I can't keep up. I really can't. I am so much not a digital native I feel I know how Pocahontas felt when she was transplanted to London. And I am not even stupid. Just very, very baffled. The only consolation is that the Systems Administrator is baffled as well, and the SA is normally good at digital devices.
The new tablet arrived. It is the cheapest Amazon Fire I thought I could get away with while being able to see the screen, which meant an HD8. More than half of the icons on the Home page are for Amazon features, but I'm OK with that: I do not regard Amazon as the Great Satan. The SA assured me that the Amazon branding was the price I paid for something with the functionality of the Amazon Fire being as cheap as it was.
It arrived with my Kindle library already downloaded, because I told Amazon when I ordered it that it was for me and not a gift. I was perfectly happy with that, not that I normally read books on my tablet because I like reading on the Kindle. Something about the quality of the screen and the fact that there are so few buttons is very soothing. I managed to link to my email account in no time at all, it was just a question of putting my address and password into a box that popped up the first time I touched the email icon. This was digital technology for non technology minded people, so far so good. The Amazon branded App store let me download my favourite Sudoku programme as the SA had promised that it would: we checked on the SA's device that Amazon offered that app before I decided on the Fire.
I wasn't utterly convinced by the concept of the Silk browser, because I am a creature of habit and I use Chrome, but the SA said we could download Chrome later. I really didn't understand why Silk took me to a BT page, twice, after I'd clicked on a link to the film review programme, and gave the device to the SA to look at. It did the same to him as well, and the SA began to sound irritated, then it stopped doing it without the SA knowing why, or why it had been doing it in the first place. Never mind, it then let the SA access the BBC website and download the most recent film review podcast, which took a few minutes.
And then I couldn't find where it had put it. Could not find a folder for podcasts anywhere. Could not find a section in the help page that would tell me how to start looking. If you wanted to know if a stone had a mouth, how would you know where to look? Wittgenstein (if it was Wittgenstein who said it), where are you when we need you? The Amazon Fire comes with a series of pages after the Home page, books, video, games, shop, apps, music, library. Books was self explanatory and had my books in it. Video was empty because I hadn't bought any, and probably won't. I don't think it does justice to any film worth watching at all to try and watch it on a screen that size. Games contained my solitary Sudoku, which is the only game I ever play. But where the hell were podcasts? The old tablet had a down arrow icon on the front page that brought up a list of all of them, arranged in date of download.
I gave the tablet back to the SA who began to fiddle with it while emanating bad vibes. Not as bad as when reinstalling the operating system on an errant PC, but not happy positive vibes. Eventually the SA announced that podcasts were filed in music, not on the front page which is all adverts for albums I might want to buy (but don't) but in the library of the music section. Of course they are.
The next time I fired up the tablet it came up with a page for Ceebeebies, followed by a link to a shop to sell me accessories for the tablet, while the button for the home page had vanished. Swiping sideways didn't get me home, while swiping down from the top brought up a menu including Airplane Mode, Blue Shade (what is that?) and Camera. In despair I chose Settings. I didn't want any of the Settings options, but it did have the little round Home button at the bottom of the page. The SA reminded me that I'd taken the cheaper option with adverts at the start of every session. Which turns out to mean often, as the tablet powers down jolly quickly (though maybe I can alter that using Settings). I did notice before ordering that it is possible to upgrade retrospectively for another twenty-five quid or so so as to not have adverts. At the current rate of progress I may be doing so. Why any advertiser thinks it helps their cause to ram adverts in people's faces that slow them down when they are trying to do something else, and with no prior reason to believe they want to shop for that sort of thing at that moment, is a total mystery to me.
Meanwhile my phone had come up with a message saying it needed to do a software update and I would have to delete some data or unused apps to create sufficient memory space. I was baffled again. I don't have any data. I don't even use the phone as a camera. All it has on it is half a dozen text threads. The SA explained that it was not that sort of data but the mess that was left over from having previously used maps and so on, and that anyway the memory of my phone was not very big. The SA cleared the digital mess out and ran the update, following which the home page looks entirely different. I am sure I will find my way round it eventually, and the SA has promised to show me how to de-gunk the phone for next time. Tomorrow, when I have not already overdosed on new technology.
I really can't keep up. I am going to read a book. A printed one made out of paper.
Monday, 24 October 2016
Sunday, 23 October 2016
planting and tidying
I finally finished planting the knapweeds and mallows in the daffodil lawn, intermittently inspected by kittens who came bounding across the grass to greet me before tearing up the oak tree. I ended up locking them in the house after lunch, so that I could cut the last bits of straggly grass under the tree and along the line of the hedge without fear that I'd accidentally lop Mr Fluffy's feet off. They were all lounging about digesting and looking relaxed and not as if they were about to go anywhere, but through the glass door I could see Mr Cool beginning to panic as he realised that he was locked in. It took less than an hour to finish the grass, once I didn't have to mind what I was doing so carefully, and as soon as Mr Cool was allowed to go back outside he no longer wanted to.
The Systems Administrator managed to get the mowers over the top and bottom lawns. We haven't had much rain in the past couple of days, but the dew overnight is pretty heavy by now, and the grass wasn't drying during the day. It's still all surface moisture. I planted some old polyanthus left over from last winter's pots by the front door, that have been sitting in individual plastic pots all summer, and digging down four or five inches the soil is still dry. The daffodil lawn is bone dry too along the strip closest to the hedge, and unless we get some proper rain fairly soon I can see the hose coming out again.
I was very pleased with myself for tidying up the mess of old compost bags and assorted dump-bound rubbish that had accumulated behind the woodshed, so that there was space to put the hose away in a series of big loops on the ground. It wasn't doing anything for the appearance of the garden, having got into the habit of leaving the hose snaked around the edge of the drive to whichever area I was last using it, and I needed somewhere where it could be coiled and uncoiled reasonably quickly and easily. I hadn't reckoned with my efforts giving the Systems Administrator a nasty fright with the boiler, as I stacked bags of waste waiting to go to the dump too densely around the flue, and the boiler cut out. It had done the same a few days previously, and the SA seemed to have fixed it by removing the Parthenocissus shoots that had started twining around the metal cage protecting the flue and vacuuming dust out of the exhaust. Not knowing that I'd moved things around near the flue, the SA was spooked when the boiler did it again.
