it was marvellous that I had so few. I have four or five, all except one dating from before I left school, a legacy of 1970s drill and fill dentistry. My current dentist took a charitable view, saying that in those days that was how things were done, with more precautionary fillings. I thought it probably reflected the fact that if you pay dentists according to how many fillings they do, they have an incentive to drill holes in children's teeth. When I hear from the pro-Statin lobby, funded partly by Stain manufacturers, about the population health benefits of giving Statins to all over 50s on a precautionary basis, I need only look in my own mouth to be reminded of the other side of the argument.
Alas, although I didn't need fillings I did need a good scrub. In the past the dentist has done the scraping and polishing, and I have regarded it as the reward for undergoing all that probing with an alarming pointed tool, but this time she told me I needed an appointment with the hygienist. I can see that it doesn't make sense for NHS dentists with their umpteen years of training to be doing work that could be carried out by hygienists, but it means I have to make an extra visit, so that's another half a morning gone, not to mention an additional £38.50.
The locum looked at my back and said that the moles were fine, but there was an outsize blocked pore that he could deal with if I liked. He did, and professed himself pleased with the result, saying I was the first person he'd cured all morning. He commented that dark skinned people like me were relatively unlikely to contract melanoma, which mainly afflicted redheads, but agreed it was sensible to get moles checked when in doubt, and that it is hard to see the middle of your own back. I have known two people with melanoma, though they were both redheads, and one of them died of it, so I am more hawkish about it than I might be otherwise.
When the Archers scriptwriters decided that Siobhan's adulterous behaviour was punishable by death and gave her malignant melanoma, she said that not having a partner to look at her back she had been late in picking it up. It may be that new lovers observe each other's bodies with that level of detail, despite middle age, but in my experience by the time you are embarking on your fourth decade with your life's partner, you have both begun to develop the art of glossing over physical defects. Minute inspection of each new emerging blemish would just be too demoralising. I was looking at my legs in the mirror recently, and discovered that my knees had gone baggy. I mean, when the hell did that happen?
After the doctor came the dentist, booked in a fit of panic because I hadn't been for a long time, and the surgery reserves the right to chuck you off the NHS list if you don't go for regular check-ups. The dentist said that my the teeth were fine, with no fillings needed, and that it was marvellous that I had so few. I have four or five, all except one dating from before I left school, a legacy of 1970s drill and fill dentistry. My current dentist took a charitable view, saying that in those days that was how things were done, with more precautionary fillings. I thought it probably reflected the fact that if you pay dentists according to how many fillings they do, they have an incentive to drill holes in children's teeth. When I hear from the pro-Statin lobby, funded partly by Stain manufacturers, about the population health benefits of giving Statins to all over 50s on a precautionary basis, I need only look in my own mouth to be reminded of the other side of the argument.
Alas, although I didn't need fillings I did need a good scrub. In the past the dentist has done the scraping and polishing, and I have regarded it as the reward for undergoing all that probing with an alarming pointed tool, but this time she told me I needed an appointment with the hygienist. I can see that it doesn't make sense for NHS dentists with their umpteen years of training to be doing work that could be carried out by hygienists, but it means I have to make an extra visit, so that's another half a morning gone, not to mention an additional £38.50.
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
the home of English cricket
The Systems Administrator took me today to see a county match at Lord's. It is not that through the influence of the Olympics and the Paralympics I have suddenly become interested in sport, for I still find the idea of supporting a team baffling, and remain as serenely unpeturbed as ever by who wins or loses. Nor have I changed my views on football. However, I do like cricket, in moderation, and provided it is played by teams wearing traditional white clothes and not coloured pyjamas, against a background of polite clapping and throaty muttering and not loud music, and on a sunny day, not under spotlights. And I particularly like Lord's (actually, I shouldn't say that, as it is the only cricket ground I have ever been to) because having read and re-read the Peter Wimsey novels more times than I would care to count, I can imagine Wimsey (five foot nine and rather sensitive about his height) striding out on to the pitch in the Varsity Match, bat in hand.
The Systems Administrator is a member of Middlesex Cricket Club. This is not nearly so posh as the MCC, which the SA's late father unaccountably forgot to put the SA's name down for at birth, but it does mean that for county (as distinct from Test) matches when Middlesex are playing at home the SA can use the Pavilion, and can sign in a guest. Not being allowed in the Pavilion for Test matches is not a total disaster, since MCC members have to queue from about half past six in the morning to bagsie good seats, whereas the plebs' seats at the other end are numbered, so there's no need to queue and the SA and great mate can saunter in for the start of play. Today we were in the Pavilion.
The Pavilion is wonderful. The Lord's website doesn't make as much of it as it might, and I had to look up its architectural details on Wikipedia, since I don't have the Pevsner guide for that part of London. It was built in 1889-90, and is a magnificent concoction of Victorian brick and ironwork, now grade II* listed. The Long Room is renowned, and the last time we went we saw the players file through it as they came off for lunch. An extremely fine collection of cricket related paintings, from the nineteenth century to the current day, is dotted around the building. A people watcher can have a field day in the Lord's pavilion. There are more linen jackets per square metre than anywhere else in England, an intriguing array of hats, a secret code of ties which I don't understand (some of the MCC members are not very pleased with the way that Middlesex members and their guests lower the tone on 20-20 match days), odd rooms that only MCC members can enter, and a Committee room restricted to Committee members. There are two huge war memorials for the two World Wars, one on each main staircase. The MCC lost a heart breakingly large number of members in both conflicts. I read the one for the Second War all the way through, and only spotted a handful of names that had Pte and not an officer's rank against them (and no visibly Jewish surnames at all). Female members were only allowed in 1998.
Wanting to enter into the spirit of the thing, I wore a rather well-cut, moderately expensive, decorously below the knee linen skirt in a colour discouragingly described by the Toast catalogue as 'donkey', a new T shirt and a double row of fresh water pearls, topped off with a straw hat and an ancient two-tone cotton jacket that was originally the top half of a trouser suit but went well with donkey. As pre-war vibes went I thought that would be spot on. Ladies are required to wear 'appropriate' shoes, which leaves things a little vague. My idea of an appropriate shoe is something which I can walk in and which is not going to give me blisters walking from Baker Street tube to the cricket ground. Victoria Beckham's idea of an appropriate shoe seems to be a four inch heel. From the MCC's perspective I should think that flat cream sandals that show the tips of three toes are highly appropriate.
The cricket. I didn't mention the cricket. Middlesex were playing Lancashire, and when we arrived Lancashire were just going out to bat. It was a bit slow. Middlesex had their fielders bunched in close and defensive, and sent on the fast bowlers, and then tried a spinner, and not a great deal happened. Lancashire notched up the odd run, and the score crawled towards twenty, of which six were extras. The SA had to explain to me what an extra was, and I asked if they were supposed to account for a third of your entire score, and apparently they aren't.
I can't remember what the score was when we got to lunchtime, but at that point we were allowed to go and walk on the pitch. The 'hallowed turf', as it is traditionally called. Stewards stood in the middle and prevented the crowd from treading on the wicket, but a big group of happy and surprised people swirled slowly around the rest of the field. Apparently this is sometimes permitted at the end of the season, plus as a quid pro quo for allowing Lord's to be used for the Olympic archery they are going to get a hunk of the turf replaced. It is amazing turf, very short and dense, and made out of grass species with much narrower leaves than your common or garden domestic lawn. I took my sandals off, the better to experience it, and it felt like walking on a carpet. I have long thought that there would be an interesting TV series to be made about sports turf, and all the techniques the groundsmen use to keep it in good nick, the special substrates, and the problems caused by things like new stands making the whole ground too airless and enclosed. I'd watch it.
The opening batsman managed to rack up some fours, so that he had reached 55 (I think) and his partner 25 or so. The SA suggested that as it was very slow, if I'd seen enough we could go home ahead of the rush, so we did. Walking past the end of the ground we heard a more energetic burst of clapping than any of the previous ones, and when we got home I looked up the score on Cricinfo and saw that Smith, the opening bat, was out for 55, so we must have just missed seeing that. The match was going slowly, though. Lancashire need to win, otherwise they will be demoted from Division One of the County Championship. That will be a severe reverse for them, as they won it last year. I asked the SA how things had gone so badly wrong in such a short space of time, and whether several of their best players had retired or something, but apparently not. They just went off the boil, mysteriously.
There was a big plan to redevelop Lord's, to be funded by residential development on land at the 'nursery end' which is the opposite end to the Pavilion. It was voted down by the Committee, and Sir John Major resigned from the Committee in protest. The outward appearance at Lord's is Oh so English, traditional, peaceful and unchanging, but dark currents run beneath the surface.
The Systems Administrator is a member of Middlesex Cricket Club. This is not nearly so posh as the MCC, which the SA's late father unaccountably forgot to put the SA's name down for at birth, but it does mean that for county (as distinct from Test) matches when Middlesex are playing at home the SA can use the Pavilion, and can sign in a guest. Not being allowed in the Pavilion for Test matches is not a total disaster, since MCC members have to queue from about half past six in the morning to bagsie good seats, whereas the plebs' seats at the other end are numbered, so there's no need to queue and the SA and great mate can saunter in for the start of play. Today we were in the Pavilion.
The Pavilion is wonderful. The Lord's website doesn't make as much of it as it might, and I had to look up its architectural details on Wikipedia, since I don't have the Pevsner guide for that part of London. It was built in 1889-90, and is a magnificent concoction of Victorian brick and ironwork, now grade II* listed. The Long Room is renowned, and the last time we went we saw the players file through it as they came off for lunch. An extremely fine collection of cricket related paintings, from the nineteenth century to the current day, is dotted around the building. A people watcher can have a field day in the Lord's pavilion. There are more linen jackets per square metre than anywhere else in England, an intriguing array of hats, a secret code of ties which I don't understand (some of the MCC members are not very pleased with the way that Middlesex members and their guests lower the tone on 20-20 match days), odd rooms that only MCC members can enter, and a Committee room restricted to Committee members. There are two huge war memorials for the two World Wars, one on each main staircase. The MCC lost a heart breakingly large number of members in both conflicts. I read the one for the Second War all the way through, and only spotted a handful of names that had Pte and not an officer's rank against them (and no visibly Jewish surnames at all). Female members were only allowed in 1998.
Wanting to enter into the spirit of the thing, I wore a rather well-cut, moderately expensive, decorously below the knee linen skirt in a colour discouragingly described by the Toast catalogue as 'donkey', a new T shirt and a double row of fresh water pearls, topped off with a straw hat and an ancient two-tone cotton jacket that was originally the top half of a trouser suit but went well with donkey. As pre-war vibes went I thought that would be spot on. Ladies are required to wear 'appropriate' shoes, which leaves things a little vague. My idea of an appropriate shoe is something which I can walk in and which is not going to give me blisters walking from Baker Street tube to the cricket ground. Victoria Beckham's idea of an appropriate shoe seems to be a four inch heel. From the MCC's perspective I should think that flat cream sandals that show the tips of three toes are highly appropriate.
The cricket. I didn't mention the cricket. Middlesex were playing Lancashire, and when we arrived Lancashire were just going out to bat. It was a bit slow. Middlesex had their fielders bunched in close and defensive, and sent on the fast bowlers, and then tried a spinner, and not a great deal happened. Lancashire notched up the odd run, and the score crawled towards twenty, of which six were extras. The SA had to explain to me what an extra was, and I asked if they were supposed to account for a third of your entire score, and apparently they aren't.
I can't remember what the score was when we got to lunchtime, but at that point we were allowed to go and walk on the pitch. The 'hallowed turf', as it is traditionally called. Stewards stood in the middle and prevented the crowd from treading on the wicket, but a big group of happy and surprised people swirled slowly around the rest of the field. Apparently this is sometimes permitted at the end of the season, plus as a quid pro quo for allowing Lord's to be used for the Olympic archery they are going to get a hunk of the turf replaced. It is amazing turf, very short and dense, and made out of grass species with much narrower leaves than your common or garden domestic lawn. I took my sandals off, the better to experience it, and it felt like walking on a carpet. I have long thought that there would be an interesting TV series to be made about sports turf, and all the techniques the groundsmen use to keep it in good nick, the special substrates, and the problems caused by things like new stands making the whole ground too airless and enclosed. I'd watch it.
The opening batsman managed to rack up some fours, so that he had reached 55 (I think) and his partner 25 or so. The SA suggested that as it was very slow, if I'd seen enough we could go home ahead of the rush, so we did. Walking past the end of the ground we heard a more energetic burst of clapping than any of the previous ones, and when we got home I looked up the score on Cricinfo and saw that Smith, the opening bat, was out for 55, so we must have just missed seeing that. The match was going slowly, though. Lancashire need to win, otherwise they will be demoted from Division One of the County Championship. That will be a severe reverse for them, as they won it last year. I asked the SA how things had gone so badly wrong in such a short space of time, and whether several of their best players had retired or something, but apparently not. They just went off the boil, mysteriously.
There was a big plan to redevelop Lord's, to be funded by residential development on land at the 'nursery end' which is the opposite end to the Pavilion. It was voted down by the Committee, and Sir John Major resigned from the Committee in protest. The outward appearance at Lord's is Oh so English, traditional, peaceful and unchanging, but dark currents run beneath the surface.
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
pets and herbs
I can't keep up with the latest expert findings on health. Last week I'm sure that owning a cat was good for me, as stroking it would lower my blood pressure and reduce my risks of heart attack and stroke. I even vaguely thought that pet owners lived longer than hygiene obsessed animal haters. This week it seems the cats are going to give me toxoplasma, putting me at increased risk of psychosis and schizophrenia.
The chickens, meanwhile, are discovering the back garden. The Systems Administrator let them out on returning from an abortive trip to Landguard Fort (the ferry from Harwich turned out to only seat twelve people, and to be heavily oversubscribed) and settled down in a deckchair in the front garden, but the chickens, instead of consenting to be minded and sticking to foraging in the turning circle, set out on an expedition to explore half way down the top lawn. As I was weeding in the back I found myself in the position of principal chicken minder, and the chickens didn't stick to my planned timetable of packing up at six in order to have time to do my Pilates exercises and write today's blog. They made it safely home to the hen house, but they won't all last the winter if they insist on wandering off into the back. The fox will have the outliers.
Lemon balm has also wandered off into the back garden. It is supposed to grow in the herb bed in the front, where it spreads energetically, being a member of the mint family. At some point I must have cut the old stalks down after they had ripened seed, and put them in the compost bins, because it now crops up in various places where I've mulched with home made compost in the past. Given the way it spreads, I don't want it all over the garden, so I root the rogue plants out as I find them. Fortunately, the leaves give off a pleasant lemon scent freely if you touch them, so the wafts of citrus alert me to its presence, and I can seek it out and dispose of it. Sometimes it doesn't pay to advertise.
I planted the herb bed because it seemed a nice idea to have fresh herbs to cook with. We don't make us much use of it as we could do. The SA does most of the cooking, and buys jars of dried sage leaves for flavouring pork, despite the fact that we have a large and sprawling bush growing a few steps from the front door. We were chatting as I weeded the bed, when I mentioned that the thing I was pruning the gone-over flower stems out of was sage, and the SA's eyes lit on it with curiosity. 'Oh, is that sage?'. Having just looked up the properties of lemon balm I can see that I ought to do more with it, since it apparently reduces stress, is anti-bacterial, improves mental performance and repels mosquitoes. All I do with it is admire the bees foraging on the flowers, and pull up unwanted plants. I could make it into herbal tea. Or ice cream.
