race day

We have just been to our first ever point-to-point, at Higham.  Neither of us really knew what to expect, but on the basis that the Systems Administrator has been to multiple Cheltenham meetings, and recently tried Newmarket for the first time, and that I like looking at horses as long as none of them fall over and get killed, and that there would probably be lots of happy dogs among the crowd, and it would be a thoroughly English rural spectacle, we thought we'd give it a whirl.

Entrance to the car park, or rather the field where you park, was up a single track lane which people were simultaneously trying to use as an exit.  We didn't think that was a good idea.  Even at Fakenham they have a one way system.  The field had until very recently been used to graze sheep. You could tell this from the liberal sprinkling of sheep droppings, and the flock of displaced sheep running about in the middle distance.  The lane was lined with bluebells, it was all extremely bucolic, and there were lots of dogs.

The near side of the course was lined with cars, mostly four wheel drives, and crowds of people in tweed jackets consuming picnics, red trouser quotient moderately high.  I was half expecting someone to tell us that we were on the wrong side of the rope and needed to go and stand somewhere else with the hoi polloi, but nobody did, and we worked out that there was no right side of the rope.  I guess you just need to be a registered hunt member to get your car that close to the course.  In between races, and even when the horses are on the far side of the loop, you can walk across the course to view from the middle, and we did, some of the time.

The atmosphere was very jolly, the crowd covering the full age range from three to ninety-three, and there were indeed lots of dogs,  mostly very well behaved, apart from one that ran on to the course during a race, and a labrador with a red lead that was found wandering, according to the announcements over the tannoy.  Terriers are definitely in vogue among the point-to-pointing set. It's as much fun looking at the dogs as it is the horses.  Like at Fakenham, you can go and stand right by the parade ring and see the horses before each race close enough to pat them as they go by, though you wouldn't.  And you can stand right by the jumps, so we did that, watching them take off for one race and land for another.

The race card was confusing, since several horses were entered for more than one race, the trainers and owners only deciding at the last minute which they were going for, and in the main ladies' race one jockey was down to ride three different horses, which would have been worth seeing.  No horses fell, though some riders were unseated.  The SA said that it was not quite the same as seeing them come over the last fence four abreast at Cheltenham, but agreed that it was lovely.  I just like watching them galloping about and jumping, and am happy when none of them get injured.  I suppose I am relieved when the jockeys get round unscathed as well, but after all they are volunteers, while the horses are conscripts.

The Systems Administrator placed one bet, putting twenty pounds on a second favourite at four to one, which the SA said was a good price.  It was more than I'd have bet myself, given that neither of us had a clue what was going on, but the SA had done OK at Newmarket and was betting with bookies' money.  The bookie immediately slashed his odds, followed by all the other bookies in the row.  Obviously a thin market.  I suspect the SA of having done it on purpose, in order to be able to recount the tale of single handedly shifting the odds at subsequent racing gatherings.  The horse lost, so that was the end of the day's betting.

We left before the last two races, the penultimate one having only two entrants anyway, to miss the worse of the fight to get down the narrow lane, and because the wind was getting cold.  As we left we passed one solitary car going the other way, trying to get in.  I shouldn't think they had a hope.

Addendeum  Shock, horror.  According to this evening's Telegraph, Branston Pickle is saltier than seawater, containing 4 grammes of salt per hundred grammes of pickle, equivalent to two thirds of your daily allowance.  But surely nobody eats 100 grammes of Branston at a time.  Out of curiosity I have just got our quite large jar out of the cupboard, and it is 520 grammes, so to get your 4 grammes of salt you'd have to eat a fifth of a jar in one go.  Er, I don't think so.  In a tablespoon or so of pickle there must be more like a gramme, which if you cook from scratch and don't add salt to most things is probably fine in the context of a meal.  The body does need some salt, just not too much of it.

a grand day out

Christy Moore was absolutely brilliant.  I was confident that the music would be good, having listened to enough of his recordings over the years, but I didn't know quite what a charismatic stage performer he was.  Though, given the rave reviews the papers gave his previous Royal Festival Hall appearances, and the Amazon reviews of his live albums that comment on the atmosphere at his gigs, I knew he must be pretty good.  He is extraordinary, part musician, part comedy Irishman, part shaman.  Declan Sinnott is a highly skilled guitarist, and they had signed up an excellent percussionist, but it was Christy's show.  They announced at the outset that there would be no interval, and I was amazed when suddenly it was the last number, and I looked at my watch and two hours had passed.  The encore stretched to four or five more songs.

Dramatically, one long sweep of music worked better than breaking the mood by having an interval. I did feel a twinge of sympathy, though, for anyone with a weak bladder or other bodily needs that meant they needed a loo oftener than two and a half hours.  I laid off the caffeinated drinks from lunchtime onwards, to be on the safe side.

We made a day of it, and kicked off with a swift visit to the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in Islington.  I've been meaning to go there for years without ever quite getting round to it, and their current exhibition of Georgio de Chirico ends this weekend, so it was my last chance to see it. I have had a soft spot since childhood for his vaguely surreal paintings of deserted classical squares, with their architectural ambiguities and incongruous details.  The temporary exhibition focuses on his sculptures.  Suffice to say that Il Duce would probably have liked them.  We didn't, but I'm glad I saw them, finding them ugly and vaguely repellent, but interesting.  The same went for the permanent collection.

The Systems Administrator's reward for indulging me in a visit to a small gallery of twentieth century Italian art was to be taken to lunch at Gem, our Kurdish restaurant of choice.  I had a delicious aubergine thing, while the SA is still trying to work out how they stop their lamb kebabs from falling to bits.  They serve a sort of fascinating stuffed bread, which I think I could try at home, and if we go there again I might try asking the owner what sort of rice they serve.  It has much fatter grains than the usual long grain rice, but is not as sticky as risotto rice or pudding rice, and I liked it very much.

We had thought to go to the Cabinet War Rooms, but after looking at the queue decided to save those for a quiet winter's day when we might share them with fewer visitors and get more of the atmosphere.  Instead, we went and looked at Westminster Abbey.  Confession: it was the first time I had ever been inside.  If a building with comparable historic associations were to be found somewhere that we were on holiday for a week, I would have visited like a shot, but because it's in London, it's always there, and it costs eighteen pounds to go in, I never did.  It is incredibly tall inside, and the gothic tracery of the ceiling is fine, but honestly the best bit is the tombs.

They are squeezed into side chapels like a series of mad, overcrowded junk shops.  The Howards and the Percys have their own chapels, while others contain unlikely bedfellows.  It's a nice touch putting Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I together, united in death as they never were in life.  Brave General Wolfe gets a gigantic and lavish monument, but space is so tight that a heroic young man who died in a sea battle off Bengal is squatting on the back, partially obscured by a set of reposing figures in doublets.  Those who died more recently mostly have to make do with slabs on the floor, and I was touched to see Clem Attlee commemorated near his personal friend and political ally Ernie Bevin.  According to Wikipedia, since the early twentieth century remains have had to be cremated before being interred, because space is getting tight, the only exceptions being the Percys (of course), on account of them having their own vault.

Westminster Abbey is an Old Peculiar, answering to no diocesan bishop, and the Church of England, not being allowed to call the tune, does not pay the piper and contributes nothing towards the running costs, according to the leaflet I picked up.  On that basis I can see why the entrance fee is as high as it is.  In the economics of the arts, one Westminster Abbey entry equates to half a Christy Moore concert, who is in turn worth less than the RFH's most expensive classical pianists this April.

the experimental cook

I made another rhubarb pie last night.  We've got the rhubarb, and I had some cream that needed using up.  I bought the cream on Monday, and only noticed as I stood in the checkout queue that it was relatively short dated, with just two days to go.  I couldn't face abandoning my shopping on the conveyor belt and holding up the queue while I went to root around to see if I could find a pot with a best before date a week hence, so stuck with it.

The pudding did not come out the same as previous attempts, but bad scientist that I am, I changed two variables at once so can't tell you why that was.  My first change was to interpret the instruction to add a pinch of cream of tartar to the egg whites more liberally.  I was not brought up to add cream of tartar to whisked egg white, and am not clear how large a pinch is, but yesterday I made it the amount that forms a pile on the end of a teaspoon handle.  Which doesn't sound very scientific either.  My set of steel measuring teaspoons goes down to 1.25cc, and it would be easier if Diana Henry could give some guidance in terms of fractions of a teaspoon.  1.25cc is a quarter.

The egg whites whisked up beautifully, voluminous and silky, so I think that using cream of tartar in a more than symbolic quantity made a difference.  Thinking back to domestic science at school, which I actually thoroughly enjoyed, despite the thinly disguised view of the school and my parents that it was only meant for the academically less able, I could remember a laborious explanation of sorts as to why I should heat the milk when making mashed potato, but nothing about cream of tartar.  After consulting the oracle of Google I am little the wiser.  It stabilises egg whites when whisked, allowing them to hold more air and withstand heat better, and it does this by affecting the way the proteins interact with each other as they are denatured by the mechanical stress of whisking, but that's not really an explanation, more a long winded description.

However, I then made a second change, which was to substitute single cream for the milk in the recipe.  I only needed 150 ml for the pudding, but bought a 300 ml carton because that was all that I could see, thinking vaguely that I'd use the rest to make a quiche, without really focusing on the fact that the Systems Administrator was going out, I was going out, and there wasn't going to be an occasion for us to eat the quiche before the cream went off.  I looked hopefully at the pot, but it didn't say Suitable for Home Freezing.  I could have poured the second half down the sink, but that seemed a waste, and I suddenly thought that I could use it in the pudding instead of milk.