I planted my bag of a hundred Crocus tommasinianus in the bottom lawn, to bulk up the existing display. A hundred bulbs didn't seem to go very far given the size of the lawn, and I wondered if I should have ordered more. Five hundred, or stop pussy footing around and order a thousand. Five thousand! I add some more bulbs every year or two and the display is building up, though I still don't feel it's achieved critical mass. I only ordered a hundred this time partly on grounds of cost, but largely because I thought planting five hundred bulbs might just get too soul destroying, not to mention hard on the wrist. I note with envy those interviews in magazines with owners who claim to have planted a few dozen crocus bulbs some years ago, and now have sheets thanks to naturalising. My crocus are still nowhere near being a sheet. Maybe mice find them and eat them, even in the lawn. Or the grass is too vigorous for them to self seed.
The Systems Administrator managed to get the mowers over the top and bottom lawns. We haven't had much rain in the past couple of days, but the dew overnight is pretty heavy by now, and the grass wasn't drying during the day. It's still all surface moisture. I planted some old polyanthus left over from last winter's pots by the front door, that have been sitting in individual plastic pots all summer, and digging down four or five inches the soil is still dry. The daffodil lawn is bone dry too along the strip closest to the hedge, and unless we get some proper rain fairly soon I can see the hose coming out again.
I was very pleased with myself for tidying up the mess of old compost bags and assorted dump-bound rubbish that had accumulated behind the woodshed, so that there was space to put the hose away in a series of big loops on the ground. It wasn't doing anything for the appearance of the garden, having got into the habit of leaving the hose snaked around the edge of the drive to whichever area I was last using it, and I needed somewhere where it could be coiled and uncoiled reasonably quickly and easily. I hadn't reckoned with my efforts giving the Systems Administrator a nasty fright with the boiler, as I stacked bags of waste waiting to go to the dump too densely around the flue, and the boiler cut out. It had done the same a few days previously, and the SA seemed to have fixed it by removing the Parthenocissus shoots that had started twining around the metal cage protecting the flue and vacuuming dust out of the exhaust. Not knowing that I'd moved things around near the flue, the SA was spooked when the boiler did it again.
I planted my bag of a hundred Crocus tommasinianus in the bottom lawn, to bulk up the existing display. A hundred bulbs didn't seem to go very far given the size of the lawn, and I wondered if I should have ordered more. Five hundred, or stop pussy footing around and order a thousand. Five thousand! I add some more bulbs every year or two and the display is building up, though I still don't feel it's achieved critical mass. I only ordered a hundred this time partly on grounds of cost, but largely because I thought planting five hundred bulbs might just get too soul destroying, not to mention hard on the wrist. I note with envy those interviews in magazines with owners who claim to have planted a few dozen crocus bulbs some years ago, and now have sheets thanks to naturalising. My crocus are still nowhere near being a sheet. Maybe mice find them and eat them, even in the lawn. Or the grass is too vigorous for them to self seed.
Saturday, 22 October 2016
out and about
I went last night to my second Studio Music concert at Brightlingsea. I knew how the furniture was arranged this time, and by dint of arriving early managed to nab myself a chair on the ground floor giving a view of the musicians without having to peer through the banisters. They were a cello and piano duo, James Lisney and Joy Lisney, who had had a nightmare journey to north Essex after leaving London at three and arriving at twenty past seven. True professionals, they did not let this outwardly ruffle them and appeared to be genuinely delighted to be playing on a Friday night to a tiny audience in what was basically somebody's front room, but I hope that they managed to get something to eat at some stage.
I enjoyed their recital very much. You get something of what the sensation of a nineteenth century salon must have been like, sitting so close to the musicians with the front row practically within touching distance. We got Bach's sixth and most difficult cello suite, two early pieces of Chopin, some Schubert, some Ligeti, and some Brahms. My initial uncharitable reaction when I saw on the programme that the first piece after the interval was by Ligeti was to hope it would be short, and it was, but I surprised myself by enjoying it. It was the first time I ever heard slide cello and it is a fabulous sound. I must confess I had not heard of either musician before this concert series, which signifies little since I haven't heard of all sorts of people, but I see from Joy Lisney's blurb that she is a champion of new music and is currently studying for a PhD in composition as well as performing. I shall keep half an eye out in future.
I liked Brahms' violin sonata transcribed for cello so much that I might even buy a copy (Presto Classical's top choice comes bundled with all the rest of Brahms' entire output for the cello for a correspondingly weighty price, but it's also available on Naxos). I was not convinced by James Lisney's claim that Brahms had played it at Clara Schuman's funeral, though, because I was sure I remembered from a Radio 3 programme that he was late to her funeral, only arriving in time for the actual burial, and I don't see they'd have had a piano standing next to the grave. But perhaps he did.
Despite their hideous journey and late arrival at the venue they even played us an encore, some more Chopin. My neighbours in the audience on both sides were friendly, and altogether I am beginning to warm to Studio Music. It is only a quarter of an hour's drive from home, so the main issue is the need to arrive so ridiculously early to get a decent seat (and avoid getting caught by the level crossing at Thorrington).
This afternoon was the last of this year's lectures at the Suffolk Group of Plant Heritage, which was mainly about orchids growing in the wild, interspersed with other wild plants, lemurs, and assorted South African and Madagascan mountains and forests. Somebody else's holiday photos, in fact, but the lecturer was an authority on orchids and possessed of a dry sense of humour. And I bought a tender salvia with white flowers in dark purple calyces, to be a companion for 'Amistad' next year if I can nurse it through the winter in the greenhouse without it getting botrytis. And I stayed for tea and cake, and chatted to various strange people, which is so much easier at a club meeting when you have a common interest to talk about. Sit two keen gardeners down together with a cup of tea and pose the question 'What sort of soil do you have' and we're off.
I enjoyed their recital very much. You get something of what the sensation of a nineteenth century salon must have been like, sitting so close to the musicians with the front row practically within touching distance. We got Bach's sixth and most difficult cello suite, two early pieces of Chopin, some Schubert, some Ligeti, and some Brahms. My initial uncharitable reaction when I saw on the programme that the first piece after the interval was by Ligeti was to hope it would be short, and it was, but I surprised myself by enjoying it. It was the first time I ever heard slide cello and it is a fabulous sound. I must confess I had not heard of either musician before this concert series, which signifies little since I haven't heard of all sorts of people, but I see from Joy Lisney's blurb that she is a champion of new music and is currently studying for a PhD in composition as well as performing. I shall keep half an eye out in future.