I bought a new gym ball from John Lewis click-and-collect (the old gym ball, which was from Argos, began to go very soggy and neither of us could work out how we had inflated it in the first place, or find any adaptor that fitted). I pumped it up this afternoon, with the tiny plastic pump that came with it. The pump also has a reverse action for deflating the ball, and one of the two (genuine? One doesn't know nowadays) reviews on the website said how the ball packed down very small for storage. Given the time it took to blow the thing up once, and the tackiness of the pump, I thought that mine would be staying inflated, with the pump reserved for occasional top-ups. The gym ball set, along with three pairs of thick cotton tights (winter is nearly here) arrived in a box only very slightly larger than the cats' current favourite Amazon box. We have put the new down next to the old, to see if Our Ginger and the big tabby will use it. The old box is so old, dirty and revolting, it really is a health hazard, never mind toxoplasma.
The chickens, meanwhile, are discovering the back garden. The Systems Administrator let them out on returning from an abortive trip to Landguard Fort (the ferry from Harwich turned out to only seat twelve people, and to be heavily oversubscribed) and settled down in a deckchair in the front garden, but the chickens, instead of consenting to be minded and sticking to foraging in the turning circle, set out on an expedition to explore half way down the top lawn. As I was weeding in the back I found myself in the position of principal chicken minder, and the chickens didn't stick to my planned timetable of packing up at six in order to have time to do my Pilates exercises and write today's blog. They made it safely home to the hen house, but they won't all last the winter if they insist on wandering off into the back. The fox will have the outliers.
Lemon balm has also wandered off into the back garden. It is supposed to grow in the herb bed in the front, where it spreads energetically, being a member of the mint family. At some point I must have cut the old stalks down after they had ripened seed, and put them in the compost bins, because it now crops up in various places where I've mulched with home made compost in the past. Given the way it spreads, I don't want it all over the garden, so I root the rogue plants out as I find them. Fortunately, the leaves give off a pleasant lemon scent freely if you touch them, so the wafts of citrus alert me to its presence, and I can seek it out and dispose of it. Sometimes it doesn't pay to advertise.
I planted the herb bed because it seemed a nice idea to have fresh herbs to cook with. We don't make us much use of it as we could do. The SA does most of the cooking, and buys jars of dried sage leaves for flavouring pork, despite the fact that we have a large and sprawling bush growing a few steps from the front door. We were chatting as I weeded the bed, when I mentioned that the thing I was pruning the gone-over flower stems out of was sage, and the SA's eyes lit on it with curiosity. 'Oh, is that sage?'. Having just looked up the properties of lemon balm I can see that I ought to do more with it, since it apparently reduces stress, is anti-bacterial, improves mental performance and repels mosquitoes. All I do with it is admire the bees foraging on the flowers, and pull up unwanted plants. I could make it into herbal tea. Or ice cream.
I bought a new gym ball from John Lewis click-and-collect (the old gym ball, which was from Argos, began to go very soggy and neither of us could work out how we had inflated it in the first place, or find any adaptor that fitted). I pumped it up this afternoon, with the tiny plastic pump that came with it. The pump also has a reverse action for deflating the ball, and one of the two (genuine? One doesn't know nowadays) reviews on the website said how the ball packed down very small for storage. Given the time it took to blow the thing up once, and the tackiness of the pump, I thought that mine would be staying inflated, with the pump reserved for occasional top-ups. The gym ball set, along with three pairs of thick cotton tights (winter is nearly here) arrived in a box only very slightly larger than the cats' current favourite Amazon box. We have put the new down next to the old, to see if Our Ginger and the big tabby will use it. The old box is so old, dirty and revolting, it really is a health hazard, never mind toxoplasma.
Monday, 3 September 2012
long day
It's been a long day, so it's going to be a short blog. Work was very quiet. One person was on holiday, meaning that I was mostly stuck in the shop rather than working outside in the sunshine, but that was just as well really, since I forgot to take my hat.
The owner told us that one of the tills was playing up, and asked if I could ring the till service company at nine, and get them to come and fix it. I duly rang them, and they asked what was wrong, suggesting helpfully that it might be something they could fix over the phone. It was a noble idea, to try and save us a call-out charge, but suggested by somebody who hadn't seen the age of the tills. I asked the owner how, exactly, the till had been misbehaving, but she didn't know, beyond the fact that one of the weekend shift had left a note saying there was something wrong with the electronics. She told me to put some dummy transactions through it and find out what it was or wasn't doing, then till up to clear it and make a note for her that it had been a test, but when I tried to put in my first invented sale of £5.99 herbaceous, I discovered that one of the things the till was doing wrong was refusing to let you input anything at all, as it just beeped at me. I booked the cheaper option of an engineer calling sometime in the next couple of days, when he was in the area, but in fact somebody turned up a couple of hours later. The problem turned out to be that solder from a previous repair had begun to break down with use and fill the inside of the till with what was effectively solder dust, which was causing short circuits. The repair man fixed it, but left warning us that it would break down again sooner or later, and probably sooner.
To keep me busy while minding the till, the manager asked if I could weed and top dress the box hedging plants. I tidied up the 2 litre pots first, then turned my attention to three plastic trays of young plants in 9cm pots. (A 9cm pot is 9cm in diameter across the top. Imagine a smallish coffee mug and you're in the right ballpark). As I wheeled the trays into the shop, to work on them by the till, a gush of foetid water slopped out of them and on to the floor. It smelt pretty rank, and I thought that was not what you wanted in a tea shop, a pungent background aroma of swamp. Whoever designed the plastic trays had for reasons best known to themselves put the drainage holes about a centimetre above the bottom of the tray, so they collected water, and the box plants were sitting far too wet.
The dog attached herself to some visitors and walked right around the garden with them. They were rather pleased.
After work came the beekeepers' committee meeting. At least at this time of the year I have time to go home, change and clean my hands, and grab something to eat, which is easier than the summer meetings when I have to go straight there from a six o'clock finish. It seems to be one step forwards and one back with those meetings. The last one was unexpectedly productive, while tonight's wasn't. We seemed to go round and round in circles. Nobody lost their temper, but you could sense the collective energy ebbing away by the minute.
When I got home there was a telephone message from the Colchester Natural History Society's stag beetle expert, who sounded delighted with the beetle. It was rather late to ring her back.
The owner told us that one of the tills was playing up, and asked if I could ring the till service company at nine, and get them to come and fix it. I duly rang them, and they asked what was wrong, suggesting helpfully that it might be something they could fix over the phone. It was a noble idea, to try and save us a call-out charge, but suggested by somebody who hadn't seen the age of the tills. I asked the owner how, exactly, the till had been misbehaving, but she didn't know, beyond the fact that one of the weekend shift had left a note saying there was something wrong with the electronics. She told me to put some dummy transactions through it and find out what it was or wasn't doing, then till up to clear it and make a note for her that it had been a test, but when I tried to put in my first invented sale of £5.99 herbaceous, I discovered that one of the things the till was doing wrong was refusing to let you input anything at all, as it just beeped at me. I booked the cheaper option of an engineer calling sometime in the next couple of days, when he was in the area, but in fact somebody turned up a couple of hours later. The problem turned out to be that solder from a previous repair had begun to break down with use and fill the inside of the till with what was effectively solder dust, which was causing short circuits. The repair man fixed it, but left warning us that it would break down again sooner or later, and probably sooner.
To keep me busy while minding the till, the manager asked if I could weed and top dress the box hedging plants. I tidied up the 2 litre pots first, then turned my attention to three plastic trays of young plants in 9cm pots. (A 9cm pot is 9cm in diameter across the top. Imagine a smallish coffee mug and you're in the right ballpark). As I wheeled the trays into the shop, to work on them by the till, a gush of foetid water slopped out of them and on to the floor. It smelt pretty rank, and I thought that was not what you wanted in a tea shop, a pungent background aroma of swamp. Whoever designed the plastic trays had for reasons best known to themselves put the drainage holes about a centimetre above the bottom of the tray, so they collected water, and the box plants were sitting far too wet.
The dog attached herself to some visitors and walked right around the garden with them. They were rather pleased.
After work came the beekeepers' committee meeting. At least at this time of the year I have time to go home, change and clean my hands, and grab something to eat, which is easier than the summer meetings when I have to go straight there from a six o'clock finish. It seems to be one step forwards and one back with those meetings. The last one was unexpectedly productive, while tonight's wasn't. We seemed to go round and round in circles. Nobody lost their temper, but you could sense the collective energy ebbing away by the minute.
When I got home there was a telephone message from the Colchester Natural History Society's stag beetle expert, who sounded delighted with the beetle. It was rather late to ring her back.
Sunday, 2 September 2012
late flowers
It was such a grey day, it was difficult to get motivated to do anything. It wasn't cold. The air was maybe a trifle too humid for perfect comfort, but not desperately so. It didn't rain, or even spit and threaten showers. There was just something about the total lack of sunshine, and monochrome grey sky, that was discouraging.
I gardened anyway, albeit at a sluggard's pace, and went and bought another ten bags of mushroom compost which had to go in my clean car. It is not that clean, unfortunately. Now it has dried I can see a few muddy triangles on the paintwork where I missed patches with the sponge, and I need to have another go at de-smearing the inside of the windscreen. Still, there were no disasters with the compost.
In the garden, there are some flowers still coming out. Rudbeckia subtomentosa 'Henry Eilers' is just opening, having grown to about 1.5 metres tall, the best it has ever done with me. The wet summer must have been to its liking. This is a lovely thing in the daisy family, with petals of a soft, rich yellow surrounding a dark, fairly small, slightly raised central boss. The petals are quilled, rolled into a cylinder along most of their length, before opening out into a spoon shaped tip, which gives them a substantial, three dimensional effect that contrasts with the overall daintiness of the plant. The central boss is laid out in two opposite Fibonacci spirals, like the centre of a sunflower. My plants are starting to spread and join to form a proper clump, which is a relief since the emerging shoots got rather trampled on in the spring when I was weeding. It has been utterly trouble free with me, but it is a tricky beast to keep alive for any length of time in a pot, so isn't offered for sale all that widely. Plus perhaps not everybody likes the sound of quilled soft yellow petals.
An area of planting in the front garden has come off. Next to an existing purple leaved Cotinus I planted a purple leaved form of Berberis thunbergii, and a Colutea x media 'Copper Beauty'. The Colutea is a shrub with greenish-grey leaves, and burnt orange flowers in late summer that are followed by long-lasting, inflated pinky-orange seed pods. The mixture of purple, grey and orange is as good as I hoped it would be, and was forming a fine backdrop for the sulphur yellow flower heads of some purple fennel, though those are fading now. I've seen it used to great effect in a Piet Oudolf designed garden in North Yorkshire, but it isn't all that commonly grown, or widely available. We have plants intermittently at the plant centre, and I bought one of the last batch, which was large and rather expensive, wishing I'd picked up a small one at Scampston when I saw them. Still, mine has established well and is growing happily in full sun on light soil.
In the back garden a hardy hibiscus named 'Blue Chiffon' is opening its double flowers, in a rich shade of mid blue. It hasn't grown much since I planted it, and really at this stage I'd swap the flowers for some extension growth. The rather glamorous, barely hardy salvia S. guaranitica 'Black and Blue' has made a good bushy plant, and is busily producing a succession of flower spikes, each deep blue flower sitting in a black calyx, very exotic. The foliage on mine is looking better than the boss's one at work, which has been disastrously attacked by something and is horribly distorted. So many of the leaves in the garden this year are chewed to shreds or destroyed by fungal attack, it's gratifying to find something that's doing comparatively well.
Wandering around for a look-see before coming inside to post today's blog entry and tackle the beekeeper's accounts before tomorrow's committee meeting, I discovered that the autumn flowering cyclamen are already opening, and that a fresh crop of Herb Robert has germinated in their bed. That will all have to come out next week. It's a funny time of year, the cusp between summer and autumn. I like the late flowers, as do numerous bumble and solitary bees which were busily foraging on many of them, and part of me wants to make the most of the last of the vaguely warm days. Winter will be long enough, after all, when it comes. The other part of me looks at the yellowing foliage and half gone-over nature of many of the plants that are still flowering, like the everlasting peas, and the purple lobelia in the bog bed, and just wants to have done with it, cut them to the ground, and restore the garden to a minimalist state of pared-down tidiness.
I gardened anyway, albeit at a sluggard's pace, and went and bought another ten bags of mushroom compost which had to go in my clean car. It is not that clean, unfortunately. Now it has dried I can see a few muddy triangles on the paintwork where I missed patches with the sponge, and I need to have another go at de-smearing the inside of the windscreen. Still, there were no disasters with the compost.
In the garden, there are some flowers still coming out. Rudbeckia subtomentosa 'Henry Eilers' is just opening, having grown to about 1.5 metres tall, the best it has ever done with me. The wet summer must have been to its liking. This is a lovely thing in the daisy family, with petals of a soft, rich yellow surrounding a dark, fairly small, slightly raised central boss. The petals are quilled, rolled into a cylinder along most of their length, before opening out into a spoon shaped tip, which gives them a substantial, three dimensional effect that contrasts with the overall daintiness of the plant. The central boss is laid out in two opposite Fibonacci spirals, like the centre of a sunflower. My plants are starting to spread and join to form a proper clump, which is a relief since the emerging shoots got rather trampled on in the spring when I was weeding. It has been utterly trouble free with me, but it is a tricky beast to keep alive for any length of time in a pot, so isn't offered for sale all that widely. Plus perhaps not everybody likes the sound of quilled soft yellow petals.
An area of planting in the front garden has come off. Next to an existing purple leaved Cotinus I planted a purple leaved form of Berberis thunbergii, and a Colutea x media 'Copper Beauty'. The Colutea is a shrub with greenish-grey leaves, and burnt orange flowers in late summer that are followed by long-lasting, inflated pinky-orange seed pods. The mixture of purple, grey and orange is as good as I hoped it would be, and was forming a fine backdrop for the sulphur yellow flower heads of some purple fennel, though those are fading now. I've seen it used to great effect in a Piet Oudolf designed garden in North Yorkshire, but it isn't all that commonly grown, or widely available. We have plants intermittently at the plant centre, and I bought one of the last batch, which was large and rather expensive, wishing I'd picked up a small one at Scampston when I saw them. Still, mine has established well and is growing happily in full sun on light soil.
In the back garden a hardy hibiscus named 'Blue Chiffon' is opening its double flowers, in a rich shade of mid blue. It hasn't grown much since I planted it, and really at this stage I'd swap the flowers for some extension growth. The rather glamorous, barely hardy salvia S. guaranitica 'Black and Blue' has made a good bushy plant, and is busily producing a succession of flower spikes, each deep blue flower sitting in a black calyx, very exotic. The foliage on mine is looking better than the boss's one at work, which has been disastrously attacked by something and is horribly distorted. So many of the leaves in the garden this year are chewed to shreds or destroyed by fungal attack, it's gratifying to find something that's doing comparatively well.
Wandering around for a look-see before coming inside to post today's blog entry and tackle the beekeeper's accounts before tomorrow's committee meeting, I discovered that the autumn flowering cyclamen are already opening, and that a fresh crop of Herb Robert has germinated in their bed. That will all have to come out next week. It's a funny time of year, the cusp between summer and autumn. I like the late flowers, as do numerous bumble and solitary bees which were busily foraging on many of them, and part of me wants to make the most of the last of the vaguely warm days. Winter will be long enough, after all, when it comes. The other part of me looks at the yellowing foliage and half gone-over nature of many of the plants that are still flowering, like the everlasting peas, and the purple lobelia in the bog bed, and just wants to have done with it, cut them to the ground, and restore the garden to a minimalist state of pared-down tidiness.