Perversely, this brilliant and frugal solution only occurred to me after I'd driven down to the village to buy more milk, because when I came to cook and looked in the fridge there was almost none left. I left a little note on the kitchen table in case the SA got back while I was out, having visions of the SA finding a Marie Celeste kitchen, with the ingredients and utensils spread out on the table, my laptop fired up with the recipe, but no cook anywhere on the premises.  The petrol to drive to the village probably costs about the same as half a pot of Waitrose Essential single cream,  but there you go.

The pudding mark III, fired up with cream of tartar and enriched with extra dairy fat, rose up extraordinarily, bursting open like a round of soda bread that's been scored across with a knife before cooking.  Once cooled, it collapsed unevenly, leaving a slightly sunken top cracked like a limestone pavement.  It tasted fine, if anything slightly creamier and more lux than the original recipe, but looked pretty dodgy, not something you would serve up at a supper party with pride.  Though at least it looked so bad it would be pretty clear that you had gone to the trouble of making it yourself, and weren't passing caterer's food off as your own.  Apparently people do that, though why you would go to the trouble of inviting your friends to your house and then lie to them beats me.

Anyway, that's breakfast for the next five or six days sorted out.

seven and half years to establish. Is this a record?

There was a slight frost on the lawns in the back garden, and I was relieved when I saw that once again the new leaves of the dahlias standing in their pots outside the greenhouse had escaped unscathed.  By rights they should still be under cover, but there is no room for them in the greenhouse, except under the staging where they spent the winter.  It is too dark for them there once they come back into growth.  I have left them under the bench in previous springs, and they have grown long and lanky stretching up in search of light.  Etiolated, a marvellous word.  It takes so long to say, and sounds like stretching, ee-tee-oh-lated.  If their first leaves do get caught, I expect they'll recover, since the ones in the bed have coped in the past with being eaten and scratched up by the chickens for days, if not weeks, before we hit on the method of putting black mesh along the front of the bed to keep them off.

I spent a happy morning spreading mushroom compost on the long bed, crumbling it around the clumps of grape hyacinths and lifting their leaves clear.  By lunchtime I'd got through nearly five bags, and we only bought twenty-three the last time we took the truck up to the garden centre for a bulk load.  Still, it was bought to be used, and isn't doing the garden any good sitting on the back of the truck.

A Moonlight Holly, Ilex aquifolium 'Flavescens', which I planted as long ago as November 2006, finally looks as though it is getting going.  That has to be a record, even for this garden.  Holly is generally slow to get away when planted out of a pot, though plants sown in situ by the birds can be quite fast, and the soil in the long bed is sandy and peculairly infertile.  I dug in organic material when I planted the holly, and periodically watered, fed and mulched it thereafter, but all that happened was that one after another branches dropped their leaves, flirted with the idea of making some new ones, and then died.  I kept cutting out the dead twigs, and at its nadir the holly stood at approximately four inches tall.  Finally, it must have got its roots down, or last autumn's aggressive feeding programme followed by a wet winter did the trick, because it has now doubled in size.  I nearly dug it out several times, but never did, because I could see that it was trying, and it is not an easy variety to get hold of.  I don't think the plant centre ever had any more after I bought that one.  It is a female form, whose young leaves are suffused with soft yellow, a pretty thing.

In the afternoon I sowed some beetroot, broad beans, peas and two sorts of lettuce in the vegetable patch.  I have yet to keep them watered and weeded, and it's a long way from here to harvesting any edible vegetables, but it's a start.  I haven't cleared all the beds yet, but thought I'd better plant something in some of those that were ready, otherwise it'll be July, and I'll have a blank plot with no produce, even if I've reduced the number of weeds.  The pots I sowed in the greenhouse are starting to germinate, so there should be some more beetroot and broad beans, plus courgettes and leeks.  I rather draw the line at onions, because they are so cheap in the supermarket and I can't believe I could tell the difference between home grown and shop bought, but we get through a fair few leeks.  I have grown them in the past, quite successfully, and courgettes, though not since I bought a little book called What Shall I Do With All These Courgettes.  That put an effective hex on the courgette project, and I haven't managed to grow one since.  I think last time I tried, something chewed half way through the stems of the plants, and drought finished them off.

I am shadowed at all times by a robin, or series of robins.  Perhaps they are communicating with each other, like the watchers in a spy drama.  She's come out of the house again.  She's going up to the compost heap, over to you.  Suspect is weeding.  Alert, suspect has been joined by a ginger cat. One even comes into the greenhouse, which makes me peer about nervously when I'm watering in case by now there is a nest concealed behind a pot, but I haven't found one.

eager anticipation

There is only time for a quick blog post this evening, as I have a beekeepers' committee meeting.  The Systems Administrator has gone to Lords, and it would be pretty antisocial to open the laptop and start typing as soon as I got home.

I made soda bread this morning, because I bought a pot of buttermilk about a fortnight ago when I saw it, meaning to make a raisin bread recipe I saw in the Telegraph, then kept not getting round to it because the weather was so nice for gardening and the milk was very long dated.  However, even dates that seem ages off come around eventually, and the last day for the buttermilk was today.  It's funny looking stuff, like thin curdled yogurt.  The recipe was another by Diana Henry, and again I had to open the wretched Windows Explorer because of the Telegraph glitch that means pages on their site sometimes won't open in Chrome.  When I finally found the recipe again I discovered that it was supposed to be apple and raisin bread, and I didn't have any apples, so it was just raisin.  It was nice, but next time I wouldn't add sugar to the dough as she suggests.  It's quite sweet enough for my taste with the fruit.

After the bread I pottered around the garden gently.  I am still teetering on the brink of a cold, and desperately want not to topple over the edge before Friday.  We have tickets for Christy Moore at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday night, which I booked over a year ago, as soon as I saw that he was appearing there.  Christy Moore has been one of my musical heroes since my early teens, when I was hooked on Planxty, and his gigs with Declan Sinnott are supposed to be quite something.  I had a horrible twinge of anxiety a couple of days ago when I found an email from the Southbank Centre in my inbox headed up Christy Moore concert, in case it was cancelled.  He hasn't been in great health in recent years, but all the email said was that the concert would start at eight and not the 7.30 pm printed on the tickets.

He released an album called Listen in 2009 that got a great deal of attention on BBC radio, and he told a great story in an interview, of how as a young man he'd had a load of albums confiscated by the Garda, because they contained seditious material, then twenty years on one of the policemen concerned popped up at a gig, still with a copy of the album, asking Christy Moore if he would autograph it.  Listen is a very fine album, and includes a good acoustic version of Shine on You Crazy Diamond.  It's a test of a good song if it still works stripped down to one voice and an acoustic guitar, though I don't suppose that Pink Floyd thought they were writing folk music.  The SA's favourite is the Ballad of Ruby Walsh, which we always have to listen to several times around Cheltenham week.

The next album Folk Tale, released in 2011, includes On Morecambe Bay, about the cockle picking tragedy.  I couldn't believe it when that didn't get the Radio 2 Best Original Song in the next Folk Awards.  Christy Moore is always very quick in interviews to stress that he didn't write the song, and to credit the actual writer.  They was robbed.  It's lucky to get even one new song that good in a year, with lyrics as clever as anything Elvis Costello wrote in his heyday, that tells a proper story and grabs you from beginning to end.

And that's all.  I need to dig the earth out from under my nails, and I must eat my dinner.  Which is vegetable stew, with sweet potatoes and red pepper.  It is an experiment while the SA is out, and since I shoved it in the simmer oven at lunchtime I hope it has not gone completely to mush.

red in tooth and claw

I am typing this with Our Ginger snuggled up against my arm as he lies purring on the end of the sofa.  In truth he is not so much snuggled against me, as sliding down the sofa and on to me, and he is making it slightly awkward to type.  Ergonomic designs for desk workspace would not include a large cat resting an increasing proportion of his considerable weight on your arm while you type, and it can only be a matter of time before it starts to ache so much that I have to move him.  Or put the computer to one side so that he can lie in my lap, which is what he really wants.

He was not so cute this morning.  As I was putting away some shopping in the kitchen I heard a curious thumping noise from the sitting room.  I couldn't immediately identify exactly what was causing it, but presumed it involved cats doing something they shouldn't.  I went to investigate, and beat a hasty retreat at the sight of Our Ginger with a large baby rabbit clamped in his jaws.  The drumming noise was the sound you get when a rabbit in its dying agony bangs its feet against the base of a grandfather clock.  Bet you didn't know what that sounded like.  Nor did I, until this morning.  Very resonant pieces of furniture, long case clocks.

I demanded that the Systems Administrator Do Something About Our Ginger and his rabbit.  It is deeply unfair to make the dead and half dead things that the cats bring in into the SA's responsibility, but I really loathe gore of any sort, and reason that anybody who spends as much time reading military history as the SA does, and has voluntarily seen Saving Private Ryan, is better equipped to deal with rabbits than I am.  The SA shepherded cat and rabbit out of the front door and round the corner of the house.

The other cats knew that there had been a rabbit, and spent some time sniffing around the base of the clock in baffled desire for the spoils of the chase.  After a while Our Ginger reappeared, sans bunny and looking pugnacious.  Then he sat and yowled in the middle of the drive for a while.  Then he went and got another rabbit.  This time the SA succeeded in heading him off before he got into the house, and he trotted off into the garden with the big anxious tabby in pursuit.  He may have been allowed a share, since not even Our Ginger could eat two entire rabbits in quick succession.