I liked Brahms' violin sonata transcribed for cello so much that I might even buy a copy (Presto Classical's top choice comes bundled with all the rest of Brahms' entire output for the cello for a correspondingly weighty price, but it's also available on Naxos). I was not convinced by James Lisney's claim that Brahms had played it at Clara Schuman's funeral, though, because I was sure I remembered from a Radio 3 programme that he was late to her funeral, only arriving in time for the actual burial, and I don't see they'd have had a piano standing next to the grave. But perhaps he did.
Despite their hideous journey and late arrival at the venue they even played us an encore, some more Chopin. My neighbours in the audience on both sides were friendly, and altogether I am beginning to warm to Studio Music. It is only a quarter of an hour's drive from home, so the main issue is the need to arrive so ridiculously early to get a decent seat (and avoid getting caught by the level crossing at Thorrington).
This afternoon was the last of this year's lectures at the Suffolk Group of Plant Heritage, which was mainly about orchids growing in the wild, interspersed with other wild plants, lemurs, and assorted South African and Madagascan mountains and forests. Somebody else's holiday photos, in fact, but the lecturer was an authority on orchids and possessed of a dry sense of humour. And I bought a tender salvia with white flowers in dark purple calyces, to be a companion for 'Amistad' next year if I can nurse it through the winter in the greenhouse without it getting botrytis. And I stayed for tea and cake, and chatted to various strange people, which is so much easier at a club meeting when you have a common interest to talk about. Sit two keen gardeners down together with a cup of tea and pose the question 'What sort of soil do you have' and we're off.
Friday, 21 October 2016
another day, another electronics failure
My tablet died overnight. It was perfectly fine yesterday. I played Sudoku in the evening, and left the tablet on charge overnight so that I could listen to the film programme podcast today while planting mallows in the daffodil lawn. This morning I was all set up to go, trowel, trays of plants in their nine centimetre pots, packet of mycorrhizal fungus, kneeling mat, shears to tidy up the whiskery bits of lawn as I went (keeping an eye out for approaching kittens), big green bucket for the rubbish, radio, jack plug lead, tablet. Lights, camera, action. Only when I swiped my finger across the touch screen nothing happened, and after I'd dried my finger (which was not even wet) and wiped the screen with kitchen roll and spectacle cleaner still nothing happened. The little padlock remained firmly in place in the middle of the screen and that was that.
The Systems Administrator tried every technique in his armoury, from switching it off and switching it on again to attempting to reinstall the entire operating system. Nothing. The tablet is dead, defunct, no more. It had done us pretty well, since I'd had a couple of years' use out of it and before that it was the SA's for about three years, but even so. How dare it break? It had all my film programme podcasts on it.
I am not having a good six months for electronic kit. First of all it was my phone, going into a mad spasm and eating its entire battery in a few hours. Then my iPod went into a fugue so that the only thing it would do was play Philip Glass. And the battery in my garden radio got to the point where it wouldn't last a morning before it flattened. The radio problem was easily solved by installing a new battery, its fourth. I was relieved the SA could refettle it yet again, since it is a good chunky radio. After I bought it the SA was so impressed that he bought an identical one for his bathroom. The model has been long discontinued by the manufacturer, but I think its modern equivalent would set me back pretty close to three figures, so a new battery at twelve pounds something was a bargain.
It didn't seem worth buying a new iPod, when I thought about it. I hate wearing headphones, which is eccentric in this day and age but there it is, I can't help it. And I don't want to listen to music on the move. When I'm out and about I'd like to hear what's going on around me. Eccentric again, but that's how it is. So I listen to the iPod when I'm indoors and stationary, either cooking or ironing. On that basis buying a small CD player was easier and cheaper than getting a replacement iPod. I am slightly sad to see it go on purely artistic and cultural grounds, since an iPod and docking station were featured in Grayson Perry's tapestry The Vanity of Small Differences as middle class signifiers, but I can't see him bothering to include a mini CD player any time soon.
In total I probably don't spend any more on electronic equipment than I do on gardening gloves, but it still riles me when it breaks. Gloves are disposables. Electronics are capital equipment, they are supposed to last.
The Systems Administrator tried every technique in his armoury, from switching it off and switching it on again to attempting to reinstall the entire operating system. Nothing. The tablet is dead, defunct, no more. It had done us pretty well, since I'd had a couple of years' use out of it and before that it was the SA's for about three years, but even so. How dare it break? It had all my film programme podcasts on it.
I am not having a good six months for electronic kit. First of all it was my phone, going into a mad spasm and eating its entire battery in a few hours. Then my iPod went into a fugue so that the only thing it would do was play Philip Glass. And the battery in my garden radio got to the point where it wouldn't last a morning before it flattened. The radio problem was easily solved by installing a new battery, its fourth. I was relieved the SA could refettle it yet again, since it is a good chunky radio. After I bought it the SA was so impressed that he bought an identical one for his bathroom. The model has been long discontinued by the manufacturer, but I think its modern equivalent would set me back pretty close to three figures, so a new battery at twelve pounds something was a bargain.
It didn't seem worth buying a new iPod, when I thought about it. I hate wearing headphones, which is eccentric in this day and age but there it is, I can't help it. And I don't want to listen to music on the move. When I'm out and about I'd like to hear what's going on around me. Eccentric again, but that's how it is. So I listen to the iPod when I'm indoors and stationary, either cooking or ironing. On that basis buying a small CD player was easier and cheaper than getting a replacement iPod. I am slightly sad to see it go on purely artistic and cultural grounds, since an iPod and docking station were featured in Grayson Perry's tapestry The Vanity of Small Differences as middle class signifiers, but I can't see him bothering to include a mini CD player any time soon.
In total I probably don't spend any more on electronic equipment than I do on gardening gloves, but it still riles me when it breaks. Gloves are disposables. Electronics are capital equipment, they are supposed to last.