Saturday, 1 September 2012
your opinion counts
I did a Telegraph online survey this morning. They promised me that if I answered a few questions on behalf of one of their advertisers I could be entered in a draw to win £100 worth of Amazon vouchers, and I thought I should like that. A friend of mine once won a £20 book token from the Colchester Evening Gazette, and very pleased she was with it. Since the Telegraph are presumably tracking my browsing habits on their site anyway they already know quite a lot about me, and if I didn't like the way the survey was turning out I could always stop answering.
The survey started by wanting to know my age, within broad bands, and sex, for which I was given only two options, M or F. Presumably lesbian, gay and transgender people don't read the Telegraph website while they're eating their muesli. Then we got to the first question of substance: was I interested in cricket? Again this seemed to be a rather black and white decision, with no box to tick if you weren't personally fussed, but lived with somebody who was so had picked a bit up. Likewise I struggled a little with the question of whether I was interested in Test cricket. I mean, I'm generally aware of when there's a test match on if England are playing, and even who they're playing against (note the instinctive use of the word 'they' rather than 'we'), which is more than you can say for my awareness of the football European Cup. I decided that I was not interested in Test cricket.
Then we got to the meat of the survey: have you heard of any of the following financial providers? The list included Rathbones, Brewin Dolphin, Investec and a couple of others, and I'd heard of all of them. However, I could truthfully say that I'd never seen the following advertisement, which must have been embedded in the sports section of the Telegraph. My opinion of Investec (so that was the client) was completely neutral: I had no strong feelings to sway me away from a rating of 3 out of 5 about whether they were competent, different to other fund management companies, trustworthy or anything else.
Since the occupation of the main income earner in our house was part time, and unskilled but having received training (which is apparently what retail workers are) and I declined to say what the net worth of the household was, I don't suppose I'll be hearing any more from them. Unless I win the voucher. One lives in hope.
Online surveys can be quite entertaining, and are worth doing from time to time to remind yourself that the results of all surveys should be treated with deep suspicion. It is terribly difficult not to write loaded questions, and of course a lot of the time that isn't the aim of the survey anyway. I'm afraid the Tate sank in my estimation after their survey asking what, as a Tate member, I thought of the new tanks at Tate Modern, used 'disinterested' when they meant 'uninterested'. I'd have filled in the whole thing more truthfully if I'd had the faintest ideas what terms for at least half the artistic categories I was being polled about even meant.
Yesterday's survey on behalf of Museum Selection should have been a doddle, since it went through everything I'd ordered and asked on a scale of one to five how much I liked it. I haven't actually opened up my packets of Christmas cards yet and inspected them in minute detail, but they looked fine in the packet. That survey promised it would only take two minutes, but after I'd rated the Christmas cards, and the English Countryside and Alfred Voysey blank-for-your-own-message cards, and the 2 pint jug bought on an impulse because it looked nice, and the free-when-you-spend-over whatever it is writing paper as fine (the free writing paper looked a bit odd, but I daresay it will come in useful, in lieu of postcards with my name and address printed on them) and tried to submit my reply, it was bounced back at me on the grounds that I had to write something. I thought they'd had their two minutes by then, and deleted the whole thing.
The survey started by wanting to know my age, within broad bands, and sex, for which I was given only two options, M or F. Presumably lesbian, gay and transgender people don't read the Telegraph website while they're eating their muesli. Then we got to the first question of substance: was I interested in cricket? Again this seemed to be a rather black and white decision, with no box to tick if you weren't personally fussed, but lived with somebody who was so had picked a bit up. Likewise I struggled a little with the question of whether I was interested in Test cricket. I mean, I'm generally aware of when there's a test match on if England are playing, and even who they're playing against (note the instinctive use of the word 'they' rather than 'we'), which is more than you can say for my awareness of the football European Cup. I decided that I was not interested in Test cricket.
Then we got to the meat of the survey: have you heard of any of the following financial providers? The list included Rathbones, Brewin Dolphin, Investec and a couple of others, and I'd heard of all of them. However, I could truthfully say that I'd never seen the following advertisement, which must have been embedded in the sports section of the Telegraph. My opinion of Investec (so that was the client) was completely neutral: I had no strong feelings to sway me away from a rating of 3 out of 5 about whether they were competent, different to other fund management companies, trustworthy or anything else.
Since the occupation of the main income earner in our house was part time, and unskilled but having received training (which is apparently what retail workers are) and I declined to say what the net worth of the household was, I don't suppose I'll be hearing any more from them. Unless I win the voucher. One lives in hope.
Online surveys can be quite entertaining, and are worth doing from time to time to remind yourself that the results of all surveys should be treated with deep suspicion. It is terribly difficult not to write loaded questions, and of course a lot of the time that isn't the aim of the survey anyway. I'm afraid the Tate sank in my estimation after their survey asking what, as a Tate member, I thought of the new tanks at Tate Modern, used 'disinterested' when they meant 'uninterested'. I'd have filled in the whole thing more truthfully if I'd had the faintest ideas what terms for at least half the artistic categories I was being polled about even meant.
Yesterday's survey on behalf of Museum Selection should have been a doddle, since it went through everything I'd ordered and asked on a scale of one to five how much I liked it. I haven't actually opened up my packets of Christmas cards yet and inspected them in minute detail, but they looked fine in the packet. That survey promised it would only take two minutes, but after I'd rated the Christmas cards, and the English Countryside and Alfred Voysey blank-for-your-own-message cards, and the 2 pint jug bought on an impulse because it looked nice, and the free-when-you-spend-over whatever it is writing paper as fine (the free writing paper looked a bit odd, but I daresay it will come in useful, in lieu of postcards with my name and address printed on them) and tried to submit my reply, it was bounced back at me on the grounds that I had to write something. I thought they'd had their two minutes by then, and deleted the whole thing.
Friday, 31 August 2012
the reluctant valet
Today, I finally cleaned my car. When I say finally, I mean I had never got round to washing it since last winter. The almost non-stop rain was starting to rinse some of the winter's filth off it, but it got a lavish fresh coating when I had to be towed out of the mud at the Tendring Show, and it does get pretty dusty living in the middle of a lettuce farm. What finally made me admit that I was going to have to clean it, however, was when I had to put a clean towel over the front passenger seat before the Systems Administrator could sit in it to go to the At Home, and another over the back seats so that we could lay our tidy coats down on them.
I don't like cleaning the car. You might have guessed that. I could give Rowan Pelling a run for her money in the procrastination stakes when it comes to automobile valeting. I don't scrimp on the mechanicals, and it goes to be serviced by a proper Skoda garage at the prescribed intervals, and has its little service book stamped, and everything. I just don't like cleaning it. There are so many better ways for a sentient adult to spend an hour of their lives than vacuuming cat hair and fragments of leaves and compost off the inside of a Skoda. The Skoda garage at Little Clacton is excellent, and I can warmly recommend them, but they don't keep their service fees down to the level that they do by chucking in free valeting when the car goes for its 40,000 mile check-up and oil change.
My car leads a hard life. By putting towels over the back seats I can fit up to ten bags of weed-infested garden waste in it to go to the dump, and frequently do, or ten 30 litre bags of loose bag-your-own mushroom compost. It had plants in the boot, all over the back seat and in the rear foot well to go to my last garden lecture, plus a large yellow berried viburnum in the front passenger foot well. That did get slightly in the way of the handbrake at times. I probably really ought to drive a small van, except that there are occasions when I want to carry more than one passenger, and I'm not very good at reversing, so need all the windows I can get to see where I'm going when I'm going backwards.
A ridiculous amount of cat fur collects on the seats, given that the cats very rarely go in the car. It comes off my clothes, of course. I don't understand why car manufacturers cover their seats, and the insides of their cars, in a mixture of fabrics all of which seem designed to attract and retain cat hair. I jab at each one furiously with the vacuum nozzle, holding it over them, scraping it against the fabric to try and loosen the hairs, and they remain stuck, one end waving in the flow of air while the other stays obstinately embedded in the car seat, or door lining. The carpets are just as bad. As I try to vacuum up the grass seeds I can see them digging themselves into the upholstery. Actually, they have evolved to do that as a method of distributing themselves, whereas the cat has no evolutionary advantage that I can think off in sending samples of its fur to populate a distant place. Our vacuum cleaner doesn't have a thin nozzle for doing down the sides of the seats, or if it did we've lost it, so even when I'd vacuumed up as much dirt as possible I could still see lines of fluff, dust and seeds in all the narrow crevasses that I couldn't reach. I managed to scrape some out with my finger, and gave up.
Then I turned my attentions to washing the car, and discovered that we'd run out of car shampoo. I wasn't going to stop, having started, so decided that Ecover washing up liquid would have to do. I had a vague feeling that there was some reason why you weren't supposed to use domestic detergent, but on the basis that Ecover is supposed to be kind to your septic tank, and barely has any active ingredients in it at all, I didn't think that it was going to rot the bodywork, or at least not as much as a year's worth of salt and road dirt already were. I washed the car, and rinsed it with the hosepipe, and as it dried began to suspect that the reason why you don't wash cars using washing up liquid is that it streaks. Never mind. I found some glass cleaner and cleaned the inside of the windscreen, which was very smeared since I rub the condensation of it on cold mornings starting up, so that I can see. The Systems Administrator will not me do that in the other vehicles, and screams faintly if I put my hands anywhere near the inside of the windscreen, but they are not so damp as my car. What with all the compost and the plants it does get rather moist inside, poor thing, and sometimes on sunny and windy days I leave the tailgate open so that it can air. Of course the cats then climb inside, so in alleviating one problem I exacerbate another.
I even remembered that the windscreen wash had run dry the last time I used it, and topped that up with a solution of Halford's finest. Then I put some clean kitchen roll in the pocket of the driver's door for the next time I need to wipe the inside of the windscreen.
I don't like cleaning the car. You might have guessed that. I could give Rowan Pelling a run for her money in the procrastination stakes when it comes to automobile valeting. I don't scrimp on the mechanicals, and it goes to be serviced by a proper Skoda garage at the prescribed intervals, and has its little service book stamped, and everything. I just don't like cleaning it. There are so many better ways for a sentient adult to spend an hour of their lives than vacuuming cat hair and fragments of leaves and compost off the inside of a Skoda. The Skoda garage at Little Clacton is excellent, and I can warmly recommend them, but they don't keep their service fees down to the level that they do by chucking in free valeting when the car goes for its 40,000 mile check-up and oil change.
My car leads a hard life. By putting towels over the back seats I can fit up to ten bags of weed-infested garden waste in it to go to the dump, and frequently do, or ten 30 litre bags of loose bag-your-own mushroom compost. It had plants in the boot, all over the back seat and in the rear foot well to go to my last garden lecture, plus a large yellow berried viburnum in the front passenger foot well. That did get slightly in the way of the handbrake at times. I probably really ought to drive a small van, except that there are occasions when I want to carry more than one passenger, and I'm not very good at reversing, so need all the windows I can get to see where I'm going when I'm going backwards.
A ridiculous amount of cat fur collects on the seats, given that the cats very rarely go in the car. It comes off my clothes, of course. I don't understand why car manufacturers cover their seats, and the insides of their cars, in a mixture of fabrics all of which seem designed to attract and retain cat hair. I jab at each one furiously with the vacuum nozzle, holding it over them, scraping it against the fabric to try and loosen the hairs, and they remain stuck, one end waving in the flow of air while the other stays obstinately embedded in the car seat, or door lining. The carpets are just as bad. As I try to vacuum up the grass seeds I can see them digging themselves into the upholstery. Actually, they have evolved to do that as a method of distributing themselves, whereas the cat has no evolutionary advantage that I can think off in sending samples of its fur to populate a distant place. Our vacuum cleaner doesn't have a thin nozzle for doing down the sides of the seats, or if it did we've lost it, so even when I'd vacuumed up as much dirt as possible I could still see lines of fluff, dust and seeds in all the narrow crevasses that I couldn't reach. I managed to scrape some out with my finger, and gave up.
Then I turned my attentions to washing the car, and discovered that we'd run out of car shampoo. I wasn't going to stop, having started, so decided that Ecover washing up liquid would have to do. I had a vague feeling that there was some reason why you weren't supposed to use domestic detergent, but on the basis that Ecover is supposed to be kind to your septic tank, and barely has any active ingredients in it at all, I didn't think that it was going to rot the bodywork, or at least not as much as a year's worth of salt and road dirt already were. I washed the car, and rinsed it with the hosepipe, and as it dried began to suspect that the reason why you don't wash cars using washing up liquid is that it streaks. Never mind. I found some glass cleaner and cleaned the inside of the windscreen, which was very smeared since I rub the condensation of it on cold mornings starting up, so that I can see. The Systems Administrator will not me do that in the other vehicles, and screams faintly if I put my hands anywhere near the inside of the windscreen, but they are not so damp as my car. What with all the compost and the plants it does get rather moist inside, poor thing, and sometimes on sunny and windy days I leave the tailgate open so that it can air. Of course the cats then climb inside, so in alleviating one problem I exacerbate another.
I even remembered that the windscreen wash had run dry the last time I used it, and topped that up with a solution of Halford's finest. Then I put some clean kitchen roll in the pocket of the driver's door for the next time I need to wipe the inside of the windscreen.
Thursday, 30 August 2012
late harvest
I took the honey crop off the bees today. I'm terribly late, and I should have done it a fortnight ago, but I was so pleased that there was finally some sunny weather and the bees were flying, I wanted to give them as much time as possible to gather a bit more nectar and finish processing it, in the hopes that I'd get at least a few jars of honey. I grow quite a few late summer flowering bee plants in the garden, so this wasn't an entirely fanciful idea, though I don't know if they really brought in much more in the past couple of weeks.
The deadline is imposed, not by the requirements of the honey harvest per se, but by the fact that I'm applying a varroa treatment that can't be given until honey destined for human consumption is removed, requires a maximum daytime temperature of fifteen degrees centigrade to work properly, and takes four weeks. If September is chilly then the medication may not be fully effective during the latter part of the treatment period. Then after the varroa treatment is finished you need to feed the bees for the winter, and again cold weather could be a problem, as then they won't take sugar syrup. To be on the safe side I've bought a box of fondant paste, just in case the weather has turned against us by late September. You can put fondant on as an emergency feed in February, so I'm sure they'll manage to take it down in October, if needs be.
The treatment consists of a tray of gel which contains something toxic to the mites, but not bees, or indeed humans. The only reason for not giving it while there is a honey crop on the hive is that the gel could affect the taste. You peel the lid off the tray and put it on top of the brood frames for a fortnight, then repeat the exercise with a second tray. The bees don't like the smell very much, and can get rather tetchy, or even abscond, which makes me nervous about using it. On the other hand, varroa infestation can destroy a colony and there aren't many good medications about, since the mites developed resistance to the one in general use when I started beekeeping. I've used this gel before and the bees stayed put, but friends used it and their bees simply left home, so it's a bit nerve-wracking.