Two-faced, Jekyll and Hyde characters, cats.  To look at him now you wouldn't think that butter would melt.

titivating the ditch bed

This morning I finally planted out a tray of Anemone nemorosa which have been sitting in little pots in the greenhouse for about two years.  You may find plants of named forms of A. nemorosa on sale in the sorts of  nurseries that go for slightly more unusual woodland stuff, especially in the spring, pink and mauve and double ones at around four quid a pop.  The wild white single form is extremely pretty, and available in autumn from some specialist bulb merchants as bags of roots, which come in at a lot less than four pounds a plant.  They don't look like much on arrival, dark brown and faintly shrivelled, and you may feel you would have been safer with a nice plant growing in a pot, but roots are the way to go if you want lots of plants.

I bought a bag of fifty, potted them up individually in three inch pots, and stood them in the greenhouse.  The following spring I was left with twenty or so pots that never grew any leaves.  I planted out the ones that had, wondered whether to blame the bulb supplier or the compost for the others given that I had a dud run of compost around that time, and investigated the contents of the remaining pots.  The roots were still there, now fat and shiny with bulges on them that looked like buds of some sort.  I repotted them in fresh compost, and put them down on a low shelf in the greenhouse to get on with it.  This spring most came into leaf and this was the second batch I've planted.  I have read that Anemone nemorosa is not the easiest thing to establish in a garden, and that one's best bet is to start with a growing plant.  Certainly anything that lurks around underground for a year before showing any visible signs of life must be at risk of having something else planted on top of it in the meantime.

I weeded the ditch bed while I was down there.  Some of the weeds were obvious, especially the goose grass, but there were some just at the first true leaf stage, that looked as though they might have been violets.  I gave them the benefit of the doubt, since I'd like more violets.  Likewise I have to be careful not to scratch up all the primrose seedlings at this time of year.  They have typical wrinkly primrose leaves when they are still very small, so are reasonably easy to identify, but start off awfully tiny, so you have to peer closely.  I think there might be a few bog primula seedlings in the bog bed as well, which would be nice since I never got round to collecting seed from the apricot coloured P. bulleyana, but it will be a faff weeding round them.

The pulmonaria in the ditch bed were starting to flag, and I spent an hour and a half of the evening giving it a good soak, the first time I've got the hose out this year.  It has been a dry few weeks.  I try not to water the garden, except for the pots and recently planted things that haven't had time to get their roots out, but this is the ditch bed's peak season and I'd like to enjoy it.  Come the summer and the pulmonarias can look as tatty as they like, as long as I don't think they're actually dying.  You might not think that something called a ditch bed would need watering at the first dry spell, but while ours is called that because it runs parallel to the ditch along the bottom of the garden, it is about three feet above the level of the water, and not especially damp.

I was pleased to see the lily-of-the-valley has now popped up, and is beginning to run about in proper Convallaria fashion.  I couldn't remember when it normally showed, in this strange spring when things have been so early, and was starting to have tremors of doubt in case the roots had been eaten by some wretched animal.  The Solomon's Seal is coming up as well, its sturdy stems held well apart.  They are now big enough to see, which makes life easier, since it is always disheartening to take a step in the border, and then discover you have snapped the emerging shoots of some precious plant.

galloping about

This really will have to be a swift blog post, as I'm going out in half an hour, and I haven't eaten my supper yet.  I'm going to a friend's concert, and it would really be too antisocial to open up the laptop and start typing as soon as I get back, at half past nine or ten on a Saturday evening.

I finished my garden write-up this morning, giving it a few final tweaks and a polish and sending it off to the editor.  In the end there's only so much you can do.  Mid way through the friendly local lawnmower repair company turned up with the Mountfield on the back of a pick-up.  The man who delivered it looked slightly concerned when he realised that I was the only person available to help upload it.  I saw his point.  You don't want to lift anything heavy or fragile with another person who is going to drop it, and if I didn't know me I wouldn't be reassured by the confident offer of help from a grey haired, five foot four and eight and a half stone middle aged lady.  Fortunately I am stronger than I look.  He hadn't even brought the invoice with him, but said they would send it. After all that I went and weeded the vegetable patch until lunchtime, since I am still persisting in the delightful fantasy that this year I might grow some vegetables.  I sowed some in pots and modules in the greenhouse, but when I looked at them yesterday nothing had come up yet.

After lunch I inspected the bees.  It was technically just warm enough, and the hives are well sheltered from the wind when it's in the south west as it was today, but it wasn't the sort of day you'd want to keep them open for ages, and the light was terrible.  I did mean to buy a small pocket torch to help me see eggs on dull days, but haven't got round to it.  The two colonies made out of the colony that was the first to swarm last year were both showing early signs of thinking about it. The twelfth of April is ridiculously early, but it has been so warm that lots of things are ahead of themselves.  I took out the immature queen cells I could see and gave them both an extra super to provide more room, for bees and honey.  One had already filled a good part of its first super with honey, but it wasn't ready to take off yet, since they hadn't even started capping it.  It will be a race against time now, to see if I can stop them swarming until I've got the honey off.  If they go, it will go with them.  It's a difficult trade-off knowing what you want from your bees.  This lot are swarmy, which is bad, but quick to produce a crop, tough and very forgiving of my beekeeping errors last year, which is good.

Then we went with the truck to collect mushroom compost.  It could be the truck's last summer. The MoT expires in November, and the Systems Administrator thinks that the rust around the front end may be getting so bad that it will be beyond welding next time, or at least beyond welding at an economic price.  We are trying to think of things we could stock up on before it goes.  The SA wants to buy a couple of builders' wheelbarrows, though two seems to me excessive.

Tonight's concert is Dvorak's Stabat Mater and something by Stainer.  I did invite the SA, but it is not the SA's sort of music.  Some other friends are going, and I expect we'll get to speak to our friend whose in the choir during the interval, so it should be a sociable evening, then the SA and I will have a sort of delayed Saturday night when I get home, possibly spilling over into Sunday morning.

more cake

This week ended up as a mad whirl of social activity by my standards, as I met friends this morning for a coffee in a local garden centre, Craft Nurseries on the road from Lawford to Colchester.  The friend who organised the get-together has recommended it in the past, as having some nice plants and a good cafe, run by friendly people, but I'd never got round to paying a visit.  Sure enough, it was very nice, and I am honour-bound to go back, since today's organiser suggested we make it a regular thing and picked up the tab this time round.  I had not left the house intending to eat a piece of cake, but it seemed against the spirit of the outing not to join in, and I can recommend the sticky plum and date, though it was their apricot and coconut cake which won a prize in some contest for garden centre tea rooms.

I did not need to buy any plants at that moment, but their huge range of pelargoniums and fuschias looked very promising and I'll be back at some stage.  Altogether the place felt as though it had received a lot of investment, with a spic-and-span air that you don't always get in garden centres, and I was impressed.  The economy and the weather in the past few years have both been unkind to the garden retail industry.

At home the Systems Administrator refitted the wheelbarrow and lawn tractor wheels, but there was no sign of our friendly local lawnmower repair man with the Mountfield.  He left a message yesterday on the answering machine, sounding rather harassed, saying that he might be able to get it to us late today, but that was evidently optimistic.  The lawnmower repair shop in Colchester had a sign up saying the wait time was currently three to four weeks, so if we get it back next week we'll still be doing well.  The grass almost grows while you look at it, and does need cutting rather desperately, though I suppose its shagginess has a sort of romantic charm.

I used up my last two bags of mushroom compost.  The truck is on charge so that we can go and get a big load tomorrow.  I laugh that the SA takes me on all the best dates and knows how to show a girl a good time, but the fact of it is that I want a truck load of mushroom compost.  Just at the moment, offered a choice between a trip to get mulch and lunch in the garden centre's agreeable cafe, I'd take the manure.

lecture and lunch

I was taken today to my first NADFAS lecture.  The acronym stands for the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies, and most of the rest of the committee of the music society seem to be members.  I'd never heard of it, and was initially rather puzzled that they all seemed to be so much into floral art when they talked about seeing each other at the next meeting, until I worked out that it was nothing to do with NAFAS, the National Association of Flower Arranging Societies.  Finally a friend on the committee asked whether I'd like to go to a lecture on early twentieth century Russian art, and I thought, why not.

I recognised the address of the church in Colchester where the meeting was held.  I once gave a woodland charity talk there myself, to a group of National Trust supporters.  The lecture hall was large and well equipped, and none of the organisers on that occasion knew how to work the sound system.  They had to call out the vicar to help them, who did not seem entirely delighted to be dragged away from their supper, or children's bedtime, or whatever they had been doing when the phone rang.

The hot issue today was parking.  The church has a car park, but it is not nearly big enough to hold the number of cars generated by a church full of non-locals.  On-street parking is available, and is currently only restricted to residents for an hour and a bit in the afternoon, just enough to stop people leaving their cars there all day, but space is tight.  Along with the usual requests to switch off mobile phones were heartfelt pleas to not block residents' drives, or park in a way that would impede access by emergency vehicles, otherwise the council would entirely restrict parking to permit holders.  Though if they do they will kill off most of the activities held in the church, which will presumably result in financial hardship for the church as well as difficulties for the events organisers.  Colchester is not well provided with facilities for club meetings and lectures, as we have found when trying to find somewhere for the beekeepers to meet in the evenings.

I had expected to recognise the church, as I've been there before, but hadn't expected to recognise quite so many of the audience.  The present and past committee of the music society were out in force, and a great hunk of the regular concert audience.  In fact, if all else failed I thought they might as well move the meeting out of central Colchester and simply hold it in the village.  I was delighted to bump into a charming former colleague from my City days, actually very former as we worked out that I'd left the firm and he had retired in 1996.