Thursday, 20 October 2016
going under cover
I was going to start planting the small pots of seed raised knapweed and mallow in the lawn, now there's been some rain to soften the ground. Unfortunately it kept on raining, not a proper steady downpour that would soak into the soil, which I'm sure is still dry a few inches under the surface, just a series of annoying showers each time I'd got my tools out, enough to make everything damp including my kneeling mat, my knees and my gloves. I gave up on that plan and decided to start moving the pots of tender things into the greenhouse instead.
Frost isn't forecast within the next week, but when it does turn cold night temperatures could drop suddenly, and it takes a while to stow everything away neatly, while in the meantime the bursts of rain are making the pots randomly wet. I need to try and make sure when I fill the greenhouse that anything prone to botrytis has as much air moving around it as possible, that plants with fragile branches don't end up next to the narrow path that's all that will be left for access by the time I've finished, and that I can reach all pots needing regular checking and watering while pots that have to be kept dry are put where they won't get accidentally watered. I've never yet got it entirely right.
So this year the pelargoniums are going up on the staging as last year they got a bit damp and mouldy down on the floor, while the fuchsias are going in the corner furthest from the entrance instead of right by the door where they were last year. Fuchsia branches have a heart rending habit of ripping off, taking a long strip of bark with them, if you so much as brush into them. There is not going to be room for everything, I feel this in my bones before I even start, looking at the space and the quantity of pots scattered around the front and back garden.
In order to fit as much in as possible I have been clearing the jumble of oddments from the little shelf above the main staging. In summer it gets too hot for practically everything, apart from a prickly pear I grew from seed years ago and which lives up on the shelf so that it can't spike me or the cats. This year I remembered to water and feed it and it made some new growth, sprouting a couple of fresh green new segments. The old pads are brown and gnarly with age and the attempts of some daredevil snails to graze on them, and I would not say it was a thing of beauty, but I am fond of it. Once I have chucked out the rubbish from the shelf and condensed the useful things down into one little section above the potting tray I should be able to fit some of the vast collection of Puya up there. My garden club is holding a plant stall next May, and I hope somebody would like to buy an industrial quantity of Puya plants, because I hate the idea of throwing them away but overwintering them becomes more of a struggle each time they need repotting.
Every geranium root ball is being checked for root aphid as I stack them away, and as a radical step I have thrown away some infected mature plants if I've got clean rooted cuttings of the same variety. This is partly to save my pitiful last supplies of Provado drench for serious cases, like the dwarf pomegranates which are years old and can't be renewed from cuttings in one season, and partly because I know I'm going to be short of space as it is. I wish the RHS would hurry up and reply to my email, since I'd have liked to have a root aphid strategy planned out before starting to load the greenhouse.
I borrowed the Systems Administrator's dinky new little four wheel garden truck to move the pots since the SA was out. It was bought specifically for hauling wood, and the SA was very clear that it should not be left full of other stuff if I used it for anything else. In fact, the suggestion that if I found it useful I might like to buy one of my own has been made a couple of times. It did still have some geraniums in it by the time the SA got home, but the SA was magnanimous about them, saying they could stay there until the morning. It gets dark so early now.
Frost isn't forecast within the next week, but when it does turn cold night temperatures could drop suddenly, and it takes a while to stow everything away neatly, while in the meantime the bursts of rain are making the pots randomly wet. I need to try and make sure when I fill the greenhouse that anything prone to botrytis has as much air moving around it as possible, that plants with fragile branches don't end up next to the narrow path that's all that will be left for access by the time I've finished, and that I can reach all pots needing regular checking and watering while pots that have to be kept dry are put where they won't get accidentally watered. I've never yet got it entirely right.
So this year the pelargoniums are going up on the staging as last year they got a bit damp and mouldy down on the floor, while the fuchsias are going in the corner furthest from the entrance instead of right by the door where they were last year. Fuchsia branches have a heart rending habit of ripping off, taking a long strip of bark with them, if you so much as brush into them. There is not going to be room for everything, I feel this in my bones before I even start, looking at the space and the quantity of pots scattered around the front and back garden.
In order to fit as much in as possible I have been clearing the jumble of oddments from the little shelf above the main staging. In summer it gets too hot for practically everything, apart from a prickly pear I grew from seed years ago and which lives up on the shelf so that it can't spike me or the cats. This year I remembered to water and feed it and it made some new growth, sprouting a couple of fresh green new segments. The old pads are brown and gnarly with age and the attempts of some daredevil snails to graze on them, and I would not say it was a thing of beauty, but I am fond of it. Once I have chucked out the rubbish from the shelf and condensed the useful things down into one little section above the potting tray I should be able to fit some of the vast collection of Puya up there. My garden club is holding a plant stall next May, and I hope somebody would like to buy an industrial quantity of Puya plants, because I hate the idea of throwing them away but overwintering them becomes more of a struggle each time they need repotting.
Every geranium root ball is being checked for root aphid as I stack them away, and as a radical step I have thrown away some infected mature plants if I've got clean rooted cuttings of the same variety. This is partly to save my pitiful last supplies of Provado drench for serious cases, like the dwarf pomegranates which are years old and can't be renewed from cuttings in one season, and partly because I know I'm going to be short of space as it is. I wish the RHS would hurry up and reply to my email, since I'd have liked to have a root aphid strategy planned out before starting to load the greenhouse.
I borrowed the Systems Administrator's dinky new little four wheel garden truck to move the pots since the SA was out. It was bought specifically for hauling wood, and the SA was very clear that it should not be left full of other stuff if I used it for anything else. In fact, the suggestion that if I found it useful I might like to buy one of my own has been made a couple of times. It did still have some geraniums in it by the time the SA got home, but the SA was magnanimous about them, saying they could stay there until the morning. It gets dark so early now.
Wednesday, 19 October 2016
back to the stage
The great question of the music society stage rumbles on. We have a stage already. It is composed of several pieces of massively thick and massively heavy plywood that sit on metal frames. The community opposite the church kindly lets the music society store it in one of their outbuildings and one of their members has been in charge of ferrying it over to the church and assembling and disassembling it for years. More years, in fact, than any of the current committee members have been on the committee. Now he is in his ninth decade he is beginning to find hauling huge pieces of plywood and chunky metal about the village not so easy as he did when he started, and so the plan was hatched to invest in a modern stage made out of individually lighter components that anybody could handle.