In order to make room for the tray of gel on top of the brood nest, you need to lift the crown board slightly. Last time I used extra super boxes, the ones the bees put honey for harvest in, but that meant emptying out the frames and storing them in cardboard boxes for a month, which wasn't ideal. The best place for spare frames is inside a closed beehive, a mouse-proof, insect-proof wooden box where they can't get broken or infested with unwelcome inhabitants. You can buy purpose-made, low square sections from beekeeping suppliers which they call ekes, presumably from the same root as the term 'to eke out' something in short supply. The Systems Administrator says that eke is used as a noun in carpentry, meaning an extra fillet of wood used in an unobtrusive place to make something fit together. The flat pack self assembly eke kit seemed a lot of money for four smallish bits of wood, so I bought one to use as a template, and the SA built me some more out of decking offcuts. This turned out to be a fiddly job due to not having enough clamps of the right size, but was not intrinsically complicated.
The mite-killing fumes need to linger inside the beehives, so I had to move them from their usual floors made of metal mesh on to solid wooden ones. The idea of the mesh floor is that any varroa mite that drops off the bee it's holding on to will fall through the floor and out of the hive, before it can climb back on to another bee. I've been using them for three or four years now, and the bees seem quite happy on them, even in the winter. I did worry that it would make the hive too cold for them, but they don't seem to mind, and the mesh floor does prevent condensation building up. Luckily when I made the switch I kept the wooden floors.
The honey extraction didn't take long, alas, because there wasn't very much of it. There'll be enough for me to eat (the SA isn't especially keen on honey, or sweet spreads generally) and give a few jars to close friends and relations, but certainly none for sale. A little honey had solidified in the comb, but most spun out in the centrifuge. It is a medium coloured honey in show terms, a nice mid brown, with quite a strong flavour. I'm very partial to it. I stored the supers and combs away as soon as I'd finished extracting, layering them with newspaper and lining up each box exactly with the one below it, finishing the pile with a wooden crown board and a lid. With earlier extractions I would put the boxes outside for the bees to take what I can't, but now it's the wasp season, and I don't really want wasps crawling all over the combs. I need to get the bees to clean them at some stage, as I want them to take the granulated honey down into the brood box and clear the combs for me, but I'll put them on a hive that's going well next spring.
Nothing to do now for two weeks, except hope that the bees don't dislike the varroa treatment so much they move out. If you are thinking of taking up beekeeping please don't follow my example in this case. Like I said, I should have done everything two weeks earlier.
The deadline is imposed, not by the requirements of the honey harvest per se, but by the fact that I'm applying a varroa treatment that can't be given until honey destined for human consumption is removed, requires a maximum daytime temperature of fifteen degrees centigrade to work properly, and takes four weeks. If September is chilly then the medication may not be fully effective during the latter part of the treatment period. Then after the varroa treatment is finished you need to feed the bees for the winter, and again cold weather could be a problem, as then they won't take sugar syrup. To be on the safe side I've bought a box of fondant paste, just in case the weather has turned against us by late September. You can put fondant on as an emergency feed in February, so I'm sure they'll manage to take it down in October, if needs be.
The treatment consists of a tray of gel which contains something toxic to the mites, but not bees, or indeed humans. The only reason for not giving it while there is a honey crop on the hive is that the gel could affect the taste. You peel the lid off the tray and put it on top of the brood frames for a fortnight, then repeat the exercise with a second tray. The bees don't like the smell very much, and can get rather tetchy, or even abscond, which makes me nervous about using it. On the other hand, varroa infestation can destroy a colony and there aren't many good medications about, since the mites developed resistance to the one in general use when I started beekeeping. I've used this gel before and the bees stayed put, but friends used it and their bees simply left home, so it's a bit nerve-wracking.
In order to make room for the tray of gel on top of the brood nest, you need to lift the crown board slightly. Last time I used extra super boxes, the ones the bees put honey for harvest in, but that meant emptying out the frames and storing them in cardboard boxes for a month, which wasn't ideal. The best place for spare frames is inside a closed beehive, a mouse-proof, insect-proof wooden box where they can't get broken or infested with unwelcome inhabitants. You can buy purpose-made, low square sections from beekeeping suppliers which they call ekes, presumably from the same root as the term 'to eke out' something in short supply. The Systems Administrator says that eke is used as a noun in carpentry, meaning an extra fillet of wood used in an unobtrusive place to make something fit together. The flat pack self assembly eke kit seemed a lot of money for four smallish bits of wood, so I bought one to use as a template, and the SA built me some more out of decking offcuts. This turned out to be a fiddly job due to not having enough clamps of the right size, but was not intrinsically complicated.
The mite-killing fumes need to linger inside the beehives, so I had to move them from their usual floors made of metal mesh on to solid wooden ones. The idea of the mesh floor is that any varroa mite that drops off the bee it's holding on to will fall through the floor and out of the hive, before it can climb back on to another bee. I've been using them for three or four years now, and the bees seem quite happy on them, even in the winter. I did worry that it would make the hive too cold for them, but they don't seem to mind, and the mesh floor does prevent condensation building up. Luckily when I made the switch I kept the wooden floors.
The honey extraction didn't take long, alas, because there wasn't very much of it. There'll be enough for me to eat (the SA isn't especially keen on honey, or sweet spreads generally) and give a few jars to close friends and relations, but certainly none for sale. A little honey had solidified in the comb, but most spun out in the centrifuge. It is a medium coloured honey in show terms, a nice mid brown, with quite a strong flavour. I'm very partial to it. I stored the supers and combs away as soon as I'd finished extracting, layering them with newspaper and lining up each box exactly with the one below it, finishing the pile with a wooden crown board and a lid. With earlier extractions I would put the boxes outside for the bees to take what I can't, but now it's the wasp season, and I don't really want wasps crawling all over the combs. I need to get the bees to clean them at some stage, as I want them to take the granulated honey down into the brood box and clear the combs for me, but I'll put them on a hive that's going well next spring.
Nothing to do now for two weeks, except hope that the bees don't dislike the varroa treatment so much they move out. If you are thinking of taking up beekeeping please don't follow my example in this case. Like I said, I should have done everything two weeks earlier.
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
art and culture
I went to London today, for a culture fix. The trains were very quiet, Paralympics notwithstanding (though those Olympic mascots are truly dreadful. Whoever thought that a thing like a cross between a Teletubby and a giant penis was an appropriate representation of the Olympic spirit should seek professional help). The Olympics are responsible for one cultural gem, the presence on loan in the British Museum until 9th September of the Motya charioteer.
This is a Greek victory statue of an athlete, believed from his robe to be a charioteer. It was created around 480 to 470BC, and is a thing of great beauty and erotic power. A muscular young man, arms now sadly missing, face and crotch somewhat chipped, stands in a triumphant pose, hand on hip, while the other arm would originally have been raised to adjust his laurel crown. His charioteer's robe is a softly fluted, full length garment, intended to cling revealingly to the sweat-soaked body beneath, and the sculptor has shown how the young man's fingers press into the folds of fabric, and the swell of every magnificent muscle. He is well worth catching before he disappears back to his small museum in western Sicily. You will find him with the Elgin marbles.
Also on show, and also free, is an enjoyable exhibition about the horse, starting with the earliest records of horses being domesticated in the near East, initially as draught animals and later ridden, which progresses via the role of the horse in the Islamic world to the racing stables of the eighteenth century, finishing with the modern Olympics. It is not a big exhibition, but there are some interesting things, including some beautiful mughal miniatures. That's in room 35, which is in the upper part of the reading room, and is on until the end of next month.
On display until 2nd September is a complete set of Picasso's Vollard Suite. No, I hadn't heard of it until I read that the museum had recently managed to acquire the prints through the generosity of a donor. It consists of a set of 100 etchings, made in the 1930s, exploring classical themes, of artist, muse and minotaur. Many of them were made when Picasso was enjoying an affair with his latest muse and model, a girl not much over a third of his age when they first met. I have admitted before that I struggle with some of Picasso's paintings, but he was a wonderful draughtsman. Having just typed about eight different attempts to explain why these etchings are so good, and erased all of them because they sounded so ridiculous, I suggest you high-tail it to room 90, at the back of the museum and up the stairs past the Chinese porcelain, and see for yourself. If you have twenty-five quid to spare you could buy the catalogue. I didn't, having a rule only to do so when the show relates to art and landscape, because one has to draw the line somewhere with books, but I should have liked to.
The British Museum has been absolutely on top form for several years now, and if I were retired and lived in London I'd go every week. There is always something interesting. Their temporary exhibitions are consistently the best curated of all the galleries I visit, and it would take a lifetime just to look at the permanent collection. The Chinese porcelain is lovely, if you're passing.
Then I went to see the paintings from the Clark Art Institute at the RA. This ends on 23rd September, so I wanted to squeeze it in before we go on holiday. Sterling and Francine Clark were blessed with a good eye for a painting, and a great deal of money, and built up a very nice collection including many fine Impressionist paintings, which they gifted to an art gallery. The RA has borrowed a hunk of the collection wholesale, which must be a great deal easier than having to scout round a couple of dozen different owners to put a show together. There are still lives, landscapes, seascapes, portraits and genre paintings. We all have our favourites when it comes to art exhibitions, so I found Toulouse Lautrec's downcast young woman, waiting alone at a table with her drink in front of her, more interesting than Renoir's sugary ingenues, but you might disagree. It is a lovely exhibition, and I had a look at it, then went and found something to eat in the form of a piece of vastly expensive Royal Academy cafe pie, then returned for a second look.
I don't like the RA so much as the British Museum. For the past three years my mother has kindly paid for me to be a Friend, during which time they have vastly jacked the price up, while introducing the requirement for Friends to book tickets for the most popular events. It's ninety quid nowadays, which for a country member who isn't going to get up to London all that often equates to a lot of money per exhibition, and if I'd wanted a little booklet for today's show they'd have charged me another £2.50. Compared to way the Tate treats its supporters I think the RA is taking the piss. That is not my mother's fault, I hasten to add. She asked me which one I'd like to support, and I opted for the RA, but back then it cost a third less, and you could walk in to the Van Gogh exhibition on a whim, whereas by the time it got to David Hockney and Degas you had to commit in advance. However, the current exhibition is delightful, and worth a visit if you can make it.
Addendum My naturalist friend reported back on the expert opinion on the dead beetle. It was a female stag beetle. She died recently, of natural causes, and the teeth on her front legs showed signs of wear, indicating that she had fulfilled her biological role and laid some eggs somewhere. She weighed 0.96 grammes. I think the Colchester Natural History Society were interested to have the confirmed sighting, which tells them something new about the distribution of stag beetles in this part of Essex.
This is a Greek victory statue of an athlete, believed from his robe to be a charioteer. It was created around 480 to 470BC, and is a thing of great beauty and erotic power. A muscular young man, arms now sadly missing, face and crotch somewhat chipped, stands in a triumphant pose, hand on hip, while the other arm would originally have been raised to adjust his laurel crown. His charioteer's robe is a softly fluted, full length garment, intended to cling revealingly to the sweat-soaked body beneath, and the sculptor has shown how the young man's fingers press into the folds of fabric, and the swell of every magnificent muscle. He is well worth catching before he disappears back to his small museum in western Sicily. You will find him with the Elgin marbles.
Also on show, and also free, is an enjoyable exhibition about the horse, starting with the earliest records of horses being domesticated in the near East, initially as draught animals and later ridden, which progresses via the role of the horse in the Islamic world to the racing stables of the eighteenth century, finishing with the modern Olympics. It is not a big exhibition, but there are some interesting things, including some beautiful mughal miniatures. That's in room 35, which is in the upper part of the reading room, and is on until the end of next month.
On display until 2nd September is a complete set of Picasso's Vollard Suite. No, I hadn't heard of it until I read that the museum had recently managed to acquire the prints through the generosity of a donor. It consists of a set of 100 etchings, made in the 1930s, exploring classical themes, of artist, muse and minotaur. Many of them were made when Picasso was enjoying an affair with his latest muse and model, a girl not much over a third of his age when they first met. I have admitted before that I struggle with some of Picasso's paintings, but he was a wonderful draughtsman. Having just typed about eight different attempts to explain why these etchings are so good, and erased all of them because they sounded so ridiculous, I suggest you high-tail it to room 90, at the back of the museum and up the stairs past the Chinese porcelain, and see for yourself. If you have twenty-five quid to spare you could buy the catalogue. I didn't, having a rule only to do so when the show relates to art and landscape, because one has to draw the line somewhere with books, but I should have liked to.
The British Museum has been absolutely on top form for several years now, and if I were retired and lived in London I'd go every week. There is always something interesting. Their temporary exhibitions are consistently the best curated of all the galleries I visit, and it would take a lifetime just to look at the permanent collection. The Chinese porcelain is lovely, if you're passing.
Then I went to see the paintings from the Clark Art Institute at the RA. This ends on 23rd September, so I wanted to squeeze it in before we go on holiday. Sterling and Francine Clark were blessed with a good eye for a painting, and a great deal of money, and built up a very nice collection including many fine Impressionist paintings, which they gifted to an art gallery. The RA has borrowed a hunk of the collection wholesale, which must be a great deal easier than having to scout round a couple of dozen different owners to put a show together. There are still lives, landscapes, seascapes, portraits and genre paintings. We all have our favourites when it comes to art exhibitions, so I found Toulouse Lautrec's downcast young woman, waiting alone at a table with her drink in front of her, more interesting than Renoir's sugary ingenues, but you might disagree. It is a lovely exhibition, and I had a look at it, then went and found something to eat in the form of a piece of vastly expensive Royal Academy cafe pie, then returned for a second look.
I don't like the RA so much as the British Museum. For the past three years my mother has kindly paid for me to be a Friend, during which time they have vastly jacked the price up, while introducing the requirement for Friends to book tickets for the most popular events. It's ninety quid nowadays, which for a country member who isn't going to get up to London all that often equates to a lot of money per exhibition, and if I'd wanted a little booklet for today's show they'd have charged me another £2.50. Compared to way the Tate treats its supporters I think the RA is taking the piss. That is not my mother's fault, I hasten to add. She asked me which one I'd like to support, and I opted for the RA, but back then it cost a third less, and you could walk in to the Van Gogh exhibition on a whim, whereas by the time it got to David Hockney and Degas you had to commit in advance. However, the current exhibition is delightful, and worth a visit if you can make it.
Addendum My naturalist friend reported back on the expert opinion on the dead beetle. It was a female stag beetle. She died recently, of natural causes, and the teeth on her front legs showed signs of wear, indicating that she had fulfilled her biological role and laid some eggs somewhere. She weighed 0.96 grammes. I think the Colchester Natural History Society were interested to have the confirmed sighting, which tells them something new about the distribution of stag beetles in this part of Essex.
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
of bees and beetles
I was woken at half past midnight by a vixen barking close to the house. There was enough suspicion of background kerfuffle that I put on my dressing gown and went down to check that she was in the wood, and not attempting to break into the chicken house. The chickens were sitting on their perch, looking rather fluffed up and vigilant, but there was no sign of the fox. A vixen's scream is an unearthly sound, and if you were not used to it I suppose you could convince yourself that it was an exotic animal such as a lion. On the other hand, if you are a resident of St Osyth rather than a visitor staying in the caravan park you will be fully familiar with foxes.
The national newspapers had by this morning decided that there was definitely not a lion, and ran grainy photos of what did look awfully like a fat ginger cat. I don't think it can have been Our Ginger, since he never leaves the premises, but he must have sprung from somewhere, so maybe he left relatives behind him. The Telegraph's principal suspect is a ginger Maine Coon called Teddy Bear. The East Anglian Daily Times stuck with a photograph of a real lion with resplendent mane, doing a Metro Goldwyn Mayer roar.