The lecture was very good.  Early twentieth century Russian art, while trying spasmodically to be essentially Russian, owed a great deal to Paris, but Paris was the artistic epicentre of the western world in those times.  I had not heard of most of the artists, apart from Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall, but I liked what I saw.  By a beautiful irony, given what is going on in the Ukraine, 2014 has been officially designated as the bi-lateral UK-Russia Year of Culture.  William Hague and Sergey Lavrov signed up to it in March of last year.  There are all sorts of events scheduled, as listed on the Russian Art and Culture website.  You have to wonder whether William Hague and the new Culture Minister will now be so keen to attend them now.

After the lecture my friend introduced me to a fairly new Colchester restaurant that I didn't even know existed, one of those post-industrial chic places, with tables made out of sawn planks, raw metal lampshades, and menus served on hardboard clipboards.  My fish pie and honeycomb pudding with coconut ice cream were delicious, and I am completely unable to eat any supper.

I collected my two tyres on the way home, and the chap in the service department insisted on carrying them and the remains of the bottle of tyre sealant out to my car for me, so that I wouldn't get my tweed jacket or my dress dirty.  I could get used to being a lady who lunches.

a safe arrival

My tickets for the Chelsea Flower Show arrived this morning, which was a good thing.  Given my lack of faith in the postal service I always worry in case they have been randomly shoved through some other local letterbox.  This time they arrived relatively early, and so I hadn't started worrying yet, but I would have, very soon.  It is my grandest day out of the entire year, besides being horribly expensive, and it would be a crushing blow if the tickets did go astray.  I am not at all confident that the RHS and the vast commercial ticketing agency they use would offer replacements, not like LSO St Lukes, who when I rang them to explain that two sets of lunchtime concert tickets had never arrived just said to say what had happened on the door.  I did, and the very sweet junior arts administrator behind the desk let me in, but I can't see the high vis jacketed security goons on the turnstiles at Chelsea doing the same.

We are definitely not the only people to be suffering from colds.  The friend I was due to meet this morning for coffee had to postpone for that reason.  Mine is not developing into anything very exciting, but then, this one doesn't seem to, just hangs around the edges like somebody unpopular at a party making spasmodic unsuccessful attempts to join in.  You think they've given up and left, or at least found someone else to talk to, and then suddenly there they are again at your elbow with another story with an unfunny punchline.

I tottered out into the front garden, and raked the weeds out of the paving by the pond, and brought over the pots of tulips.  They are coming out, and it seems a waste to have them blooming largely unseen outside the greenhouse.  In a fit of optimism I got the cafe table and chairs out of the garage as well.  The whole ensemble looks quite like something out of The English Garden, viewed from the right vantage point.  The cracks of the paving are still full of oxalis roots, which it is impossible to extract completely, and I must try and remember to run over them occasionally with the new sprayer.

The replacement tyres for the wheelbarrow and ride-on lawn mower are ready to collect.  I know this because Ernest Doe sent me an invoice.  It seemed very large for two small tyres, but includes fitting, which the SA couldn't do because we don't have the equipment, and of course VAT bumps it up another twenty per cent.  I didn't have any luck tracking down the lawnmower repair man, though, to see if the Mountfield was ready.  It would be handy to have that back.  It is really rather desperate for it to be the ninth of April, and to have no working lawnmower at all.

write up

I have written up the first draft of yesterday's garden visit, and the minutes of the committee meeting, and now it's the turn of the blog.  Doctor Johnson said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money, and I am only being paid for the first of the three.  Still, the rewards the committee brings are non-monetary, not least the sheer entertainment value and the piece of cake I ate in yesterday's meeting, and the art lecture and lunch I have been invited to on Thursday, courtesy of a fellow committee member.  The rewards of the blog are practice.  That, and self-expression, self-censored.

I found myself very reluctant to talk about the garden visit until I'd written about it, and the Systems Administrator sensibly didn't ask.  Somehow I instinctively didn't want to say anything about my memories and impressions until I was able to settle down to go through them systematically, focused on the task in hand of turning them into six hundred words or a shade more of fluent descriptive prose.  I think that as soon as you start describing something, you lose the raw data as it begins to turn into a conclusion.  Rather like cooking an egg, the process is irreversible, and I wanted to hang on to my raw thoughts until I was ready to make my omelette.

Words did not come easily, partly because by the time I got in from the concert it was gone half past eleven and I was still tired this morning, but mainly because my cold is back for another stint. I am getting so thoroughly fed up with these colds.  One or the other or both of us have been suffering since early December, and it is now April, and just as I thought I was clear of them here I am snuffling away again, throat slightly sore, and fuzzy mind stumbling over sentence construction instead of the phrases ordering themselves as naturally as walking.  Though it's not just us: the SA had lunch with a former colleague today, who with his wife has had just the same thing over recent months.  In fact, the former colleague wnet one better and contracted a human form of foot and mouth disease, though looking on the bright side his GP prescribed penicillin instead of shooting him and burning his body on a pyre.

It took a long time, but I have the bones of the narrative, and will have another go at smoothing out the syntax later in the week.  It was probably also more difficult to write about than the previous two gardens because it was twice the size, and would have been much easier given twice the word count.  As it was, it was hard to describe the main features and organising principles without lapsing into an estate agent's list of features.  The garden benefits from extensive lawns and herbaceous borders with mature trees, plus a large pond, rose pergola and productive orchard. When what gives the narrative colour is partly being able to include the fact that the owner allows wild ducks to nest in the flower beds.

The minutes seemed to go on interminably, even though I was trying to be crisp and terse, but so did the meeting.  It didn't help that one committee member overslept after an afternoon nap following a busy weekend and arrived twenty minutes late, while another was over an hour late for reasons that were never explained, but then wanted to broaden out the discussion into why the village hall couldn't be expanded.  I didn't include that bit in the minutes.

another garden

I made it to this morning's garden with plenty of time to spare, as the A12 had decided to behave wonderfully, and I didn't get lost.  It was a very nice garden, and they were very charming people, and that's all I want to say about it.  I shall sit down after breakfast tomorrow to write my piece, and I don't want to go over the memories before then and smudge them.

I took pages and pages of notes, not trusting entirely to memory.  One of the most useful things I was taught doing O level Geography was to always take a pencil to write with on field trips.  They continue to work in the rain, and don't run.  It did not rain so much as I thought it was going to, or as much as it has at home.  The weather system is moving eastwards, and I must have nipped in almost ahead of it.

As I was early for the appointment, I had a look at the local church, which was sweet and old, Grade I listed, and unlocked, to my great pleasure.  It has suffered from various travails over the centuries, from the Puritan iconoclasts to a lightning strike that destroyed the top part of the tower, and the great storm of 1987 which blew off one entire end of the building.  It had the air of a building that was greatly loved and valued, though I couldn't work out how anybody was supposed to be married or buried there nowadays, because there seemed to be absolutely nowhere to park.  I tucked my car on to the verge on a broadish piece of the main thoroughfare, which was still very rural and not very wide, having rejected the other lanes around the churchyard as simply too narrow, and was mildly relieved when I got back to the car and didn't find anybody complaining about it.

It is all go today, since I'm off out again shortly for a music society committee meeting, and in the evening my father and I are going to the Colchester Arts Centre to hear a fine pair of traditional musicians, Nancy Kerr and James Fagan.  She is a second generation English folk musician, who sings and plays the fiddle, while he is Australian, sings and plays the bouzouki.  It should be good.  I will tell you tomorrow if it is, as you will have the chance of a second bite of the cherry, because they are playing in Harwich next week at The Electric Palace, which has found a sideline as a folk venue.

It was rather a waste that everything ended up happening on the same day, or at least that the committee meeting did, otherwise I could have stopped to look at one or two nurseries on the way back, or gone to see my father's cousin in Aldeburgh.  Oh well, another time.  I am not sure I am a great deal of use on the committee, but do at least take reasonably competent minutes.  Writing those up will be my second task tomorrow, after I've done the first draft of the garden visit.

catching up with the accounts

It was not supposed to rain this morning, according to the Met Office five day forecast, but it did.  I had just finished sorting out the cats' breakfast, and the chickens' sprinkle of porridge oats with Value sultanas, and their water, and their food, and my breakfast, and washed up the small accumulation of mugs and glasses by the kitchen sink, when the circular pattern of ripples on the pond told me that it has started to rain.

At least it gave me time to catch up with the beekeepers' accounts, though it I'd known it was going to rain for most of the morning I would have got dressed properly, instead of sitting at the kitchen table in my gardening thermals and a dirty t-shirt with large holes in the cuffs.  Still, at the end of it the accounts were complete right up to the end of March, though I was sorry when I realised I'd missed Pienaar's Politics on Radio 5 Live.  The Systems Administrator introduced me to this quite recently, and it delivers a better quality of debate than you generally get on the Today Programme nowadays.  John Pienaar does not interrupt his guests, and nobody talks over each other.  This might be due to his civilising influence, but I think it is also because if they try to, he switches their microphones off.  Evan Davis, take note.

I had rhubarb pudding again for breakfast, this time with a conventional sponge, because I couldn't find any lemons in the fridge to flavour the whisked egg white-batter version, though after the SA had gone shopping with a list that included unwaxed lemons I found two in the bottom of the salad drawer, so we are now rather long on lemons.  I don't know whether rhubarb counts as part of your five (or seven, or ten) a day, since you would have to be a real masochist to eat it without a generous helping of the devil-food sugar.  When first introduced to this country it was not regarded as a food stuff, but a medicinal purge.