And that is where the fun starts. Were we going to store the new stage in the community across the road? How much could the components weigh before they weighed so much there was no real advantage over the existing system? Did we expect one person to be able to put the new stage up, or a couple, or more? How much space could we reasonably ask to take up in the store room, if the new stage came on its own purpose built trolley or trolleys so that we didn't have to unload it and load it up again each time we wanted to move it?
I don't particularly want to become regularly involved in moving the stage, just because it's an hour's round trip from home, so I'm hoping enough volunteers come forward who live in the village. But I thought I'd go and contribute my two penny's worth when a rep from one of the potential suppliers offered to come and demonstrate their stages in situ in the church, on the grounds that I am probably more used to lifting and moving things than some of the committee, and to remind some of the chaps that actually women could lift things too, as long as the things weren't too heavy or awkwardly shaped. To listen to them you'd think that lifting anything heavier than a teapot was an exclusively male preserve.
We were shown two sorts of stage, one composed of smallish squares that sat on solid metal supports where the legs were fixed, and one made of bigger pieces with detachable legs that clipped on. The exact size of the floor sections and height of the legs was entirely up to us, since the company designed and made to order and could make whatever size we wanted. I liked the detachable legs. The clips that held them looked good and solid and very quick to fasten and release, and I could imagine all the legs stowing away into a bag, leaving us with only the floor sections to stack, while carrying a ferrying a couple of dozen or more fixed three dimensional little metal supports back and forth across the road looked like a complete hassle. And my instinct was to go for the largest floor sections we could comfortably handle, on the grounds that setting up eight or twelve pieces of staging looked like much less work than slotting twenty or thirty together. The church floor has got some spectacular dips in it where the brasses were removed in times gone by, and the floor sections have to be clipped together, so I thought the fewer legs and clips to worry about the better.
But of course not everybody thought like that, which is how democracy works. The salesman retained an air of Zen calm as he explained for the half dozenth time that we needn't worry about the exact height of the sample he'd brought, we could have any height we liked, and talked us through the Disability Discrimination Act rules on the maximum height of steps, and tried to get us to focus on what size we would like our stage to be in total. We didn't reach a decision on the spot, of course. I think the chairman's husband agreed with me, but he is not a voting member of the committee.
And that is where the fun starts. Were we going to store the new stage in the community across the road? How much could the components weigh before they weighed so much there was no real advantage over the existing system? Did we expect one person to be able to put the new stage up, or a couple, or more? How much space could we reasonably ask to take up in the store room, if the new stage came on its own purpose built trolley or trolleys so that we didn't have to unload it and load it up again each time we wanted to move it?
I don't particularly want to become regularly involved in moving the stage, just because it's an hour's round trip from home, so I'm hoping enough volunteers come forward who live in the village. But I thought I'd go and contribute my two penny's worth when a rep from one of the potential suppliers offered to come and demonstrate their stages in situ in the church, on the grounds that I am probably more used to lifting and moving things than some of the committee, and to remind some of the chaps that actually women could lift things too, as long as the things weren't too heavy or awkwardly shaped. To listen to them you'd think that lifting anything heavier than a teapot was an exclusively male preserve.
We were shown two sorts of stage, one composed of smallish squares that sat on solid metal supports where the legs were fixed, and one made of bigger pieces with detachable legs that clipped on. The exact size of the floor sections and height of the legs was entirely up to us, since the company designed and made to order and could make whatever size we wanted. I liked the detachable legs. The clips that held them looked good and solid and very quick to fasten and release, and I could imagine all the legs stowing away into a bag, leaving us with only the floor sections to stack, while carrying a ferrying a couple of dozen or more fixed three dimensional little metal supports back and forth across the road looked like a complete hassle. And my instinct was to go for the largest floor sections we could comfortably handle, on the grounds that setting up eight or twelve pieces of staging looked like much less work than slotting twenty or thirty together. The church floor has got some spectacular dips in it where the brasses were removed in times gone by, and the floor sections have to be clipped together, so I thought the fewer legs and clips to worry about the better.
But of course not everybody thought like that, which is how democracy works. The salesman retained an air of Zen calm as he explained for the half dozenth time that we needn't worry about the exact height of the sample he'd brought, we could have any height we liked, and talked us through the Disability Discrimination Act rules on the maximum height of steps, and tried to get us to focus on what size we would like our stage to be in total. We didn't reach a decision on the spot, of course. I think the chairman's husband agreed with me, but he is not a voting member of the committee.
Tuesday, 18 October 2016
are you talking to me?
I applied for our Chelsea Flower Show tickets the other day. They are quite eye-wateringly expensive, and I have to tell myself that it is the greatest flower show on earth, besides which I don't go to international sports matches or stadium rock concerts or Glyndebourne, or even the Royal Festival Hall nowadays, so Chelsea is pretty much the only premium event that I do in the whole year. And I love it, and Hampton Court doesn't have the same buzz, even if it is less crowded.
The RHS has 450,000 members according to their magazine, so it's just as well that they don't all want to go to Chelsea. Or maybe they do, and some people who didn't remember to book the previous October are disappointed. I have been reading some of the accumulated pile of magazines on my desk, before filing them in date order in boxes down in the garage. So far I have not found anything about the withdrawal of Provado root drench and what we are supposed to do about root aphid. I emailed the question to the RHS but their website warned that replies to queries could take a couple of weeks.
I wonder what the membership profile is? I would guess predominantly older, mainly middle class, mostly suburban and rural. I am probably typical. I don't think the RHS has ever asked me, not that I like filling in those surveys that ask you about your age and ethnicity before getting to the meat of the issue, what is your household income? I sometimes get the slight feeling that the RHS is not really talking to me. They seem rather fixated on youth. How to encourage more young people to take up gardening as a career. Up-and-coming young designers. Gardening in schools. Also the environment. Campaigns to stop front gardens being paved over. Wild flowers on verges. Peat free compost.
It isn't that I have anything against young people, or believe that urban flooding is a good thing. I am very much in favour of gardens and gardening and pollinating insects. It's just that sometimes I get the slight feeling the RHS is so busy on its self-imposed mission of converting the masses and especially the young that it forgets about the greying, mad keen experienced gardeners who stump up their £57 per annum membership fee to keep the show on the road. For that you get free double entry to the four gardens owned by the RHS, entry for one only to a longer list of gardens opting to work as partnership gardens, the right to buy tickets to the first two days of the Chelsea Flower Show when it is less crowded and some displays may be looking fresher than by day four, a monthly magazine, free admission to a reducing number of London flower shows, access to a fairly cheap though no longer free seed list, use of the Lindley Library, and access to a plant advice and pathology service.