When I went down to water the conservatory I found a large black beetle, lying dead on its back on the floor. It was so big I wondered whether it could be a female stag beetle, so put it in a cook's size matchbox to show to a friend who is a member of the Colchester Natural History Society, and has a friend who is an expert on stag beetles. Finding a live stag beetle would have been more exciting, on the other hand I don't think they live long in their adult state, after spending several years as a larva. I suppose, therefore, that instead of thinking of the larva as a stage towards producing an adult, it would make as much sense to think of adults as a necessary stage to produce more larvae.
My naturalist friend is a fellow beekeeper, and we were due to meet in the afternoon at another beekeeper's house to see his bees. One bee honestly looks much like another, but this chap uses what are called top bar hives. Instead of giving the bees wooden frames filled with wire and sheets of wax and inviting them to build combs in controlled sizes which he then takes out and inspects regularly, he just gives them boxes with wooden bars across the top, and leaves them to build comb as they please. He doesn't inspect them regularly, or try to stop them swarming, though he does monitor for disease. They swarm. Boy, do they swarm. He gets a lot of new bee colonies, but not much honey, which suits him since his intention is to make more bees. He catches the swarms and gives them to other beekeepers who want them.
Top bar beehives are popular in the developing world, because they are simple and cheap to make compared to a western beehive, though I don't know how the beekeepers cope with the high ratio of swarms to honey, given that development charities always talk about the value of honey to them as a cash crop. Our friend had two sorts, a tall hive with a square cross section made of several stacking boxes, and a long hive shaped like a manger. Both had glass windows in the sides, normally protected by little wooden doors, which he removed so that we could peer inside. He also had a little nucleus colony in a mini-manger shaped hive, and he took the roof off this one and removed one bar with its crescent of comb hanging below so that we could see it, suspending it from a little wooden frame brought out for that purpose. It is essential that you don't tip comb that's just hanging from a piece of wood, as if you don't keep it vertical it will break, and I thought that learning to handle a top bar hive would in my case mean unlearning a lot of deeply ingrained habits.
My Colchester naturalist friend, our host and his wife were all sure that my beetle was a female stag beetle. My friend has hung on to it to show it to the expert, so we await the definitive verdict. It would be great to have stag beetles about the place. North Essex is a hotspot for them, indeed oak leaves with a male stag beetle are the emblem of the Colchester Natural History Society, so it isn't totally unlikely.
The national newspapers had by this morning decided that there was definitely not a lion, and ran grainy photos of what did look awfully like a fat ginger cat. I don't think it can have been Our Ginger, since he never leaves the premises, but he must have sprung from somewhere, so maybe he left relatives behind him. The Telegraph's principal suspect is a ginger Maine Coon called Teddy Bear. The East Anglian Daily Times stuck with a photograph of a real lion with resplendent mane, doing a Metro Goldwyn Mayer roar.
When I went down to water the conservatory I found a large black beetle, lying dead on its back on the floor. It was so big I wondered whether it could be a female stag beetle, so put it in a cook's size matchbox to show to a friend who is a member of the Colchester Natural History Society, and has a friend who is an expert on stag beetles. Finding a live stag beetle would have been more exciting, on the other hand I don't think they live long in their adult state, after spending several years as a larva. I suppose, therefore, that instead of thinking of the larva as a stage towards producing an adult, it would make as much sense to think of adults as a necessary stage to produce more larvae.
My naturalist friend is a fellow beekeeper, and we were due to meet in the afternoon at another beekeeper's house to see his bees. One bee honestly looks much like another, but this chap uses what are called top bar hives. Instead of giving the bees wooden frames filled with wire and sheets of wax and inviting them to build combs in controlled sizes which he then takes out and inspects regularly, he just gives them boxes with wooden bars across the top, and leaves them to build comb as they please. He doesn't inspect them regularly, or try to stop them swarming, though he does monitor for disease. They swarm. Boy, do they swarm. He gets a lot of new bee colonies, but not much honey, which suits him since his intention is to make more bees. He catches the swarms and gives them to other beekeepers who want them.
Top bar beehives are popular in the developing world, because they are simple and cheap to make compared to a western beehive, though I don't know how the beekeepers cope with the high ratio of swarms to honey, given that development charities always talk about the value of honey to them as a cash crop. Our friend had two sorts, a tall hive with a square cross section made of several stacking boxes, and a long hive shaped like a manger. Both had glass windows in the sides, normally protected by little wooden doors, which he removed so that we could peer inside. He also had a little nucleus colony in a mini-manger shaped hive, and he took the roof off this one and removed one bar with its crescent of comb hanging below so that we could see it, suspending it from a little wooden frame brought out for that purpose. It is essential that you don't tip comb that's just hanging from a piece of wood, as if you don't keep it vertical it will break, and I thought that learning to handle a top bar hive would in my case mean unlearning a lot of deeply ingrained habits.
My Colchester naturalist friend, our host and his wife were all sure that my beetle was a female stag beetle. My friend has hung on to it to show it to the expert, so we await the definitive verdict. It would be great to have stag beetles about the place. North Essex is a hotspot for them, indeed oak leaves with a male stag beetle are the emblem of the Colchester Natural History Society, so it isn't totally unlikely.
Monday, 27 August 2012
elegy for a peachick
Flicking the kitchen radio on as I dished out cat food this morning I was surprised to hear the Today programme announce that police were hunting a reported lion in Essex (Nobody said there would be lions. The children were startled). Essex is a large county, so I was more surprised when they said that it had allegedly been seen near St Osyth. That is quite close to home. Apparently several witnesses claimed to have seen it, and there were photographs which an expert from the Colchester zoo had looked at and pronounced genuine. Today also mentioned that the lion already had its own Twitter feed. I thought that on balance there was probably not a lion, but you never know.
At work there was a more tangible animal disaster in the making. The peahen was wandering about alone, without her chick, honking terribly. She has always been a diligent mother, keeping each chick with her until it is nearly a year old and time for her to move on to the next clutch of eggs, and you never saw mother and child apart for more than a couple of minutes. As the day wore on and the chick failed to appear the peahen's cries diminished, but we all thought the fox must have had it in the night. Poor thing. It had grown to about the size of a chicken and was just starting to show a little blue in the feathers of its neck, and we were saying only yesterday how much it looked like its mother in miniature. Still, she has already raised two chicks to adulthood, one male and one female, so in evolutionary terms she has done her quota to keep the world peafowl population stable. I'm sorry for her, though, and it's a shame about the baby. It was a jolly little thing, perching on the big flowerpots outside the shop and coming in to steal cake crumbs.
The tea room franchisees can arrive not a moment too soon. They take over on September 10th, when it will be like the relief of Mafeking. My colleague who knows how the cappucino machine works had just set off for her (unpaid) lunch break when I had to call her back to serve in the tea room, then twenty minutes into her lunch break I had to call her again, and a third time before her half hour was decently up, given that she'd already been interrupted half way through. The manager doled out some cake at various points, but couldn't work the machine, and I have never been trained to work it either, and went on strike today about participating in the tea room at all, on the grounds that I had so much compost on my clothes that it was simply preposterous. One couple got so bored of waiting when the designated tea room operative of the day went up to the office to send a fax that they gave up and left.
Their plans sound great. They are going to do quiche of the day, and panini, and soup, and cream teas, and get a freezer and do ice creams (which the staff have suggested to the owners several times but they've always refused point blank). The owner is apparently talking about installing a wooden floor by Christmas, which would make the whole thing look more welcoming and cut down the noise, which is a problem at the moment. I hope the handover is not too fraught, since I gather from the manager that the new people were under the impression that they were taking the sparky girl on to cover weekends, whereas she doesn't seem to have been offered the job, and in any case has got herself a full time job at the new Patisserie Valerie that's opening in Ipswich. Given she has spent three years at catering college and has ambitions, a full time job with the national roll-out of a successful chain is going to be much more use to her than being the Saturday girl for the garden centre outlet of a very small family catering business.
There was no milk first thing in the tea room fridge, and my colleague went up to the house to raid the kitchen. She thought she had shut the door behind her, since the dogs were locked in there, but she couldn't have latched it fully, and both dogs escaped and ran round the house for the rest of the day while the owners were out. The puppy is not house trained, and late in the afternoon the boss came on the radio wanting to know who had let the dogs out, because the puppy had weed over the carpets. It escaped into the plant centre later on, but I took it back inside, since it hasn't had all of its vaccinations and shouldn't meet other dogs, or wander about in the car park by itself. Also it shouldn't wee in the tea room. It is a very cute little thing, with great fringes of hair round its ears.
Trade today was surprisingly brisk. I say surprisingly because August is generally quiet, and Saturday was dire. We all did our bit running around and helping people find things. I reckon my efforts sent a large holly and a Callistemon past the till and out of the door that otherwise wouldn't have been sold, but as always the big variable is footfall plus stock availability. On Saturday people just didn't come in. Today they did.
The manager was busy stock taking various categories as the boss is gearing up to place our orders for next spring, which meant that as the day went on we had to write down more of what we sold. This creates delays for customers, but they were all very nice about it. I recognised one couple as having one of the spraunchiest gardens at the Chelsworth Open Gardens, and asked them if that wasn't their garden I'd seen. They demurred and said it wasn't that good, but anybody who lavishes that much effort and expense on a garden can surely only be pleased to hear it remembered and praised when they go shopping for plants, and they called a cheery goodbye to me as they left. They bought the last of a line of really rather nice small Clethra that I'd been quite tempted by myself, after taking it along to last week's talk and getting no takers for it.
In the car on the way home I learned that the police had decided that there probably wasn't a lion. I wouldn't be surprised if there is something, though. We've had reports in recent years of some kind of large cat at Wivenhoe, and sightings of a beast at Elmstead Market. The witness to the beast of Elmstead was gloriously reported in the local paper as saying that My wife and children saw it using binoculars, a phrase which has passed into family use.
At work there was a more tangible animal disaster in the making. The peahen was wandering about alone, without her chick, honking terribly. She has always been a diligent mother, keeping each chick with her until it is nearly a year old and time for her to move on to the next clutch of eggs, and you never saw mother and child apart for more than a couple of minutes. As the day wore on and the chick failed to appear the peahen's cries diminished, but we all thought the fox must have had it in the night. Poor thing. It had grown to about the size of a chicken and was just starting to show a little blue in the feathers of its neck, and we were saying only yesterday how much it looked like its mother in miniature. Still, she has already raised two chicks to adulthood, one male and one female, so in evolutionary terms she has done her quota to keep the world peafowl population stable. I'm sorry for her, though, and it's a shame about the baby. It was a jolly little thing, perching on the big flowerpots outside the shop and coming in to steal cake crumbs.
The tea room franchisees can arrive not a moment too soon. They take over on September 10th, when it will be like the relief of Mafeking. My colleague who knows how the cappucino machine works had just set off for her (unpaid) lunch break when I had to call her back to serve in the tea room, then twenty minutes into her lunch break I had to call her again, and a third time before her half hour was decently up, given that she'd already been interrupted half way through. The manager doled out some cake at various points, but couldn't work the machine, and I have never been trained to work it either, and went on strike today about participating in the tea room at all, on the grounds that I had so much compost on my clothes that it was simply preposterous. One couple got so bored of waiting when the designated tea room operative of the day went up to the office to send a fax that they gave up and left.
Their plans sound great. They are going to do quiche of the day, and panini, and soup, and cream teas, and get a freezer and do ice creams (which the staff have suggested to the owners several times but they've always refused point blank). The owner is apparently talking about installing a wooden floor by Christmas, which would make the whole thing look more welcoming and cut down the noise, which is a problem at the moment. I hope the handover is not too fraught, since I gather from the manager that the new people were under the impression that they were taking the sparky girl on to cover weekends, whereas she doesn't seem to have been offered the job, and in any case has got herself a full time job at the new Patisserie Valerie that's opening in Ipswich. Given she has spent three years at catering college and has ambitions, a full time job with the national roll-out of a successful chain is going to be much more use to her than being the Saturday girl for the garden centre outlet of a very small family catering business.
There was no milk first thing in the tea room fridge, and my colleague went up to the house to raid the kitchen. She thought she had shut the door behind her, since the dogs were locked in there, but she couldn't have latched it fully, and both dogs escaped and ran round the house for the rest of the day while the owners were out. The puppy is not house trained, and late in the afternoon the boss came on the radio wanting to know who had let the dogs out, because the puppy had weed over the carpets. It escaped into the plant centre later on, but I took it back inside, since it hasn't had all of its vaccinations and shouldn't meet other dogs, or wander about in the car park by itself. Also it shouldn't wee in the tea room. It is a very cute little thing, with great fringes of hair round its ears.
Trade today was surprisingly brisk. I say surprisingly because August is generally quiet, and Saturday was dire. We all did our bit running around and helping people find things. I reckon my efforts sent a large holly and a Callistemon past the till and out of the door that otherwise wouldn't have been sold, but as always the big variable is footfall plus stock availability. On Saturday people just didn't come in. Today they did.
The manager was busy stock taking various categories as the boss is gearing up to place our orders for next spring, which meant that as the day went on we had to write down more of what we sold. This creates delays for customers, but they were all very nice about it. I recognised one couple as having one of the spraunchiest gardens at the Chelsworth Open Gardens, and asked them if that wasn't their garden I'd seen. They demurred and said it wasn't that good, but anybody who lavishes that much effort and expense on a garden can surely only be pleased to hear it remembered and praised when they go shopping for plants, and they called a cheery goodbye to me as they left. They bought the last of a line of really rather nice small Clethra that I'd been quite tempted by myself, after taking it along to last week's talk and getting no takers for it.
In the car on the way home I learned that the police had decided that there probably wasn't a lion. I wouldn't be surprised if there is something, though. We've had reports in recent years of some kind of large cat at Wivenhoe, and sightings of a beast at Elmstead Market. The witness to the beast of Elmstead was gloriously reported in the local paper as saying that My wife and children saw it using binoculars, a phrase which has passed into family use.
Sunday, 26 August 2012
people watching
We gave the sparky girl a card signed by most of the people who work at weekends, and a mug. It was a modest leaving party, with just three people at it, but it showed that we cared.
Alan Bennett enjoys sitting in the lobbies of provincial hotels, so he says. Not doing anything or talking, just listening and watching. He'd enjoy standing at the till of a garden centre on a quiet Sunday in August. The first notable customer was a woman who is a regular though not frequent visitor. She lives in Wales, but her parents, aged 95 and 94, live just around the corner. She finds the plant centre a peaceful place to call in to, every now and then.
She is a woman that at first sight you might laugh at, if you were the sort of person who writes clever, cutting articles about lifestyle and fashion. She is probably somewhere in her late sixties, with untidy hair, an amount of blue eye shadow that would have been too much for me back in the 1970s when blue eye shadow was in fashion and I was in my teens, and a hippyish taste in ethnic bags and scarves. She is very short, and walks with a stick. Her hands are swollen with arthritis, or some ailment that turns your hands into rosy, shiny lumps. She has needed operations on her legs, the last of which left her with deep vein thrombosis, and is still forbidden by her doctor to drive long distances, so she came from Wales to Suffolk by train. She does not like the change from Paddington to Liverpool Street by underground, and nobody she knows in London was available to help her, so she travelled the long way round, via Birmingham, Peterborough, Ely and Ipswich, which took her eight hours. When she arrives her parents need help with all sorts of things. They are fiercely resistant to accepting other help, or changing their house or habits or the way that they live. Her mother has started to have falls.