We had the other half of last night's leek and mushroom tart for lunch, with salad made out of whatever was left over in the fridge, which turned out to be cucumber and tomatoes, because the SA had forgotten about the flan and so didn't buy any more salad.  I jazzed mine up with a few olives.  Then we shared what was left of the grapes, which probably didn't come to a portion each, whatever a portion is, but we topped them up with two small oranges.  Tonight the SA is roasting a joint of pork, with which we'll have sprouts, carrots, parsnips, roast onion and apple sauce from the largest Bramley I think I have ever seen.  I have no idea how many portions all this adds up to, but I should think it's enough.  Fruit and vegetables are rather like the rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  The monster is not behind the rabbit: it is the rabbit. So vegetables are not something you add to food: they are the food.  Or at least, largely the food, since I am looking forward to the pork, and the SA does mean crackling.

Tomorrow I am booked to go and see my next garden, over the Orwell bridge and up into Suffolk.  It is forecast to pour with rain all day, so I am hoping the Met Office has got that wrong as well.

out with the old, in with the new

I have dug out the Hemerocallis which suffered from the untreatable midge problem so that they never flowered.  The pests are Hemerocallis specialists, so far as I know, and it's a nice question how they got into the garden, when we are several hundred yards from any other gardens.  They lay their eggs inside the flower buds, which become fat and distorted, and either fail to open, or produce ugly, deformed flowers.  If you break one open you will find it full of horrid, wriggling, pale coloured maggots.  There is no effective spray available, or at least not to amateur gardeners, and anyway I don't like applying pesticides wholesale.

The pests persist in the soil from year to year, presumably as pupae, and friends have told me of people who successfully broke the cycle by removing every flower bud for a season, so that the mites had nowhere to lay their eggs when they hatched out, and so there was no follow-on generation.  I considered this plan, but rejected it.  The pest reached the garden once, so it could do so again.  The easiest solution seems to be to grow only the later flowering varieties, which are apparently less affected.  I have no idea why the pest doesn't take full advantage of the growing season, but if it doesn't, it doesn't.

It felt very wasteful digging up the clumps, which had got quite large, and throwing the roots into a bag to go to the tip, when there was propagation material enough to make dozens of plants, but non-flowering Hemerocallis are no use to anybody.  Gardeners, like novelists, need a sliver of ice at their hearts, and to have an eye for the overall garden picture, which means being willing to get rid of plants that are not contributing.  That is a tough call.  Even though you paid money for a plant, or went to great lengths to obtain it, or desperately love it when you see it growing well somewhere else with different conditions to your garden, if with you it is a sorry, ugly, non-performing consumer of space then you are making your garden less than it could be if you allow it to remain. Nature and artifice, red in tooth and claw.

I had already bought an Alstromeria to go into one of the spaces, once I'd dug the Hemerocallis out. The flowers are an agreeable mixture of pinky-brown and yellow, called 'Rhubarb and Custard', and I picked it up last year when I saw it flowering in a one litre pot.  I moved it on into three litres, and it spent a happy few months in the greenhouse, making a massive rootball in its new pot.  I hope it will be equally vigorous let loose in the light soil of the border.  The hybrid Alstromeria seem to like our free drainage, though they must have full light, and I have lost one as the surrounding shrubs have grown, changing the nature of that border from open ground to woodland edge.  I have not done nearly so well with the species A. psitticina, which seems far less vigorous.  That's a pity, as I like its weedily exotic red and green flowers.

I was obliged to buy a new border spade the other day, as I managed to break the handle of my old one.  I bought a new handle for the broken one as well, in the hopes that the Systems Administrator might fit it, but needed something for immediate use.  The new one has a stainless steel blade that makes light work of slicing through Hemerocallis roots, and is altogether so much nicer to use than my old one that I realise I should have gone stainless ages ago.  It would still be worth fitting the new handle to the other spade, though, to have a spare and for situations in which I would rather not use my best stainless steel one.

ks-16 completed

I was a trifle hasty when I said that I'd assembled the pump handle of the sprayer, apart from inserting the split pins, since that implied that the split pins were a trifling detail.  In fact I managed to put them in the wrong places, and left out the metal washer, and it is a tribute to the quality of pin provided that I was able to straighten one of them out to extract it and then bend it again, twice, without the arms breaking.  It was only when I got on to the hose and lance assembly, and looked at the baffling collection of assorted neoprene washers, that I found the attachment clip I'd been unable to locate to complete one of the previous steps:

7  Fit the attachment clip over the end of the handle and between the flanges of the green tank base.

Maybe you would instantly recognise an attachment clip when you saw one, but I didn't.  It turns out to be a circular loop of plastic with a section cut out,that fits round the very end of the pump handle, and a bulge on the inner face that slots into the hole in the handle I thought I had to put a split pin through.

The instructions did not explicitly mention the neoprene washers, but I could see them in the parts diagram as tiny smudges approximately the size of a full stop.  I asked the Systems Administrator, who said that every joint in the pipework of the spray hose and lance must have a washer, or it would leak.  The washers all seemed to be of different sizes, and there were slightly more washers than joints, so it was not immediately obvious what went where.  Or, indeed, how to get the washers on or in when doing up the joints.  Eventually the penny dropped that, far from persuading the washers to sit snug up against the ends of the hose, I needed to ease them over the slight bulge at each end so that they would fit in the very bottom of the locking sleeves I was trying to do up.

Then I fitted the trigger back to front, before checking again with the diagram and turning it round, and the knapsack sprayer was assembled (apart from the metal washer, which I decided was not critical enough to be worth undoing the split pin for again at that moment.  I know we do not have any spare split pins, because I asked the SA, who promised to get some).  The SA suggested testing the sprayer with plain water, so that I could see where it leaked.

Reader, it did not leak.  At all.  Not from the hose, or the trigger, and no liquid bubbled out of the filling cap.  And as soon as I released the trigger it stopped spraying, with no drips.  It does not cover a very wide area even with the spray head set to maximum spread, but is so precise I could hit one emerging creeping thistle stalk in a border.  Which is handy, because I have quite a few creeping thistles coming up.  I was thrilled, and amazed, that I had managed to choose and assemble a piece of machinery that actually seemed to work.

It is designed to be worn on your back, and I probably will, although it does have a carrying handle, since that leaves one hand to wield the lance and the other to pump, and avoids the issue of putting the sprayer down on an area you have already sprayed, and then being unable to put it down anywhere else because it has weed killer on the underneath.  The shape feels quite comfortable against the spine, although I will not fill it right up, because it has a capacity of 16 litres, and apart from the fact that I'm unlikely to need that much spray at once, it would weigh 16 kilos, which is ridiculous.

The SA was impressed that the intake to the pump was right at the bottom of the tank, but so it should be, otherwise you would not merely waste the last bit of each batch of spray, but be left with the problem of how to dispose of it, given that the correct way to dispose of excess herbicide is to apply it in the normal way, which is tricky if your sprayer won't spray.  I am still not entirely clear about what is going on inside the tank, but I think the key difference between this sprayer and my previous one is that the domestic one worked by pressurising the entire tank, hence the infuriating herbicide bubbles that emerged around the tank lid, while this one contains the pressurised part of the system within the main body of the tank, so if there are any bubbles they are contained.  I am worried about Maintenance and Safety instruction 3, To replace the cup washer on the piston of the air pump, but I'll cross that hurdle when I come to it.

Addendum  The new kettle is very nice as well, fast and extremely quiet.  It even has a padded handle, for goodness sake.  Modern civilisation is wonderful sometimes.

getting technical

I'd forgotten that I'd left a partially assembled semi-industrial knapsack sprayer on the hearthrug, until I came in at half past six from weeding the vegetable patch and found it there.  I have bought it because the only way I am going to keep the nettles along the side of the wood under control, and ensure that the meadow is mown up to the rabbit wire, is to use glyphosate, for which I need a mechanical sprayer.  A little hand held one is fine for the odd dandelion in the paving, but hopelessly inadequate for the scale of the problem.

I don't especially like the idea of using weedkiller.  A couple of years ago I spent a long time digging out nettle roots by hand, but they have come back.  I spent an equally long time cutting back the brambles that had advanced over and through the rabbit fence into the meadow.  It is impossible to mow right up to a fence, and the brambles took full advantage of the un-mown margin to root when the tips of their questing branches touched down.  The Systems Administrator responded by only mowing to the edge of the bramble thicket, and so the brambles gained ground.  I simply don't have the time or energy to keep digging and chopping out either brambles or nettles, so a chemical solution it will have to be.  It will still leave about 99.99 per cent of the property gardened organically, or at least with no applications of herbicide or pesticide.

I used to have a pump-up sprayer, but it was aimed at the domestic market.  That is to say, it did not work properly.  The lid of the pressure chamber screwed in like the top of a thermos flask, and by the time you had got enough pressure to spray, foam bubbled out from around the top, getting on your hands and dripping at random on plants other than the intended target.  It was basically rubbish, not fit for purpose.  I have seen professional gardeners using proper sprayers, and they do not bubble and drip.  On the other hand, full blown professional knapsack sprayers retail in three figures, and I did not want to spend over a hundred quid on a piece of equipment that I was only going to use occasionally for short periods.

I ended up on the website of a company specialising in turf care equipment, and went for their entry level model, described as being for semi-professional use, and sounding as if it was aimed at people like me, those who want something that works, but aren't going to give it a real pounding using it all day, every day.  It set me back something under fifty pounds, including delivery.  Pricing my own labour at the minimum wage, this felt like a good trade-off between expenditure on equipment and time saved.  It arrived by next day delivery.