Which is all very nice as far as it goes, though how useful it is depends on where you live. Starting from north Essex I can make it to the London events but free entry to Rosemoor in Devon and Harlow Carr near Harrogate is about as useful as the Tate members' free access to exhibitions in St Ives. There are some very good partnership gardens, but you need to visit quite a lot of gardens to save £57 worth of entry fees. The seeds on the seed list are mostly not especially rare and plant enthusiasts would probably do better with one of the specialist societies. I can see that the magazine has to cater for a range of levels of gardening experience and knowledge (and if I wanted something really detailed and nerdily plant focused I could pay extra and subscribe to the quarterly The Plantsman).
But here, off the top of my head, are some ideas on topics I bet would be of direct personal interest to quite a few of the 450,000 subscribing members. Finding a good gardener. How to cultivate a productive long term relationship with your gardener when you've found them. How to spot when the slow changes and accumulated errors of a quarter of a century call for wholesale renewal in your garden. How to summon the heart to do it. Gardening with a bad back or hip replacements. Getting to grips with the garden after an enforced absence from gardening. What it's like to downsize your garden. Growing your garden club's membership. Finding people to serve on the committee. Organising garden group visits. I have a hunch that more of the members would be able to identify with three or four of the topics on that list than are every going to be involved in inner city community gardening.
The RHS has 450,000 members according to their magazine, so it's just as well that they don't all want to go to Chelsea. Or maybe they do, and some people who didn't remember to book the previous October are disappointed. I have been reading some of the accumulated pile of magazines on my desk, before filing them in date order in boxes down in the garage. So far I have not found anything about the withdrawal of Provado root drench and what we are supposed to do about root aphid. I emailed the question to the RHS but their website warned that replies to queries could take a couple of weeks.
I wonder what the membership profile is? I would guess predominantly older, mainly middle class, mostly suburban and rural. I am probably typical. I don't think the RHS has ever asked me, not that I like filling in those surveys that ask you about your age and ethnicity before getting to the meat of the issue, what is your household income? I sometimes get the slight feeling that the RHS is not really talking to me. They seem rather fixated on youth. How to encourage more young people to take up gardening as a career. Up-and-coming young designers. Gardening in schools. Also the environment. Campaigns to stop front gardens being paved over. Wild flowers on verges. Peat free compost.
It isn't that I have anything against young people, or believe that urban flooding is a good thing. I am very much in favour of gardens and gardening and pollinating insects. It's just that sometimes I get the slight feeling the RHS is so busy on its self-imposed mission of converting the masses and especially the young that it forgets about the greying, mad keen experienced gardeners who stump up their £57 per annum membership fee to keep the show on the road. For that you get free double entry to the four gardens owned by the RHS, entry for one only to a longer list of gardens opting to work as partnership gardens, the right to buy tickets to the first two days of the Chelsea Flower Show when it is less crowded and some displays may be looking fresher than by day four, a monthly magazine, free admission to a reducing number of London flower shows, access to a fairly cheap though no longer free seed list, use of the Lindley Library, and access to a plant advice and pathology service.
Which is all very nice as far as it goes, though how useful it is depends on where you live. Starting from north Essex I can make it to the London events but free entry to Rosemoor in Devon and Harlow Carr near Harrogate is about as useful as the Tate members' free access to exhibitions in St Ives. There are some very good partnership gardens, but you need to visit quite a lot of gardens to save £57 worth of entry fees. The seeds on the seed list are mostly not especially rare and plant enthusiasts would probably do better with one of the specialist societies. I can see that the magazine has to cater for a range of levels of gardening experience and knowledge (and if I wanted something really detailed and nerdily plant focused I could pay extra and subscribe to the quarterly The Plantsman).
But here, off the top of my head, are some ideas on topics I bet would be of direct personal interest to quite a few of the 450,000 subscribing members. Finding a good gardener. How to cultivate a productive long term relationship with your gardener when you've found them. How to spot when the slow changes and accumulated errors of a quarter of a century call for wholesale renewal in your garden. How to summon the heart to do it. Gardening with a bad back or hip replacements. Getting to grips with the garden after an enforced absence from gardening. What it's like to downsize your garden. Growing your garden club's membership. Finding people to serve on the committee. Organising garden group visits. I have a hunch that more of the members would be able to identify with three or four of the topics on that list than are every going to be involved in inner city community gardening.
Monday, 17 October 2016
kittens
The Systems Administrator has warned me to go easy on the late night distribution of cat biscuits, having cleared up a couple of piles of sickie that had quite a lot of biscuit in them. One had quite a lot of mouse as well, but I take the SA's point. It's very easy to keep feeding the cats, because at the first hint of movement anywhere near the kitchen they will all insistently tell you that they are very, very hungry. Kitty breakfast is a riot, with all three kittens swarming over each other and Our Ginger, who sits in the midst of the food dishes and howls with indignation that the youngsters are showing him such scant respect. A dollop of food into a dish at one end of the newspaper will distract the kittens, hopefully for long enough to give Our Ginger something to be going on with before doling out the rest of the kitties' share. Twice in recent days Mr Cool has ended up with a lump of jelly on his head, and Mr Fidget has taken to darting towards Our Ginger's share as soon as it is put out, instead of battling it out with his two brothers.
We've gone back to tins for their main meals now that they are bigger. One tin holds the same amount of food as four pouches and is much easier to dish out. Squeezing the contents of a pouch on to Our Ginger's plate with one hand while using the other hand to fend off Mr Fidget takes forever, and you end up with fingers smelling of cat food. Serving food from pouches to four cats is easier with two people, but still a riot.
An hour after they'd had their breakfast this morning they were on the hunt for more food. They did not honestly need it. The three kittens are all just nicely covered, no jutting bones but slim and sleek as healthy young animals should be, and Our Ginger is frankly tubby. I shut them out of the kitchen while I made a pudding for some forthcoming guests, and when I opened the door all four were waiting outside, Our Ginger because he wanted to sleep in the cardboard box in the kitchen like he usually does in the mornings, Mr Fidget because he thought there must be something interesting going on behind the closed door, Mr Fluffy in case there was food, and Mr Cool who had just strolled in according the the SA and joined the queue to see what was going on.