I don't know this customer's name, but she is always cheerful. She doesn't moan about the fact that it took her an exhausting eight hour journey to get here, or that her duties are pretty onerous when she arrives, after which it takes her another marathon trip to get back. We chatted about how nice the walled garden is, and she told me about her garden in Wales, and how it is full of wildlife, but doesn't meet the neighbour's standards of tidiness. She was planning to call again later in the week. She limped off, with her stick and her dodgy hair, back to the domestic chores.
The second notable customer was also short and mobility impaired (and with really seriously bad long frizzy hair, if you are taking a Hannah Betts or Hilary Rose view), and walked bent double with the aid of a frame on wheels that she pushed in front of her. She was with her husband, a tall, patient man with a sad and anxious expression, who bought a climbing rose. He suggested they could go to a National Trust property, but she replied in the tone of voice that doesn't brook any discussion that they would all be crowded. They took a table in the tea shop and he was sent up to the counter to order. She called across the room to the sparky girl to ask whether she could have a latte and the sparky girl said yes, we did latte. She asked her husband what he was having, and then pointed out to him that there was a list of what was available, repeating twice with real venom that it was there, look, right in front of him. He said that he was just putting his glasses on so that he could see and that he would have an ordinary coffee, then stood leaning against the counter, staring into the distance with a defeated expression and slowly removing his glasses again, while the sparky girl loaded up his tray. If tonight he strangles the companion of his bosom I will act as a character witness that he was treated to an extraordinary public display of casual contempt by his late spouse.
Later on a customer came in who I don't think was at my talk last Tuesday, but might as well have been, as she was buying foliage plants to liven up her border. She had some Carex in her trolley, a vine, and a Paulownia, and she asked my advice about stooling the Paulownia, which is how I discovered that she was specifically interested in foliage. Perceptive woman. We naturally warm to people whose ideas and opinions coincide with our own.
As we went up to the house at the end of the day with the tills and our telephones and radios, the owners had just returned from their holiday. They didn't come rushing through to say hello to us, but one of my colleagues heard the boss say that somebody had trampled mud up the stairs. She had a nasty suspicion it was not mud, but something to do with the peacocks.
Alan Bennett enjoys sitting in the lobbies of provincial hotels, so he says. Not doing anything or talking, just listening and watching. He'd enjoy standing at the till of a garden centre on a quiet Sunday in August. The first notable customer was a woman who is a regular though not frequent visitor. She lives in Wales, but her parents, aged 95 and 94, live just around the corner. She finds the plant centre a peaceful place to call in to, every now and then.
She is a woman that at first sight you might laugh at, if you were the sort of person who writes clever, cutting articles about lifestyle and fashion. She is probably somewhere in her late sixties, with untidy hair, an amount of blue eye shadow that would have been too much for me back in the 1970s when blue eye shadow was in fashion and I was in my teens, and a hippyish taste in ethnic bags and scarves. She is very short, and walks with a stick. Her hands are swollen with arthritis, or some ailment that turns your hands into rosy, shiny lumps. She has needed operations on her legs, the last of which left her with deep vein thrombosis, and is still forbidden by her doctor to drive long distances, so she came from Wales to Suffolk by train. She does not like the change from Paddington to Liverpool Street by underground, and nobody she knows in London was available to help her, so she travelled the long way round, via Birmingham, Peterborough, Ely and Ipswich, which took her eight hours. When she arrives her parents need help with all sorts of things. They are fiercely resistant to accepting other help, or changing their house or habits or the way that they live. Her mother has started to have falls.
I don't know this customer's name, but she is always cheerful. She doesn't moan about the fact that it took her an exhausting eight hour journey to get here, or that her duties are pretty onerous when she arrives, after which it takes her another marathon trip to get back. We chatted about how nice the walled garden is, and she told me about her garden in Wales, and how it is full of wildlife, but doesn't meet the neighbour's standards of tidiness. She was planning to call again later in the week. She limped off, with her stick and her dodgy hair, back to the domestic chores.
The second notable customer was also short and mobility impaired (and with really seriously bad long frizzy hair, if you are taking a Hannah Betts or Hilary Rose view), and walked bent double with the aid of a frame on wheels that she pushed in front of her. She was with her husband, a tall, patient man with a sad and anxious expression, who bought a climbing rose. He suggested they could go to a National Trust property, but she replied in the tone of voice that doesn't brook any discussion that they would all be crowded. They took a table in the tea shop and he was sent up to the counter to order. She called across the room to the sparky girl to ask whether she could have a latte and the sparky girl said yes, we did latte. She asked her husband what he was having, and then pointed out to him that there was a list of what was available, repeating twice with real venom that it was there, look, right in front of him. He said that he was just putting his glasses on so that he could see and that he would have an ordinary coffee, then stood leaning against the counter, staring into the distance with a defeated expression and slowly removing his glasses again, while the sparky girl loaded up his tray. If tonight he strangles the companion of his bosom I will act as a character witness that he was treated to an extraordinary public display of casual contempt by his late spouse.
Later on a customer came in who I don't think was at my talk last Tuesday, but might as well have been, as she was buying foliage plants to liven up her border. She had some Carex in her trolley, a vine, and a Paulownia, and she asked my advice about stooling the Paulownia, which is how I discovered that she was specifically interested in foliage. Perceptive woman. We naturally warm to people whose ideas and opinions coincide with our own.
As we went up to the house at the end of the day with the tills and our telephones and radios, the owners had just returned from their holiday. They didn't come rushing through to say hello to us, but one of my colleagues heard the boss say that somebody had trampled mud up the stairs. She had a nasty suspicion it was not mud, but something to do with the peacocks.
Saturday, 25 August 2012
relief in sight
The owners of the plant centre have franchised out the tea room. That is such a massive relief. A total result. Thank you, God. Each time I washed my hands then made tea and served slices of cake, wearing my compost covered shirt and with dirt engrained under every finger nail, I was waiting for the customer to turn out to be an environmental health inspector. Instead the tea room is going to become the responsibility of a young couple currently running one close by, whose lease is expiring. They are going to serve savoury food as well as cake, which will please all those customers who don't like cake, or don't feel like it as a substitute for lunch. There will be a smiling face all the time behind the tea room counter, ready to dish out refreshments when the mood for cake strikes. At the moment, standing behind the plant centre till, you can see customers warm to the idea of cake, look around trying to work out who is supposed to serve it, remember that cake is fattening and that if they wait for a cup of coffee until they get home they could save £3.50 a head, and give up on the idea. Altogether putting the tea room under the full-time charge of people who understand catering and aren't trying to multi-task in the plant centre is an excellent idea.
It's a shame about the sparky girl, who will not be staying on, but since she has not merely already found another job, but already started it, she should be OK. Working for us at weekends was never a career anyway, more of a post-college CV filler and modest earner. She was nice to have around, and we'll miss her. Even while holding down two jobs she found the time to make a farewell box of cupcakes for the staff room. I predict a bright future for her, and wouldn't be at all surprised if in five or six years she suddenly bobbed up as the new face of UK television cookery, or something.
I left work early, by prior arrangement, to get ready to go to an At Home. It was the first time we had ever been invited to one, though I have seen cards for them on the owner's desk. I think they belong to a slightly more Upper section of the middle classes than the bit we belong to. The Systems Administrator and I don't give At Homes, nor have I ever possessed a set of postcards with my name and address printed across the top. Entertainments at our house are either coffee, lunch, tea, or supper, and when I send postcards they are from art galleries, or the Penguin one hundred book covers boxed set.
We decided that At Home from 6.00pm translated as drinks and nibbles, and so it did. Our host was one of the music society committee members, and there were lots of faces there that I recognised from the concerts, and lots more I recognised from the plant centre, and many I knew from both. The boss's parents were there, and the woman who works in the office, and a former colleague from the plant centre who lives next door. Our hosts occupy the house once owned by Randolph Churchill (son not father), which is a fine building in itself, and has one of the best views in Suffolk, straight up the vale to Dedham church, which providence has kindly placed exactly the right amount off centre, not in the middle of the view.
Neither of us are very good at small talk, and it was more difficult for the SA, who didn't recognise so many faces, but we made a creditable shot at mingling. Generally, with groups of people you don't know well, you don't have to see them many times before you start feeling you know each other well enough to sustain a ten minute conversation without it feeling like an effort. We lasted two hours, by which time the At Home was starting to wind down. Back at our home we had to change straight out of our party clothes, before they could get covered in cat hair.
It's a shame about the sparky girl, who will not be staying on, but since she has not merely already found another job, but already started it, she should be OK. Working for us at weekends was never a career anyway, more of a post-college CV filler and modest earner. She was nice to have around, and we'll miss her. Even while holding down two jobs she found the time to make a farewell box of cupcakes for the staff room. I predict a bright future for her, and wouldn't be at all surprised if in five or six years she suddenly bobbed up as the new face of UK television cookery, or something.
I left work early, by prior arrangement, to get ready to go to an At Home. It was the first time we had ever been invited to one, though I have seen cards for them on the owner's desk. I think they belong to a slightly more Upper section of the middle classes than the bit we belong to. The Systems Administrator and I don't give At Homes, nor have I ever possessed a set of postcards with my name and address printed across the top. Entertainments at our house are either coffee, lunch, tea, or supper, and when I send postcards they are from art galleries, or the Penguin one hundred book covers boxed set.
We decided that At Home from 6.00pm translated as drinks and nibbles, and so it did. Our host was one of the music society committee members, and there were lots of faces there that I recognised from the concerts, and lots more I recognised from the plant centre, and many I knew from both. The boss's parents were there, and the woman who works in the office, and a former colleague from the plant centre who lives next door. Our hosts occupy the house once owned by Randolph Churchill (son not father), which is a fine building in itself, and has one of the best views in Suffolk, straight up the vale to Dedham church, which providence has kindly placed exactly the right amount off centre, not in the middle of the view.
Neither of us are very good at small talk, and it was more difficult for the SA, who didn't recognise so many faces, but we made a creditable shot at mingling. Generally, with groups of people you don't know well, you don't have to see them many times before you start feeling you know each other well enough to sustain a ten minute conversation without it feeling like an effort. We lasted two hours, by which time the At Home was starting to wind down. Back at our home we had to change straight out of our party clothes, before they could get covered in cat hair.
Friday, 24 August 2012
cutting a dash
The lawn had got very long and whiskery, as the Systems Administrator who nowadays cuts the grass was first of all ill, and then at various cricket matches, and today wanted to go to the Clacton Airshow to see the Red Arrows. I once went to the Farnborough Airshow with some stockbrokers, and as I stood at the edge of the tarmac listening to the scream of the engines of a row of harrier jump jets hovering approximately three metres off the ground in front of me, I thought that this came close to hell on earth. Airshows are not for me. I really don't like the noise, and I am not terribly interested in aeroplanes.
However, it dawned on me that I could cut the grass myself, before the next band of rain turned up. The last few days had dried it out nicely, and as rain was forecast for tonight and tomorrow, with showers lasting into next week, cutting it while it was dry and before it got even longer seemed a good idea. For years I was in charge of mowing the lawn, after I gave up full time work and the SA was still commuting. However, since then the cutter deck of the lawn tractor I knew how to drive collapsed through old age and overwork, and we have a new one. I got the SA to give me a quick course before going out in how the current model worked, and decided that after lunch I'd give it a go. The worst that could happen seemed to be that I failed to start it at all, or that it stopped working somewhere in the garden and I had to leave it there until the SA came home. I could have frozen with fear half way across the lawn and ploughed helplessly through a flower bed before coming to rest in a hedge, or put one wheel up a bank and turned it over, but I didn't think I was going to. The basics of driving one lawn tractor must be much the same from one model to another, and after all, I do have a degree in horticulture, and ought to be able to master a lawnmower.
When I was a child our neighbours in Devon had one, and I wanted one quite intensely. It was an odd craving, for a child who was not otherwise interested in machinery, or cars, but I thought a drive-on lawnmower was quite the most marvellous, desirable thing. As an adult I am still rather of that opinion. It turns out that our new one is much nicer than its predecessor. Instead of having five fixed gears, plus reverse, which were always quite clunky to get in and out of, it has hydraulic transmission which gives infinitely variable speeds in forward and reverse. Out of habit I was still disengaging the cutting blades before putting it into reverse, because you had to with the old one or it stopped, but when I checked afterwards with the SA I discovered that not merely do you not have to do that with the new one, but it will cut while going backwards. For finishing off odd little corners this could be very convenient. We try not to have not too many small and awkward areas of grass, but there are some, as well as those bits of the lawn where it gets to its widest, and after doing all the rest you are left with a mohican tuft in the middle and have to go round again. Also compared to the old one the new machine has a very tight turning circle. Altogether it is great fun, though I will be happy for the Systems Administrator to remain in charge of lawn mowing for the most part, just because I don't have time to do everything else as it is.
I put the clippings into the thinnest stretches of the boundary hedge in the front garden. It is a bit of a fiddle, dropping big handfuls of grass into the hedge, especially when it is poking you in the face, but worth the effort. I used to do that cutting the meadow, in the days when I used to mow the grass. Grass clippings are rich in nitrogen, and act as a mulch to suppress the growth of the grass growing in the base of the hedge, so while you must be careful not to pile them against the stems, they do help improve thin soil and reduce competition from weeds. I don't want to put them on the compost heap, thought they would be very useful in terms of helping all the ivy prunings to rot down, because they contain too many weed seeds, but if any plantains fancy their chances under the hedge they're welcome to it.
There was some good news on the plant front, after the woe of the suspected phytophthora. A pair of Photinia serratifolia, that I planted in the front garden to try and hide the electricity pole, are finally growing. P. serratifolia is a tall-growing evergreen, remarkably drought tolerant once established, or so my books said. It has glossy mid green leaves, handsome red buds and copper young foliage, and generally looks like a more statuesque and classier 'Red Robin'. The electricity pole is not pretty, but necessary if we want electricity, since I can't see the electricity company agreeing to come and bury the wires. The pole itself has a certain post-industrial charm to it, reminding me of a walk we took past an abandoned mine in the Lake District, and tangentially of Ry Cooder's soundtrack to Paris, Texas, but the bright yellow markers the company put on the guy wire a couple of years ago are irredeemably ugly. I thought about taking them off again, but decided that a large, evergreen shrub to mask the whole thing was the answer. Pyracantha, with its evil, festering, prickles seemed too mean to anyone working on the pole, and the Photinia sounded just the job. Sounded but wasn't. I kept watering the plants, and they kept dying back and producing only miserable little leaves half the size they were supposed to be. They didn't like the cold winters either. Now, suddenly, after the wet summer, they have started to grow. They have made new twigs, and the leaves look large, fat, healthy and happy.
The SA saw the Red Arrows and a Sea King helicopter, but says the air show was a fraction of its former self. The organisers would have to pay, to get the vintage planes to come, and they can't afford it.
However, it dawned on me that I could cut the grass myself, before the next band of rain turned up. The last few days had dried it out nicely, and as rain was forecast for tonight and tomorrow, with showers lasting into next week, cutting it while it was dry and before it got even longer seemed a good idea. For years I was in charge of mowing the lawn, after I gave up full time work and the SA was still commuting. However, since then the cutter deck of the lawn tractor I knew how to drive collapsed through old age and overwork, and we have a new one. I got the SA to give me a quick course before going out in how the current model worked, and decided that after lunch I'd give it a go. The worst that could happen seemed to be that I failed to start it at all, or that it stopped working somewhere in the garden and I had to leave it there until the SA came home. I could have frozen with fear half way across the lawn and ploughed helplessly through a flower bed before coming to rest in a hedge, or put one wheel up a bank and turned it over, but I didn't think I was going to. The basics of driving one lawn tractor must be much the same from one model to another, and after all, I do have a degree in horticulture, and ought to be able to master a lawnmower.