In bits.  I had not really imagined quite how many bits.  Systems Administrator and I agreed that it would better if I assembled the sprayer myself, so that I had full ownership of it and understood how it worked.  I got the bits out of the box, and looked at them, while the SA began to intone Henry Reed's Naming of Parts. This is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see when you are given your slings.  And this is the piling swivel, which in your case you have not got.  Part one was the handle securing ring.  After half an hour I was still not sure I had identified the handle securing ring correctly, let alone worked out what it did, or how and which way up I was supposed to fit it to the top of the air chamber.

It took me about an hour and a half to complete assembly instructions one to five, at the end of which I had attached three components to the tank, and still had not inserted any of the split pins. However, I think I have managed to fit the pump handle correctly.  That only leaves the spray hose and lance to go, so I feel I'm on the home straight now.

are you getting your five a day?

The great British media has heard the latest research on how much fruit and veg we should all be eating for our health (if you believe the research, given the obvious difficulties of investigating the link between diet and health, such as that people might tell the researchers what they think they ought to be doing, or that levels of  fruit and vegetable consumption might be associated with other lifestyle factors that also influence health).  The media has heard it, and doesn't like it.  Are They Having a Laugh? demands Victoria Lambert in the Torygraph, while Zoe Williams in the Grauniad seems to believe that the increase in recommended intake is a plot against the poor.

I don't think the official guidelines are being raised, or at least not according to the BBC.  Somebody somewhere in Whitehall has presumably worked out that when most people are failing to meet the standard already set for them, setting an even more demanding target is likely to be counter-productive.  Already I can see the eyes of many of my nearest and dearest glaze over at yet another message from the government about what we ought or ought not to be doing, to ensure that we live well into our old age to be a burden on the State.

The BBC news report did make eating five portions of fruit and vegetables in a single day look curiously difficult and off-putting.  Fruit was represented by a plate containing a banana, which is an inherently ludicrous form of food as demonstrated by that disastrous photograph of David Miliband, and a giant orange, unpeeled.  Vegetables were represented by a second plate of raw and apparently unrelated items, that didn't immediately suggest anything you could cook out of them, but looked like the ingredients in some bizarre cookery challenge, in which contestants had to make a meal out of a cabbage, some custard powder, a tin of baked beans, and some porridge oats. Either that, or they conjured up dispiriting visions of munching one's way through endless piles of carrot sticks.

If the BBC wanted to help the cause of the nation's diet-related health, in its role as State broadcaster, instead of carping from the sidelines like the broadsheets, maybe it could have approached the vegetable question from the other end, and shown us some food we might actually wanted to eat, before surprising us with how many vegetables it contained.  All around the world, and for most of human history, people have eaten and are eating vegetables.  Many of them are exclusively vegetarian, and for the others the vegetables are what makes the expensive meat go further.

For example, I don't remember the BBC's plate of veg including an onion, and yet it is practically impossible to make any sort of meat sauce or stew without starting with some onions.  They are nourishing and comparatively cheap.  Nor did the BBC mention that pulses are vegetables, in its let's-get-a-cheap-laugh-at-the-impossibility-of-eating-all-those-veg feature.  So, take chilli con carne, you have onion, tomato, beans, put in a red pepper and you're already up to four portions of vegetables.  A very basic tomato sauce, onions, tomato, celery, gets you up to three before you start doing anything with it.  We had a shepherd's pie last night, onion, peas, carrots, potato.  I suppose the health police have decided that potatoes don't count as vegetables because otherwise people would claim that chips and crisps counted as part of their five a day, but that's nonsense. They contain vitamins and fibre, especially if you eat the skins, and if they contain some calories, well, you need to get some of those from somewhere.  Better a potato than white bread, probably.

We'll be eating up some two-for-five-pounds Waitrose ham for lunch, with salad, as it's a warm day. That's lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and I've got a box of red grapes for pudding.  Purple food is good for you, it's the anthocyanins.  So that's four portions of fruit and veg sorted, and I could easily have added olives, or spring onions.  Later in the week we'll be having a leek and mushroom flan, that's two vegetables, plus salad, another two or three.  It is really not that difficult to consume three or four of your five a day at either lunch or supper, or to have fruit of some sort at breakfast, if only dried in muesli.  It would be nice if the media would stop mocking and hand wringing, and adopt a slightly more can-do attitude.

a lovely day

Isn't the sunshine wonderful?  Well, it is in north east Essex.  I believe it was cold and gloomy in Aberdeen.  We had warm air, with a sprinkling of Sahara dust on the cars to prove it, and gentle sunshine, with a breeze so light that the wind turbine on the neighbouring farm gave up.

I went and bought a bootful of bags of spent mushroom compost, just to keep me going.  It was a leisurely purchase, since the senior member of the family who runs our friendly local garden centre came over for a chat.  He initially recognised me without being able to place me, and I ceased filling bags while we established that I really did want mushroom compost and not something else, and precisely where I lived and what sort of soil I had.  He used to deliver loads of chopped bark to us, many years ago, and I think he is the father of the woman who gave us a bulk discount when we took the truck up to buy compost a few weeks back.  I now know that she lives in Wivenhoe, and think I have discovered her name, unless I have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.  Local mushroom compost for local people.

After lunch I went to open up the bees, as it was more than warm enough.  Two colonies are building nicely.  They were the result of splitting the fastest-growing and earliest swarming colony last year, so they have good increase in their blood, though already the bees in the two hives look different, one having more fat, golden bees, and the other more small, dark ones.  A third colony was not going quite so fast as I would have expected, and I wondered whether I should take a sample and have it tested for one of the diseases that can cause slow build-up.  On the other hand, they were slow to get going last year, and I got a crop eventually.  There was no sign of chalk brood, a fungal infection that has plagued them in the wet years.  The last colony had no queen, when I checked on a warm day in mid March, and I am moderately optimistic that they might have made themselves a new one from the frame of fresh eggs and young brood I gave them.  I didn't see her, but the cells in the centre of that frame were polished as if ready for laying.  And they seemed in a good mood, whereas colonies without a queen tend to be aimless and tetchy.  I shall see.

In the latter part of the afternoon when the Systems Administrator got back from a walk, I actually stopped gardening, and we sat under the great white cherry, Prunus 'Tai-haku'.  After getting on for twenty years it really is big enough to sit under.  When first planted it was almost dwarfed by the bench next to it, and for a few years under that you had to use your imagination, because even when your head was under the canopy your legs still stuck out, but by now it is a proper umbrella, the bench nestling at the heart of it and looking quite small.

It is a good tree for sitting under, having a spreading habit.  The flowers are individually large, and are held in big clusters that tend to face downwards, so that from underneath you can stare up into them, outlined today against a pure blue sky.  They are very attractive to bees as well as us, and so the whole tree hums gently.  I pruned a few of the lower branches last summer, so that the SA would be able to get under it on the lawnmower without being smacked in the face, and there is now just the right amount of headroom, enclosing but not oppressive.  The SA is attached to it in memory of his late father, who planted one in their garden when the SA was very little.  I like ours because it is so beautiful, and the spreading shape works very well as a fulcrum where we have it towards the centre of the garden, with grass and borders curving around it.

a stitch in time

The bad news is, the rabbits are on the loose in the meadow.  There are an increasing number of droppings in the turf.  The good news is, they have not re-excavated the large scrape they had started, which I filled in the other day, using up some old compost and half of a bucket of earth left over from making planting holes in the gravel.  The scrape was an example of how a stitch in time would have saved nine.  It started off as a small hole in the ground, perhaps made originally by a mouse, which we noticed while mowing the long grass at the summer's end a couple of years ago when wasps began to come out of it.  Wasps build nests out of paper, which is why you may see them rasping away on your wooden shed or table, but they do not excavate holes, so far as I know.

Something, presumably badgers, then dug out whatever was living in the hole after the wasps had finished with it.  I went up there one day, and there was an open hole, rather smaller than a bucket. I kept meaning to fill the hole in, but never got round to it over the winter, as we weren't cutting the grass.  Then, suddenly, something used the hole as a starting point to dig diagonally down and sideways.  I had fits of horror that it might be badgers, before calming down and looking more analytically at the spoil.  While the digger had made a great mess kicking orange sand and stones out over the grass, the volume of material was not great enough for the hole to go any distance.  I scraped as much of the earth back in as I could, salvaged the stones for use elsewhere, and levelled it off with spare soil and compost, crossing my fingers that whatever it was would take the hint.  It did, and thank goodness for that.

I began to clear the enormous mound of rampant white stemmed bramble stems that I'd built, carting them up to the bonfire area, and chopping them down into shorter lengths when I got there, so that the Systems Administrator would be able to put them on the bonfire without accidentally waving a fifteen foot burning brand about.  The SA's initial reaction to the heap had been one of almost pure panic, demanding to know what on earth it was, where it had come from, and how we were supposed to get it to the bonfire, since most of the individual stems were twice the length of the trailer.  I promised in my best soothing and reassuring voice that I would deal with it.

Luckily, or perhaps presciently, I had stacked the stems in bundles lined up with each other, so it was relatively straightforward to scoop them up into large armfuls and carry them to the bonfire, where I chopped them into between two and four pieces and threw them into a nice, manageable pile ready for incineration.  I sawed up some of the stack of light branches outside the workshop with my bow saw as well, while I was at it, until I had a wheelbarrow full of firewood.  The  bow saw is so good.  It should be written in giant capital letters in all general and introductory texts on gardening, Do Not Tolerate Blunt Cutting Instruments.  Bow saws, pruning saws, buy a good one and be prepared to replace the blade regularly, each time you realise it is not chewing its way through wood so quickly as it used to.  The time I have wasted in my life trying to cut branches out of shrubs with a saw which was essentially blunt.