When your previous generation of cats has lived to a ripe old age you forget how extraordinarily lissom young cats are. They are very quick and very supple. When all three kittens are running about in excitement waiting to be fed they positively swarm over the furniture on entirely silent feet, in a sort of fluid stream of black fur. Nobody except us is likely to see them do it, since they are cautious of visitors, but I can see how anybody who didn't greatly like cats could find it quite unsettling. Their sinister aspect is rather undermined by the squeaking, pathetic in the case of Mr Fluffy, strident from Mr Fidget, and very soft from Mr Cool. Poor Mr Cool, an Amazon van drew up outside the front door this morning, and as the driver stepped up to the doorstep Mr Cool burst out of the cat door and bolted away across the gravel at great speed, just in case the stranger planned to come in.
All three are lying down now, Mr Fluffy and Mr Cool on the hearthrug (after Mr Cool had inspected the freshly cleaned grate very carefully in case it was a trap and Mr Fluffy had investigated whether he could climb up the chimney) and Mr Fidget on his pouffe. They look deeply asleep, but I know it will be bedlam the second I get up.
We've gone back to tins for their main meals now that they are bigger. One tin holds the same amount of food as four pouches and is much easier to dish out. Squeezing the contents of a pouch on to Our Ginger's plate with one hand while using the other hand to fend off Mr Fidget takes forever, and you end up with fingers smelling of cat food. Serving food from pouches to four cats is easier with two people, but still a riot.
An hour after they'd had their breakfast this morning they were on the hunt for more food. They did not honestly need it. The three kittens are all just nicely covered, no jutting bones but slim and sleek as healthy young animals should be, and Our Ginger is frankly tubby. I shut them out of the kitchen while I made a pudding for some forthcoming guests, and when I opened the door all four were waiting outside, Our Ginger because he wanted to sleep in the cardboard box in the kitchen like he usually does in the mornings, Mr Fidget because he thought there must be something interesting going on behind the closed door, Mr Fluffy in case there was food, and Mr Cool who had just strolled in according the the SA and joined the queue to see what was going on.
When your previous generation of cats has lived to a ripe old age you forget how extraordinarily lissom young cats are. They are very quick and very supple. When all three kittens are running about in excitement waiting to be fed they positively swarm over the furniture on entirely silent feet, in a sort of fluid stream of black fur. Nobody except us is likely to see them do it, since they are cautious of visitors, but I can see how anybody who didn't greatly like cats could find it quite unsettling. Their sinister aspect is rather undermined by the squeaking, pathetic in the case of Mr Fluffy, strident from Mr Fidget, and very soft from Mr Cool. Poor Mr Cool, an Amazon van drew up outside the front door this morning, and as the driver stepped up to the doorstep Mr Cool burst out of the cat door and bolted away across the gravel at great speed, just in case the stranger planned to come in.
All three are lying down now, Mr Fluffy and Mr Cool on the hearthrug (after Mr Cool had inspected the freshly cleaned grate very carefully in case it was a trap and Mr Fluffy had investigated whether he could climb up the chimney) and Mr Fidget on his pouffe. They look deeply asleep, but I know it will be bedlam the second I get up.
Sunday, 16 October 2016
a domestic day
Every so often the cleaning catches up with you, or at least it does with us. So today I tidied up the pile of paper on the kitchen table, discovering a reminder letter about the electoral register which one of us should have filled in weeks ago, a feedback form from the house sitting agency that must have been there for nearly a month, and a rock climbing magazine addressed to one of the neighbours. I really wish the postman wouldn't do that. Everybody who delivers our mail seems thoroughly pleasant and I don't like the idea of complaining about them and getting them into trouble, but they shouldn't go delivering mail to the wrong house. I didn't find my last Visa statement in the pile, which I was hoping to, so who might have it if I don't? It could be on my desk, of course.
And then I scrubbed the Aga with paste out of my bumper jar of non scratch enamel abrasive, and wiped the worktops and the cupboard doors and the tiles, and scrubbed at the sinks, and vacuumed and washed the floor. I don't mind scrubbing so much. You can listen to your choice of music or a podcast while you're doing it, and have a cup of tea to hand. I caught up with Pienaar's Politics, which I missed live because I went to the supermarket. I find it difficult to take Tim Loughton entirely seriously as the chairman of a select committee because I remember him when he was a very young stockbroker back in the early eighties. He wore chalk striped suits and we were once invited to dinner at his flat, sausages and mash served out of the sort of white plastic urn they sold in garage forecourts. He wanted to be an MP even then.
The new pump is still working down in the conservatory. Fairly soon I'll have to switch it off because the struggle will be to keep the atmosphere buoyant, not to raise the humidity even further, but after months of not having a working pump it is so nice to go in and hear the trickle of water. And the Systems Administrator advised me to run it for a few days in case it failed. Apparently if they are going to go they tend to fairly quickly. We drank our tea down there, and I realised it was time to clear the dahlia pots away. I am going to have to make space for the potted Salvia confertiflora in the conservatory and am not at all sure where or how. It has grown since last winter, and so has the Eriobotrya it managed to nestle under last year.
The salvia has individually tiny orange red flowers on terminal (that is held at the ends of its branches) spikes, and as the autumn goes on the spikes have got longer and longer. The old flowers drop off discreetly, so while the effect is getting a little straggly by now it isn't too untidy. The plant is a bit gappy, though, and not so dense and bushy as some I've seen at gardens like East Ruston. I gave it a bigger pot in the spring, and it has responded by sending up a second shoot which I might try nipping the tip out of to encourage it to bush out. I bought my plant at Kiftsgate Court and have never tried growing one before, so don't know how well it will respond to hard pruning. I had better feed it more next year, along with the dahlias.
And then I scrubbed the Aga with paste out of my bumper jar of non scratch enamel abrasive, and wiped the worktops and the cupboard doors and the tiles, and scrubbed at the sinks, and vacuumed and washed the floor. I don't mind scrubbing so much. You can listen to your choice of music or a podcast while you're doing it, and have a cup of tea to hand. I caught up with Pienaar's Politics, which I missed live because I went to the supermarket. I find it difficult to take Tim Loughton entirely seriously as the chairman of a select committee because I remember him when he was a very young stockbroker back in the early eighties. He wore chalk striped suits and we were once invited to dinner at his flat, sausages and mash served out of the sort of white plastic urn they sold in garage forecourts. He wanted to be an MP even then.