When I was a child our neighbours in Devon had one, and I wanted one quite intensely. It was an odd craving, for a child who was not otherwise interested in machinery, or cars, but I thought a drive-on lawnmower was quite the most marvellous, desirable thing. As an adult I am still rather of that opinion. It turns out that our new one is much nicer than its predecessor. Instead of having five fixed gears, plus reverse, which were always quite clunky to get in and out of, it has hydraulic transmission which gives infinitely variable speeds in forward and reverse. Out of habit I was still disengaging the cutting blades before putting it into reverse, because you had to with the old one or it stopped, but when I checked afterwards with the SA I discovered that not merely do you not have to do that with the new one, but it will cut while going backwards. For finishing off odd little corners this could be very convenient. We try not to have not too many small and awkward areas of grass, but there are some, as well as those bits of the lawn where it gets to its widest, and after doing all the rest you are left with a mohican tuft in the middle and have to go round again. Also compared to the old one the new machine has a very tight turning circle. Altogether it is great fun, though I will be happy for the Systems Administrator to remain in charge of lawn mowing for the most part, just because I don't have time to do everything else as it is.
I put the clippings into the thinnest stretches of the boundary hedge in the front garden. It is a bit of a fiddle, dropping big handfuls of grass into the hedge, especially when it is poking you in the face, but worth the effort. I used to do that cutting the meadow, in the days when I used to mow the grass. Grass clippings are rich in nitrogen, and act as a mulch to suppress the growth of the grass growing in the base of the hedge, so while you must be careful not to pile them against the stems, they do help improve thin soil and reduce competition from weeds. I don't want to put them on the compost heap, thought they would be very useful in terms of helping all the ivy prunings to rot down, because they contain too many weed seeds, but if any plantains fancy their chances under the hedge they're welcome to it.
There was some good news on the plant front, after the woe of the suspected phytophthora. A pair of Photinia serratifolia, that I planted in the front garden to try and hide the electricity pole, are finally growing. P. serratifolia is a tall-growing evergreen, remarkably drought tolerant once established, or so my books said. It has glossy mid green leaves, handsome red buds and copper young foliage, and generally looks like a more statuesque and classier 'Red Robin'. The electricity pole is not pretty, but necessary if we want electricity, since I can't see the electricity company agreeing to come and bury the wires. The pole itself has a certain post-industrial charm to it, reminding me of a walk we took past an abandoned mine in the Lake District, and tangentially of Ry Cooder's soundtrack to Paris, Texas, but the bright yellow markers the company put on the guy wire a couple of years ago are irredeemably ugly. I thought about taking them off again, but decided that a large, evergreen shrub to mask the whole thing was the answer. Pyracantha, with its evil, festering, prickles seemed too mean to anyone working on the pole, and the Photinia sounded just the job. Sounded but wasn't. I kept watering the plants, and they kept dying back and producing only miserable little leaves half the size they were supposed to be. They didn't like the cold winters either. Now, suddenly, after the wet summer, they have started to grow. They have made new twigs, and the leaves look large, fat, healthy and happy.
The SA saw the Red Arrows and a Sea King helicopter, but says the air show was a fraction of its former self. The organisers would have to pay, to get the vintage planes to come, and they can't afford it.
Thursday, 23 August 2012
rose, thou art sick
Two large branches of the Grevillea rosmarinifolia were completely dead, and I sawed them out. Quite a large portion of the rest of the plant doesn't look too good, and if that dies too I shall be left with something very oddly shaped, and will be faced with a hard decision. I am really not sure why it has started ailing in the past few months. My records show that it was planted in March 2003, and according to Plant Database it can take eleven to fifteen years to reach its ultimate height, suggesting it isn't normally short lived. It is an evergreen shrub, with leaves that look very like those of rosemary, though the resemblance is superficial: the grevillea leaves are sharp to the touch, whereas rosemary is soft. It has unusual, long red flowers through much of the year (when it is doing well) that are attractive to insects. Until it began to look poorly it was growing vigorously, and was a good couple of metres tall and wide, if not larger, and densely bushy and leafy.
It comes originally from Australia, and is a member of the protea family. It is supposed to love sunshine and to be drought tolerant, and so it has proved with me. Its cold hardiness must have been tested in the nine years I've had it, but it has come through until now. Knowing that many proteas are unable to cope with high levels of some nutrients I have always been nervous of feeding it. The question now is what is wrong? Were those two very cold nights in February too much for it? The previous two winters were long, but probably didn't go down that low, and certainly the thermometer didn't drop that quickly. Does it need feeding, even though it is in the family Proteacae? Is Plant Database over optimistic about its normal lifespan? I don't know Plant Database. Hunting around the web for cultural advice (and a description so that I could post a link) I found that the RHS didn't have much to say on the subject, mainly featuring some of the named varieties.
The Magnolia grandiflora in the back garden doesn't look too good either. Most of the leaves went bronze and then dropped, and now there is a dark oozing patch at the base of the trunk. I spent some time last night leafing through my copy of Diagnosis of ill health in trees, and I am pretty sure that it has sat too wet over the summer, and that phytophthora has now taken hold. The book tells you what environmental problems and diseases each plant species is especially liable to, as well as listing diseases with symptoms, and the signs I've observed exactly fit the bill, while it has been exceptionally wet. Phytophthora covers a group of plant pathogens, similar to fungi but technically Oomycetes, whose spread is facilitated by water. M. grandiflora has fleshy roots, prone to rot and die if they sit in constantly wet soil. Odd branches have died back in the prostrate juniper in the same bed, which is likewise consistent with a diagnosis of water logging followed by infection. Indeed, my conifer looks depressingly like the photograph in the book.
I love the episode in Three Men in a Boat when the author looks up his symptoms in a medical dictionary and discovers that he has everything, except housemaid's knee. I feel rather like that about looking up plant diseases, which is why normally I try not to do it, and just blame the bad soil and drought, or the wildlife. Plants dying is a mixed blessing. If it was a good specimen that gave great pleasure one is sorry to see it go. If it was large it can leave an inconveniently large gap in the view, that has to be filled. If it still had a solid root system it can take days of one's life and great physical effort to dig out the remains. On the other hand, if the plant was always a bit poorly, or you'd got bored of it, then having the decision made for you that it's got to go can be a good thing, as the resulting space gives you the chance to plant something nicer.
It comes originally from Australia, and is a member of the protea family. It is supposed to love sunshine and to be drought tolerant, and so it has proved with me. Its cold hardiness must have been tested in the nine years I've had it, but it has come through until now. Knowing that many proteas are unable to cope with high levels of some nutrients I have always been nervous of feeding it. The question now is what is wrong? Were those two very cold nights in February too much for it? The previous two winters were long, but probably didn't go down that low, and certainly the thermometer didn't drop that quickly. Does it need feeding, even though it is in the family Proteacae? Is Plant Database over optimistic about its normal lifespan? I don't know Plant Database. Hunting around the web for cultural advice (and a description so that I could post a link) I found that the RHS didn't have much to say on the subject, mainly featuring some of the named varieties.
The Magnolia grandiflora in the back garden doesn't look too good either. Most of the leaves went bronze and then dropped, and now there is a dark oozing patch at the base of the trunk. I spent some time last night leafing through my copy of Diagnosis of ill health in trees, and I am pretty sure that it has sat too wet over the summer, and that phytophthora has now taken hold. The book tells you what environmental problems and diseases each plant species is especially liable to, as well as listing diseases with symptoms, and the signs I've observed exactly fit the bill, while it has been exceptionally wet. Phytophthora covers a group of plant pathogens, similar to fungi but technically Oomycetes, whose spread is facilitated by water. M. grandiflora has fleshy roots, prone to rot and die if they sit in constantly wet soil. Odd branches have died back in the prostrate juniper in the same bed, which is likewise consistent with a diagnosis of water logging followed by infection. Indeed, my conifer looks depressingly like the photograph in the book.
I love the episode in Three Men in a Boat when the author looks up his symptoms in a medical dictionary and discovers that he has everything, except housemaid's knee. I feel rather like that about looking up plant diseases, which is why normally I try not to do it, and just blame the bad soil and drought, or the wildlife. Plants dying is a mixed blessing. If it was a good specimen that gave great pleasure one is sorry to see it go. If it was large it can leave an inconveniently large gap in the view, that has to be filled. If it still had a solid root system it can take days of one's life and great physical effort to dig out the remains. On the other hand, if the plant was always a bit poorly, or you'd got bored of it, then having the decision made for you that it's got to go can be a good thing, as the resulting space gives you the chance to plant something nicer.
Wednesday, 22 August 2012
the day of the fair
The most beautiful thing at the wildlife fair was the captive-bred barn owl. Eight weeks old and fully grown, she sat on her handler's wrist with the calm and aplomb of a seasoned performer. She was surprisingly small, larger than a blackbird but nowhere near the size of a pigeon. Barn owls are not true night birds but crepuscular, favouring dawn and dusk, and they have the huge eyes of a creature adapted to low light levels, which look even larger because they are set in facial discs, oval bowls of radiating feathers whose job is to focus noise back on the owl's ears. They are naturally long sighted, in order to see their prey when hunting, and to help themselves focus at short range bob their heads repeatedly on their shoulders. The young owl was doing this, with an air of benign enquiry rather than fear at the cluster of strangers gathered around her. Her owner pointed out the way that the feathers along the leading edge of her wings were fringed, in order to break the flow of air over them, allowing her to fly silently. She thoughtfully stretched one wing, and he turned his arm around so that we could admire the amazing, subtle pattern of soft chequerboard brown and white on her back. Then he scratched her between her eyes, and she melted in what would, if she had been a cat and not a barn owl, been a simper.
One of my favourite images from Gerald Durrell's books about his childhood is his pet scops owl, kept free to roost in his bedroom and fly in and out of the window as it chose. I would love an owl. I can imagine having a pet little owl that would sit on my head while I typed or read. I don't think the fantasy works in practice. You can't release captive-bred barn owls into the wild. They wouldn't know how to survive, and I'm pretty sure it's illegal. A friend does have a barn owl, but it lives in an aviary, not free range. If I tried to train my owl to fly from the glove it would probably wander off, and I would be distraught that I had sent it out to its death. And the cats would probably eat a little owl. The Durrell family never had any cats, and he records his anxiety when any of the local feral ones moved too close to their various villas. But I do like owls.
The second most beautiful thing was a green beetle, a rose chafer, that had emerged from its pupa only the previous day. It was a squarish shaped creature with a tiny head, about 20mm long, and its back was a wonderful metallic green. Apparently there are several small populations scattered around Colchester, so I may never see one in the garden. They feed on rose nectar and pollen, not the leaves, so shouldn't be of concern to gardeners, though the beetle is so handsome that nobody could grudge it a few rose leaves. The larvae live in compost, leafmould or rotting wood. We have lots of those, and roses, so there is no reason why we shouldn't have rose chafers, except that I have never seen one. I like beetles too. The most glamorous ones we have here are violet ground beetles.
The Tendring tree officer was there with the tree warden coordinator, and we looked at their maps of the peninsular with the contentment of three people who are all interested in ancient woodland, field patterns and gravel deposits. The watershed runs close to the northern edge of the district, which is bounded by the river Stour, and almost all the ancient woodlands are on the southern slope. We agreed that the geology must have something to do with it, and the tree warden coordinator pointed out various minor roads that he thought were extremely old. There are documented neolithic sites not far from here, but though I keep a keen eye out when gardening the most interesting man-made thing I ever discovered was an old Worcester sauce bottle. Archaeological fragments in your garden are a mixed blessing. A friend whose garden was stuffed with little bits of broken medieval pottery found that her attempt to make a pond was proceeding so slowly it might as well have been conducted by an archaeologist with a trowel, because in effect it was. (Eventually, faced with an imminent hosepipe ban that would have stopped them from filling it, they just dug the hole out in two days).
The most baffling thing was our new gazebo, which the Show Secretary's daughter had bought reduced to £25 in an Asda end-of-season sale. To take it down you un-velcro the fabric top, and then the legs collapse telescopically into half their length, the central struts slide down the legs when you press a button, while the sides, which are diamond pattern girders, concertina together so that the whole frame collapses into a single block about 45cm square and 1.2m long, which you put in a zip-up bag. I struggle to put up a deckchair, and couldn't see how it worked at all, until somebody discovered which button to push and the entire structure folded in on itself. I would never have invented that in a month of Sundays.
My talk went OK, and I kept it to half an hour as billed, unlike the butterfly conservation man ahead of me, who overran. The audience wasn't very large, only around ten or twelve people, and I think some of them were already connected to the beekeepers in some way, but at least I wasn't talking to an empty tent, and they did ask questions afterwards. Most were youngish, and looked as though they might even be thinking of taking beekeeping up, so it was probably a useful exercise. Anyway, a condition of getting our stall was providing a half hour's entertainment, so somebody had to do something.
I was disappointed that the Woodland Trust didn't have a stall this year. They planted a new wood at the edge of the village only a few years ago, with a big local fund-raising drive, so it would seem graceful to come and tell people how the new trees are doing. On the other hand, if there's another fair next year I'm not sure I want to volunteer to run the stand for them. It's more fun to wander about gossiping, and looking at owls and beetles.
One of my favourite images from Gerald Durrell's books about his childhood is his pet scops owl, kept free to roost in his bedroom and fly in and out of the window as it chose. I would love an owl. I can imagine having a pet little owl that would sit on my head while I typed or read. I don't think the fantasy works in practice. You can't release captive-bred barn owls into the wild. They wouldn't know how to survive, and I'm pretty sure it's illegal. A friend does have a barn owl, but it lives in an aviary, not free range. If I tried to train my owl to fly from the glove it would probably wander off, and I would be distraught that I had sent it out to its death. And the cats would probably eat a little owl. The Durrell family never had any cats, and he records his anxiety when any of the local feral ones moved too close to their various villas. But I do like owls.
The second most beautiful thing was a green beetle, a rose chafer, that had emerged from its pupa only the previous day. It was a squarish shaped creature with a tiny head, about 20mm long, and its back was a wonderful metallic green. Apparently there are several small populations scattered around Colchester, so I may never see one in the garden. They feed on rose nectar and pollen, not the leaves, so shouldn't be of concern to gardeners, though the beetle is so handsome that nobody could grudge it a few rose leaves. The larvae live in compost, leafmould or rotting wood. We have lots of those, and roses, so there is no reason why we shouldn't have rose chafers, except that I have never seen one. I like beetles too. The most glamorous ones we have here are violet ground beetles.
The Tendring tree officer was there with the tree warden coordinator, and we looked at their maps of the peninsular with the contentment of three people who are all interested in ancient woodland, field patterns and gravel deposits. The watershed runs close to the northern edge of the district, which is bounded by the river Stour, and almost all the ancient woodlands are on the southern slope. We agreed that the geology must have something to do with it, and the tree warden coordinator pointed out various minor roads that he thought were extremely old. There are documented neolithic sites not far from here, but though I keep a keen eye out when gardening the most interesting man-made thing I ever discovered was an old Worcester sauce bottle. Archaeological fragments in your garden are a mixed blessing. A friend whose garden was stuffed with little bits of broken medieval pottery found that her attempt to make a pond was proceeding so slowly it might as well have been conducted by an archaeologist with a trowel, because in effect it was. (Eventually, faced with an imminent hosepipe ban that would have stopped them from filling it, they just dug the hole out in two days).