The Systems Administrator meanwhile, in a nice piece of role reversal, volunteered to do a really thorough vacuum.  The vacuum cleaner had to be emptied seven times, so great was the volume of cat fur, and the SA is beginning to think that we need a new one, with a larger capacity, better suction, and filters that don't clog up so readily, not to mention not having a stupid internal fluff box stuck together with gaffer tape.  Alleluia.  I have already ordered a new kettle from John Lewis.

a garden visit

I took my parents to the Chatto gardens this morning, by way of celebrating Mother's Day.  My first idea was to go out to tea, but the timings of coffee work better: walk round the gardens, coffee and cake in the cafe, wander round the plant sales area, parents home in time for lunch and an after-lunch nap.  There was only one row full in the car park when we arrived, and my father expressed surprise that the garden could pay for its upkeep with so few visitors, but experience working at the plant centre teaches me that Sunday mornings usually start quietly, and given the clocks changed last night, while it was technically five to eleven in human terms it was still only five to ten.  Sure enough, by the time we left the main car park was fairly full, and there were plenty more vehicles in the overflow area.

The gardens were looking very good.  There were plenty of spring flowers, and not yet too many leaves, so that the landscape had an airy, ethereal quality.  I was greatly taken by the swathes of a powder blue squill in the border along the far boundary.  They were very pretty, and appeared to be naturalising freely, despite the competition from the oaks along the edge of the garden. Unfortunately they weren't labelled, and I didn't know what they were.  I shall have to try and spot them in this year's bulb catalogues.

Equally delightful were the clumps of Fritillaria verticillata in the gravel garden.  The whole plant is a charming shade of light green, leaves, flowers and all.  I wanted to buy some last year, but neither Kevock nor Peter Nyssen were offering it.  Mind you  if they had it would probably have ended up being eaten by mice in the cold frame, with most of my other fritillaries.  Alas, the pheasants have eaten the flowers of most of our snakeshead fritillaries.  I am afraid the pheasant problem is getting worse as our cats get older, and don't go out much.  Our Ginger did appear briefly this afternoon in the back garden with a fat mouse, and Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat spent the entire afternoon asleep in the rose bed, but not much feline patrolling goes on nowadays.

My mother was rather taken with a light flowered Symphytum.  It is a pretty thing, but I had to warn her that it ran rapaciously, and was really a plant for large gardens with tracts of space to cover rather than small town gardens.  I have it in the meadow, where it has run about remarkably on horrible poor soil where almost nothing will grow.  It is an excellent bee plant, which is a bonus.

After the Chatto visit I busied myself planting out various odd things I've bought recently, or had in the greenhouse over the winter.  I must try and remember where I put them all, or at least remember to check my gardening diary for what I've planted, if we get a dry spell, so that I can water them.  I am trying my luck with Selinum wallichianum, an umbellifer I saw and greatly liked at Trentham last September.  The Chatto gardens had packets of seed for sale.  I wonder whether my lone plant will set seed, or if I should buy it a friend?

the ghost in the machine

We finally set out to cut the grass.  It has got much too long, with the warm weather, but first of all the ground was too wet and soft to put the mower over it, and then it was Cheltenham week, and then the Systems Administrator went down with a cold.  Once the grass is that long and lush it has to be done with the push mower, as the lawn tractor just clogs up, and the push mower has a cord start.  I have always been hopeless at starting lawnmowers, outboards or anything else with a cord. It is probably down to ineptitude and lack of technique, though the fact that I'm only five foot four with correspondingly short arms may not help.  The SA is six foot, and makes cord starts look easy. The Mountfield has barely been used since the first cut of last year, and I didn't fancy my chances. Anyway, I was busy doing everything else, and the SA did promise to do it, once we had a couple of dry days.

The mower didn't sound happy about life.  I am no petrol head, but even I could tell the engine wasn't running properly.  It kept getting louder and quieter, and stopped every so often without being told to.  It made it all the way round the top lawn on a high cut, but then stopped.  And wouldn't start.  After checking the air filter the SA diagnosed a problem with the fuel system, and admitted defeat, saying it would have to go to Ernest Doe.  I have never been very keen on Ernest Doe since the time they returned the previous lawn tractor after a full and very expensive service, just before a Bank Holiday weekend.  We were both still working full time in London, the forecast was for dry weather, and I was desperate to get the grass cut.  The newly serviced mower would not work because a drive belt had been fitted incorrectly, and I was told that I would not be able to have it over the weekend.  I was very, very cross.

Far closer to home, in a converted farm unit, are GB Farm Services, who were originally recommended by a beekeeping friend, and who once sorted out a chainsaw for us when old fuel jellied in the tank for a remarkably modest charge.  I didn't really expect anybody to be there at four on a Saturday afternoon, but rang on spec.  Twenty minutes later a chap had come round in a pick-up to take the Mountfield away.  That's less time than it took the AA to arrive, the last time I needed them, when the Skoda suddenly began to make terrifying grinding noises so that I didn't dare drive it any further in case I was doing untold damage to some part that would cost an arm and a leg to replace.  The lawnmower man said he presumed we would like the Mountfield back as soon as possible, and we said yes please, and off it went.  I'm not sure the SA was entirely heartbroken not to be able to go on mowing the lawn, as it meant he could watch the rest of the cricket instead of merely listening to it on headphones.

It's a nuisance not having the mower when we need it, but you could say it serves us right for not getting it serviced in February.  At least it can be mended.  My pet hatred is when part of something breaks, so that the whole thing has to be thrown away, or is a pain to use, when the broken bit is a really small part of the whole.  For example, the zip on my gardening fleece has just stopped zipping.  The rest of the garment is fine.  It is made out of a good, thick fabric that hasn't ripped on the rose thorns, it has a neat little zip-up front pocket that I like because I can keep my house key in there, if the SA is out and I'm working out of sight of the house.  The only thing wrong with it is that suddenly it no longer zips up.  Mending it is scarcely practicable, since the fabric would be so thick to sew through, and a replacement zip would probably cost as much as an entire fleece from the Clacton factory outlet shop.  But it galls to have to throw something away that so nearly works.

Likewise the kettle.  It has a window in the side so that you can see how full it is, very cute, and a blue light when it's switched on.  The window has sprung an intermittent leak.  The element still heats up, the kettle is capable of fulfilling its basic function of boiling water, but every so often it slowly dumps half its contents on the kitchen worktop.  I'm getting tired of having to mop up, and this lunchtime it started dripping boiling water on the cat when I made a cup of tea.  I can't see a way of mending it, since any sealant would have to withstand boiling temperatures and be suitable for contact with food, so we're going to have to get a new one.

And the vacuum cleaner.  It is not a Dyson, but doesn't use paper bags.  Instead, there is a removable plastic box that collects the dirt and cat fur, which you take out to empty.  The bottom of the box was held on with a plastic hinge, which broke very early in the vacuum cleaner's career, so is now hinged with gaffer tape, which makes it difficult to get the box back into the body of the machine without the door falling open.  If the box isn't properly shut then the machine doesn't develop full suction.  It is infuriating.  The engine, the real business heart of the vacuum cleaner, works perfectly well, but the functionality of the whole machine is impaired by the failure of one small, stupid, cheap plastic part, which it would have cost pennies to engineer properly in the first place.

Compared with all of these, the failure of the Mountfield and rapid the deployment of my knight in shining armour from GB Farm Services, seem positively benign in comparison.

small change

It's terrible how long the little things end up taking.  My collection of raffle takings and tea money from the beekeepers' meetings had risen to two of the proper bags for change that banks give you, one paper bag labelled with a post-it note, and a small tupperware box, plus another bag with seven pounds in it from sales of wax to members, and fifteen pounds in notes from Friends subscriptions. Since we get no interest on our current account, and are not down to our last fifty quid, I'd kept putting off going to the bank while the lovely gardening weather continued, but I was beginning to feel guilty about it.  Besides, I ought to work out what's due to the person who buys the prizes for the raffle, and raise a cheque for her for the next committee meeting.

It took quite a long time to count and double count the contents of each bag.  If I had to count change on a regular basis, making up a float or something, I suppose I'd be quicker, but I wanted to be absolutely sure I'd got it right.  Once I was satisfied that the beekeepers' cash came to exactly one hundred and five pounds and sixty pence, not a penny more, not a penny less, I thought that as I was going to the bank to pay in change, I might as well swap out some of the beekeepers' pound coins for part of our ever expanding collection of small change.

We can't be alone in having one of these.  Small showers of loose change spill out of the Systems Administrator's pockets while sitting down, especially since Marks and Spencer seemed to decide to improve margins in menswear by 0.001% by economising on the amount of material used in trouser pocket linings.  The coins get scooped out of the sofa and dumped on the coffee table, then end up in a couple of pots on the window sill in the study.  Useful pound coins and silver are recycled for car park machines, and to have the right money at the farm shop, while the collection of coppers and five pence pieces grows.

It takes ages to count out five pounds worth of five pence pieces, and almost as long to organise a pound in pennies, scrabbling for them among the other contents of the pots.  There turned out not to be enough two pence bits to make up a round bank bag total as specified on the bag, so they had to wait for another day.  In the end the grand sum of eleven pounds of small coins from the pot went off to the bank, replaced by eleven useful pound coins.  But god, it took ages.  Those machines in Tesco that count the coins for you, if you just chuck them in, and give you a voucher for the total, less commission, suddenly seem a bargain.

The bank took ages as well, as one of the two cashiers on duty was having such a lovely chat with the customer she was serving that she completely stopped doing any actual banking, so that they could both concentrate on their discussion of dancing at parties, and which West End shows they'd been to.  As the queue behind me lengthened to five people I glared at her, and she gave me an offensively radiant smile, and told her customer how everyone should perform a random act of kindness each day.  I thought that her's might have consisted in getting on with her job so that the rest of us could go and get on with our days instead of standing in a queue.  It's probably just as well that the other cashier was free first.  The happy couple were still chattering away by the time I'd had my hundred and five pounds and sixty pence counted again.  The woman at my window was much, much faster than I'd been, though the money was by then counted into bags, she did have scales, and she gets more practice than I do.

making mead

It's another late, quick blog.  I was busy earlier, and since the Systems Administrator is up in town for a reunion curry with old colleagues, I knew I'd be able to sit down at the kitchen table with my laptop when I got in from the beekeepers' monthly meeting without seeming anti-social.  The SA is accustomed to living with the blog, and will enquire genially 'whether you've blogged yet' before settling down to read or watch TV through headphones if the answer is 'not yet', but it still seems unfriendly to disappear out for the first part of the evening, and then behind your keyboard as soon as you walk in through the door.

I have been learning how to make mead.  It sounded much simpler and more achievable than it did the previous time I went to a mead-making lecture, when I emerged completely ignorant, and more confused than I had been at the beginning.  I think the previous lecturer assumed we all knew the basics of home wine-making, which I don't, whereas tonight's speaker assumed that we knew nothing.  He gave us mead making made simple, so no citric acid or any of the other umpteen chemical additives I thought I would have to go and get from a specialist supplier.  This was natural mead, made with honey, water, ordinary baking yeast and flavoured with oranges and spices.  The only chemical needed was Milton for sterilisation.  I'm OK with Milton, I use it on the ice cream machine.

Our tutor claimed not to know the capacity of the demijohn he was using, but it must have been around the gallon mark.  In it he put four pounds of honey, one orange cut into eight slices like at half time in hockey, approximately twenty-five raisins (which apparently add body to the mead), cloves, mixed spice, nutmeg and a cinnamon stick, plus one teaspoon of baking yeast.  He filled it most of the way up with bottled water, shook it vigorously, fitted an airlock, and said that after three or four days the initial fermentation would be complete, after which we should add water to fill it right up, and leave it somewhere dark for a month or so until all signs of fermentation had finished.  Then we should syphon the contents into another demijohn, leave it to settle, and bottle it.  Mead started now would be ready to drink by Christmas, and it would keep for up to four years or so.  It was OK to use old honey, or not the best honey.

And that was it.  He made up a second batch in which the demijohn was replaced by a large mineral water bottle, and the airlock by a plastic bag with one very small hole poked in it, held on with a rubber band.  Apparently there are lots of recipes on the internet.  He assured us that the oranges would shake out of the demijohn very easily, and an audience member said that she had done a similar recipe, and used a bucket for the initial fermentation stage, then filtered the oranges and lumps of spice out when transferring it to a demijohn to complete its fermentation.  There seemed a general consensus in the room among those who had tried it that mead was not that difficult, though one member had managed to punch a hole in his parents' hot water tank in his youth, putting bottles of fermenting liquid closed with screw caps in the family airing cupboard. (He did go on to have a successful career as an industrial chemist, so his youthful enthusiasm for experimentation stood him in good stead in the end).

Before going to the lecture I cooked and ate a small red cabbage I'd had sitting around in the cupboard for ages, as the right moment to inflict it on the SA never arose.  I adore red cabbage, fried in caramelised sugar and simmered with wine vinegar, raisins and caraways seeds, but the SA is not so keen.  And before that I managed to fit in my Pilates exercises, load the washing machine and set the dishwasher, make another rhubarb pudding because the first one was so nice, and weed almost all of two beds in the vegetable garden, as I am once again indulging in the fantasy that this year I might grow some vegetables.

And before all of that I went into Colchester to sort out an ISA for the current year, which I had not got round to doing before because interest rates were so pathetically low, but it still seemed worth locking in the tax allowance for future years, when rates might be higher.  I am an existing customer of Halifax, and was expecting this to be an extremely swift process, since I already knew I wanted the two year fixed rate, they already knew who I was, and it should have been a case of the Halifax filling out a very simple online form, and my writing a cheque.  It actually took over half an hour, most of which consisted of me sitting watching the Halifax representative going round and round in circles on her computer, because it would not let her open the form she wanted. Everything you have heard about IT system problems at RBS is almost certainly an understatement.

my name in print

There is a copy of one of the regional glossy magazines on the kitchen table.  We don't generally buy it, being rather mean about paying for print media when there is so much for free on the internet, but this one has my name in it, above an article about a Yellow Book garden.  I have already submitted my copy for next month, and dates to visit the next two gardens are in my diary.  I am being paid to do this, and have become, on an epically small scale, a horticultural journalist.

The way I got the gig was that my former employer advertises with the media group, and it so happened that I'd written a four hundred word blurb about their snowdrops for inclusion in the magazine.  That is the deal, sometimes, with regional magazines: if you pay to advertise, you may get space for some more cover if you supply your own copy.  My employer did not like writing, whereas I do.  So I emailed the magazine, saying that I was the person who wrote the snowdrop article, and was there any chance of doing some more garden writing for them on a freelance basis? It turned out that the editor felt their gardening cover was a bit thin, and didn't have anyone reliable to do it.  I promised that she would find me utterly reliable, and she decided to take the chance.

The magazine supplied the names and addresses of the gardens to write about, so all I had to do was fix a date with the owners to see the garden and ask them about it, then write it up in six hundred words.  Six hundred words is really not very many, less than two sides of A4 at spacing of one and a half lines.  The snowdrop piece was four hundred, and I ran that off in forty minutes.  I was quite familiar with the snowdrops, and the garden, so it was pretty straightforward, but it had a couple of phrases I was pleased with.  My fee for this unacknowledged feat of journalism, based on my hourly rate for writing (which was better than my hourly rate as a plant centre assistant), came to the princely sum of eight pounds.

The deadline for submitting the copy on my first garden was the end of February, so I fixed the meeting for the twenty-first.  A week seemed to me an age to write only six hundred words, and I thought it would be easier to work out what was in the garden and what it was going to look like by visiting season if I visited later rather than earlier, to give the plants more time to get going.  The chosen time was two, since I thought that if there were a frost, the owner would not want a visitor's feet stamping over their frozen grass.  Then I had fits of anxiety for the whole of the four weeks until the visit.  Suppose I were ill again, or the garden owner were ill, or the garden was flooded?  I had visions of the A14 being locked solid on the day, and left the house with hours to spare, so that I could not possibly be late to the meeting, and spent some time looking at Hedingham Church, some time sitting in the car, and a while drinking tea in a strange cafe attached to an alpaca farm.

The owners were very pleased that their garden was going to be in the magazine, and the owner was obviously used to giving guided walks, as he kept up a good line of patter, and I got more material than would ever have fitted in six hundred words, without having to ask many questions.  I did have a check list of points I wanted to cover, or at least establish were not relevant, to make sure I didn't get home and realise there was some fairly basic key fact that had escaped me.

Always try and learn from your experiences.  I made sure my next visit was timed with two weeks to go before the deadline, so that if anything went wrong there would be time to retrieve the situation, either by rescheduling that visit or by the editor finding another garden.  I have also learned not to drink very much tea with my breakfast on garden visiting days, and to keep a weather eye out for available lavatories.  It would not create a professional impression to arrive on a stranger's doorstep to see their garden, and immediately have to ask if you could possibly use their loo first.

Writing a six hundred word article on a garden is just like writing a presentation.  Introduce the garden, where it is, what style of garden, how long the owners have been there.  Something about the plants, something about the soil, the hard landscaping if it's worth mentioning, a little about pests and problems, artworks or propagation if applicable, a summary at the end.  Get a few quotes, and be prepared to lead your witness on their favourite plants and what other local gardens they like, if your editor has asked you for these items.  I asked my first owner what his favourite plants were, and he smiled and said he liked all plants.  The second owner seemed slightly nervous in case I was going to criticise his garden in print, but I wasn't.  Apart from the fact that it was a very good garden, my job is not to pick faults, but to make it sound as nice as I can, so that readers of the magazine will go and visit it, or go and visit some other garden, or at least experience a warm glow as they congratulate themselves on living in such an attractive part of the world.

I have found my best time to do the write-up is straight after breakfast the following day.  I tried after getting back, and found I was too tired to finish it.  When I picked it up again, the joins showed, and it took longer that if I'd completed it in one hit.  Then I sit on it for a day, and re-read it cold to check again for typos, and any errors or boobs that I missed first time round.  In the second piece, I found I'd left the owner's name out of the first paragraph.

I have been building up to this for a long time.  If gardening and visiting gardens since childhood, and notching up over twenty-five Chelsea visits, and spending a decade selling plants to people, and a horticultural degree, and practising writing the blog daily for over three years whether I feel like writing or not, doesn't equip me to become a garden writer, then nothing will.   I renewed my car insurance this morning, so had to tell them that my details had changed since I was no longer employed as a retail assistant.  When they asked what I did instead said I was now a horticultural journalist, so it's official.  All I have to do is to sell my services to some more publications, and hope that my existing editor wants to carry on after the current Yellow Book season.