The most baffling thing was our new gazebo, which the Show Secretary's daughter had bought reduced to £25 in an Asda end-of-season sale. To take it down you un-velcro the fabric top, and then the legs collapse telescopically into half their length, the central struts slide down the legs when you press a button, while the sides, which are diamond pattern girders, concertina together so that the whole frame collapses into a single block about 45cm square and 1.2m long, which you put in a zip-up bag. I struggle to put up a deckchair, and couldn't see how it worked at all, until somebody discovered which button to push and the entire structure folded in on itself. I would never have invented that in a month of Sundays.
My talk went OK, and I kept it to half an hour as billed, unlike the butterfly conservation man ahead of me, who overran. The audience wasn't very large, only around ten or twelve people, and I think some of them were already connected to the beekeepers in some way, but at least I wasn't talking to an empty tent, and they did ask questions afterwards. Most were youngish, and looked as though they might even be thinking of taking beekeeping up, so it was probably a useful exercise. Anyway, a condition of getting our stall was providing a half hour's entertainment, so somebody had to do something.
I was disappointed that the Woodland Trust didn't have a stall this year. They planted a new wood at the edge of the village only a few years ago, with a big local fund-raising drive, so it would seem graceful to come and tell people how the new trees are doing. On the other hand, if there's another fair next year I'm not sure I want to volunteer to run the stand for them. It's more fun to wander about gossiping, and looking at owls and beetles.
Tuesday, 21 August 2012
yes, you do have to weed it
The BBC is clearly determined to wring every last drop of interest out of the Olympics. This morning The Today Programme had got on to the subject of the planting at the Stratford site, with Evan Davis asking about the difference between annual and perennial planting in tones that suggested he couldn't quite believe that a metropolitan sophisticate should be occupying himself with such things. I couldn't quite believe that the fact that there was some new-wave inspired planting at the Olympic park, that had been there for ages, counted as news and current affairs, but maybe having to step back from wall to wall Olympics coverage to talk about Syria, the Euro, the deficit, and the assorted human tragedies of the past 24 hours was just too much for the production team to bear. Evan asked whether you didn't have to impoverish the soil, and said hopefully that presumably you didn't have to weed it.
No, no, no, no and no. Thrice and five times no. I have tried to get a Noel Kingsbury, Piet Oudolf et al perennial meadow affair going several times over the years, and it is jolly hard work. It might all be different in a commercial setting, where I could treat the entire site with the sorts of soil sterilants not available on the amateur market, and there wasn't too much pesky wildlife to spread seeds around, and too many stands of weeds in the surrounding countryside all casting their fluffy thistle heads and suchlike into the air to blow into the newly cleared ground thoughtfully prepared for them in my garden. If it were planted up at some incredible number of plants to the square metre, as experimental schemes tested by the academics in charge of the Stratford site, that might help make it weed proof, if I could afford to buy that many plants or had the space and time to propagate them. Doing it yourself, on a shoestring, in rough ground surrounded by countryside, is bloody hard work.
Weeds arrive. I was glad that whoever it was that Evan was interviewing did the R4 equivalent of wriggling uncomfortably in their seat and said that no, you did have to weed it. Weeds just arrive. Creeping grasses that were not completely eradicated by digging creep back again. Birds that have gorged on hawthorn and ivy berries crap over your meadow to be, and the seeds, dormancy well and truly broken by passage through the bird's gut, germinate like cress. Nettle seeds blow in, or are carried in by some vile creature. Jays bury acorns and hazel nuts. I have holm oak seedlings coming up all over my garden, and the nearest tree is five doors down, a quarter of a mile away. The ruddy rye grass that was sown over the whole field in the short period between when we bought the property and when we fenced our bit off still persists in the areas of long grass, providing a ready supply of seeds to infest the prairie planting. Evan, you have to weed it. I can't see Evan weeding, somehow. His natural habitat seems more like a very trendy coffee bar, definitely not Costa or Starbucks, if it is morning, or an even trendier nightclub, if it is late.
Looking at the quantity of weeds in the front garden, before ever getting as far as the meadow, I wondered where to start, and decided to go round pulling out the tall obvious ones. This made a great difference very quickly, and I alternated between chasing weeds, cutting down the all too visible dead flower stalks of the verbascums, and trimming the ivy hedges. The Strulch does work. Once I'd pulled out the large weed stalks it became clear that there weren't many others, and the bed overall was actually pretty clean. I disentangled what proved to be the remains of a pale yellow or white balloon, tied to a pink ribbon, from a purple leaved sage. I expect a cloud of them were let off at some wedding reception, or christening, or something, and they probably all looked very romantic and pretty as they floated off. If I were a livestock farmer, and a cow of mine had just jammed up its stomach eating a balloon, I would be extremely cross.
The garden club ladies were fine when I got there. They were mostly ladies, only three or four brave men at most in the audience. They said they enjoyed the talk, though they did a fair bit of talking themselves while I was still on, which was rather disconcerting. They bought quite a lot of plants, and were helpful about ferrying the unsold ones back to my car, which was kind of them. Two of my former fellow mature students at Writtle were in the audience, but they both said it was OK. After years of practice, mostly for the woodland charity, I'm fairly hardened, and not much would stop me talking, short of the ceiling falling in or a member of the audience having a heart attack part way through.
No, no, no, no and no. Thrice and five times no. I have tried to get a Noel Kingsbury, Piet Oudolf et al perennial meadow affair going several times over the years, and it is jolly hard work. It might all be different in a commercial setting, where I could treat the entire site with the sorts of soil sterilants not available on the amateur market, and there wasn't too much pesky wildlife to spread seeds around, and too many stands of weeds in the surrounding countryside all casting their fluffy thistle heads and suchlike into the air to blow into the newly cleared ground thoughtfully prepared for them in my garden. If it were planted up at some incredible number of plants to the square metre, as experimental schemes tested by the academics in charge of the Stratford site, that might help make it weed proof, if I could afford to buy that many plants or had the space and time to propagate them. Doing it yourself, on a shoestring, in rough ground surrounded by countryside, is bloody hard work.
Weeds arrive. I was glad that whoever it was that Evan was interviewing did the R4 equivalent of wriggling uncomfortably in their seat and said that no, you did have to weed it. Weeds just arrive. Creeping grasses that were not completely eradicated by digging creep back again. Birds that have gorged on hawthorn and ivy berries crap over your meadow to be, and the seeds, dormancy well and truly broken by passage through the bird's gut, germinate like cress. Nettle seeds blow in, or are carried in by some vile creature. Jays bury acorns and hazel nuts. I have holm oak seedlings coming up all over my garden, and the nearest tree is five doors down, a quarter of a mile away. The ruddy rye grass that was sown over the whole field in the short period between when we bought the property and when we fenced our bit off still persists in the areas of long grass, providing a ready supply of seeds to infest the prairie planting. Evan, you have to weed it. I can't see Evan weeding, somehow. His natural habitat seems more like a very trendy coffee bar, definitely not Costa or Starbucks, if it is morning, or an even trendier nightclub, if it is late.
Looking at the quantity of weeds in the front garden, before ever getting as far as the meadow, I wondered where to start, and decided to go round pulling out the tall obvious ones. This made a great difference very quickly, and I alternated between chasing weeds, cutting down the all too visible dead flower stalks of the verbascums, and trimming the ivy hedges. The Strulch does work. Once I'd pulled out the large weed stalks it became clear that there weren't many others, and the bed overall was actually pretty clean. I disentangled what proved to be the remains of a pale yellow or white balloon, tied to a pink ribbon, from a purple leaved sage. I expect a cloud of them were let off at some wedding reception, or christening, or something, and they probably all looked very romantic and pretty as they floated off. If I were a livestock farmer, and a cow of mine had just jammed up its stomach eating a balloon, I would be extremely cross.
The garden club ladies were fine when I got there. They were mostly ladies, only three or four brave men at most in the audience. They said they enjoyed the talk, though they did a fair bit of talking themselves while I was still on, which was rather disconcerting. They bought quite a lot of plants, and were helpful about ferrying the unsold ones back to my car, which was kind of them. Two of my former fellow mature students at Writtle were in the audience, but they both said it was OK. After years of practice, mostly for the woodland charity, I'm fairly hardened, and not much would stop me talking, short of the ceiling falling in or a member of the audience having a heart attack part way through.
Monday, 20 August 2012
a rare display of mechanical aptitude
Most of the plants in the plant centre were remarkably damp and happy, given how hot it was over the weekend, and my colleagues who were on duty must have worked extremely hard to keep them like that. It meant that the amount of watering we had to do this morning wasn't too bad at all, really nothing more than normal.
The phone rang, and it was one of our less favourite customers wanting to know whether we had a particular geranium in stock. Be in no doubt, if you shop at all regularly at any smallish retail outlet, the staff will have views on you, and whether you are a nice and sensible person they will go the extra mile for, or a right nuisance. I went to see what geraniums we had left, and discovered that we had four of that variety, priced at £6.50. The regular but unloved customer drawled that they were very expensive, and that while he had been going to come to us because we were closer, Beth Chatto had them for £4.65. He supposed I wouldn't like to match her on price? I said that no, I was familiar with Beth Chatto's plants, shopping there myself, and that her's were smaller. Why he expects to get a well-grown plant in a 2 litre pot for the same price as a smaller plant in a 1 litre pot beats me, other than that he is always a pain. Later on somebody else rang wanting to know whether we had a particular shrub. Unfortunately when I checked we hadn't, but he commented how soothing it was listening to my regular footsteps on the gravel as I looked for it. Now that's the sort of chat-up line that gets you exemplary service next time round.
The manager has finally achieved his will and is allowed to move the compost so that it is under the canopy at the front of the shop, instead of being piled outside at the back in the rain, getting soggy. It has taken a campaign by staff of at least a year (and more like two) to get the proprietors to agree to this. They are on holiday this week, grouse shooting in Scotland (well, they are going shooting at least once. I don't suppose they're doing it every day) and the manager thought he would strike while the iron was hot, before they could change their minds again.
One of the things cluttering up the space under the canopy was a large wooden stand holding imitation hay racks, hanging baskets and brackets. The hay racks are fairly hideous, and we must sell about two a year, making the stand a terribly inefficient use of the available retail space. The manager wanted to disassemble it, in order to reuse part of it somewhere else, and free up the canopy for the compost, and lamented that it was a pity the gardener was on holiday this week, since he is normally does that sort of job. I looked at the stand, and said that it didn't look too complicated to unscrew it, if only we could find a Phillips screwdriver. We couldn't, but the young gardener borrowed the gardener's one from their shed. You could tell that the thing had been put together using a power screwdriver, since the heads of some of the screws were buried, and others were done up so tightly they slightly depressed the surrounding wood, but I got them out eventually without stripping any of their heads. That would have been embarrassing, since my mechanical skills don't extend to drilling out broken screws. Once it finally came apart I found I'd removed more screws than I need have done, since until it was in pieces I didn't fully understand how it fitted together.
The manager allowed me to assemble the plants for tomorrow evening's talk through the day, which saves me a trip tomorrow. I asked him if the garden club lady was always difficult and he said yes, when he gives talks to their club she keeps ringing him with questions and fussing as well. I managed to cram two trolley loads of plants into the Skoda, and there were lots more showing colour I could have taken if there'd been room, so they should be satisfied. I included a couple of pots that looked like nothing at all, but which are going great guns in my garden, to illustrate the point that one of the difficulties of buying plants for a late summer show is that it can be difficult or impossible to persuade them to behave in containers the way they do growing in the open ground. And I took one nice looking purple leaved Cotinus, to use to remind them that one of the problems with late summer gardens is not that there is a shortage of flowers, but that so much of the surrounding foliage looks tatty. And I'm going to explain about the seasonal stocking habits of plant nurseries, which are at least in part driven by the seasonal buying patterns of customers, so there is a chicken and egg element. Really she should not have been quibbling about my fee, the amount of work that goes into these presentations.
The phone rang, and it was one of our less favourite customers wanting to know whether we had a particular geranium in stock. Be in no doubt, if you shop at all regularly at any smallish retail outlet, the staff will have views on you, and whether you are a nice and sensible person they will go the extra mile for, or a right nuisance. I went to see what geraniums we had left, and discovered that we had four of that variety, priced at £6.50. The regular but unloved customer drawled that they were very expensive, and that while he had been going to come to us because we were closer, Beth Chatto had them for £4.65. He supposed I wouldn't like to match her on price? I said that no, I was familiar with Beth Chatto's plants, shopping there myself, and that her's were smaller. Why he expects to get a well-grown plant in a 2 litre pot for the same price as a smaller plant in a 1 litre pot beats me, other than that he is always a pain. Later on somebody else rang wanting to know whether we had a particular shrub. Unfortunately when I checked we hadn't, but he commented how soothing it was listening to my regular footsteps on the gravel as I looked for it. Now that's the sort of chat-up line that gets you exemplary service next time round.
The manager has finally achieved his will and is allowed to move the compost so that it is under the canopy at the front of the shop, instead of being piled outside at the back in the rain, getting soggy. It has taken a campaign by staff of at least a year (and more like two) to get the proprietors to agree to this. They are on holiday this week, grouse shooting in Scotland (well, they are going shooting at least once. I don't suppose they're doing it every day) and the manager thought he would strike while the iron was hot, before they could change their minds again.
One of the things cluttering up the space under the canopy was a large wooden stand holding imitation hay racks, hanging baskets and brackets. The hay racks are fairly hideous, and we must sell about two a year, making the stand a terribly inefficient use of the available retail space. The manager wanted to disassemble it, in order to reuse part of it somewhere else, and free up the canopy for the compost, and lamented that it was a pity the gardener was on holiday this week, since he is normally does that sort of job. I looked at the stand, and said that it didn't look too complicated to unscrew it, if only we could find a Phillips screwdriver. We couldn't, but the young gardener borrowed the gardener's one from their shed. You could tell that the thing had been put together using a power screwdriver, since the heads of some of the screws were buried, and others were done up so tightly they slightly depressed the surrounding wood, but I got them out eventually without stripping any of their heads. That would have been embarrassing, since my mechanical skills don't extend to drilling out broken screws. Once it finally came apart I found I'd removed more screws than I need have done, since until it was in pieces I didn't fully understand how it fitted together.
The manager allowed me to assemble the plants for tomorrow evening's talk through the day, which saves me a trip tomorrow. I asked him if the garden club lady was always difficult and he said yes, when he gives talks to their club she keeps ringing him with questions and fussing as well. I managed to cram two trolley loads of plants into the Skoda, and there were lots more showing colour I could have taken if there'd been room, so they should be satisfied. I included a couple of pots that looked like nothing at all, but which are going great guns in my garden, to illustrate the point that one of the difficulties of buying plants for a late summer show is that it can be difficult or impossible to persuade them to behave in containers the way they do growing in the open ground. And I took one nice looking purple leaved Cotinus, to use to remind them that one of the problems with late summer gardens is not that there is a shortage of flowers, but that so much of the surrounding foliage looks tatty. And I'm going to explain about the seasonal stocking habits of plant nurseries, which are at least in part driven by the seasonal buying patterns of customers, so there is a chicken and egg element. Really she should not have been quibbling about my fee, the amount of work that goes into these presentations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)