The new pump is still working down in the conservatory. Fairly soon I'll have to switch it off because the struggle will be to keep the atmosphere buoyant, not to raise the humidity even further, but after months of not having a working pump it is so nice to go in and hear the trickle of water. And the Systems Administrator advised me to run it for a few days in case it failed. Apparently if they are going to go they tend to fairly quickly. We drank our tea down there, and I realised it was time to clear the dahlia pots away. I am going to have to make space for the potted Salvia confertiflora in the conservatory and am not at all sure where or how. It has grown since last winter, and so has the Eriobotrya it managed to nestle under last year.
The salvia has individually tiny orange red flowers on terminal (that is held at the ends of its branches) spikes, and as the autumn goes on the spikes have got longer and longer. The old flowers drop off discreetly, so while the effect is getting a little straggly by now it isn't too untidy. The plant is a bit gappy, though, and not so dense and bushy as some I've seen at gardens like East Ruston. I gave it a bigger pot in the spring, and it has responded by sending up a second shoot which I might try nipping the tip out of to encourage it to bush out. I bought my plant at Kiftsgate Court and have never tried growing one before, so don't know how well it will respond to hard pruning. I had better feed it more next year, along with the dahlias.
Saturday, 15 October 2016
plumbing in the pump
We went this morning to support a friend's fund raising event for her village hall. A group of volunteers has been revamping the garden outside, and now they need to raise the funds to pay somebody for some of the work, so locally produced food, crafts and breakfast cooked from locally sourced products were on offer. We aren't up to a full English nowadays, but managed the bacon rolls, and dutifully bought some jam, some shortbread, some coffee (roasted in Suffolk but not grown there) and two slices of cake for later (we've eaten them now and they were delicious). We didn't buy any crafts, though, and I heard one of the organisers telling somebody that they needed more people to buy things as well as food.
I'm afraid part of the trouble with local crafts is that lots of people have so many things already. We have a lifetime's accumulation of gifts and purchases, less what's been smashed by various cats over the years and augmented by the things garnered from the Systems Administrator's late mother's house. We bumped into a couple of beekeeping friends who were there for the same reason as us, and they said the same, they couldn't buy anything without something having to go to the charity shop to make room. And we drove past a huge car boot sale getting to the hall. There is a vast reservoir of objects in circulation, accumulated over decades of post war comparative prosperity, depleted only by whatever the nation's pets and butter fingered owners or their rampaging children have managed to break. Modern day craftspeople face an uphill task persuading anyone to part with hard cash to add to the existing stock.
It was a beautiful sunny morning as we trundled around the village hall and down to Screwfix so that the SA could buy some new welding gloves (not for welding in but for cutting brambles. New ones are near to thorn proof). By early afternoon just as we'd both got out into the garden it began to rain. I thought that was my cue to fit my new pump for the trough in the conservatory, since I now had all the parts and the SA had finished the other half of the job and installed the new waterproof trailing socket for the lights and the heater.
I was pleased with my initial progress, since I managed to thread the cable of the new pump through the hole in the back of the trough without dipping the end in the water, and to wire up the plug. Only then did I test the pump in a bowl of clean water, because I couldn't be bothered to wire up the plug and then unwire it and fit it all over again. I remembered to immerse the pump before switching it on, and it whirred into life and water came out of the tube at the top where it was supposed to. I had even remembered to fetch an engineering brick to put in the trough for the pump to stand on, so that it would not be right down at the bottom sucking up any silt. So far, so good. Then I discovered that the outlet tube of the pump was exactly the same diameter as the hose in the trough leading up to the spout. I could not squash the hose enough to fit it inside the outlet pipe, or stretch it enough to fit outside, and the only fitting supplied with the pump didn't seem to help at all. Alas, my self reliance in DIY plumbing ground to a halt and I had to ask the SA what sort of tape I should use to butt the two together.
The SA said there was no tape that would hold under water, but found a little bit of old hose from a defunct washing machine that fitted snugly over both and made an adequate join. After all, the trough isn't going to move about. It's not like plumbing in a washing machine or a boat. The pump was duly lowered into the trough and switched on, and nothing came out of the spout at all. The SA asked whether I had tested the hose. I hadn't. The SA blew down it experimentally and hard as possible and said it was blocked. This was a nuisance, since in order to poke anything through the hose or even see it we were going to have to pull the trough out from against the wall, which meant I had to empty it. I think the SA entertained a vague idea that we might be able to tip it over given there is a drain in the middle of the conservatory, but on the basis that it weighed a tonne and the first one I ordered got stoved in during delivery through being tipped over, I said firmly that I would bail it out. The water proved to be so filthy once seen in a white plastic bucket that I'm very glad I did. I wouldn't want my new pump sucking that up.
As soon as we were able to shuffle the trough six inches out from the wall the problem with the hose was obvious. It had kinked just behind the spout where it was required to go through a ninety degree turn. The SA chopped off the last three inches and refitted it. We moved the trough back, trying to leave a little more room for the hose this time, I refilled it, stood the pump on the brick, plugged it in and voila, I had a working water spout. I fiddled with the pump's flow rate until it tinkled pleasantly rather than sounding like a horse peeing, and arranged a convenient fern on top of an upturned flower pot to hide the hose and cable, now suddenly visible since the water got so much cleaner.
We ate our cake down there to celebrate. I am very fond of the conservatory. I daresay whoever has the house after us will just put a dining table and armchairs in there and use it as a garden room, but I get enormous fun out of messing about with the tender plants and the fountain. Conservatories used for actually growing plants in, so popular in Victorian and Edwardian times, are now massively out of fashion: there wasn't one in any of the gardens featured in Tim Richardson's book about significant modern English gardens. Ours is a relict of our City days and we could never afford to build it now, but I'm delighted that we did while we could.
I'm afraid part of the trouble with local crafts is that lots of people have so many things already. We have a lifetime's accumulation of gifts and purchases, less what's been smashed by various cats over the years and augmented by the things garnered from the Systems Administrator's late mother's house. We bumped into a couple of beekeeping friends who were there for the same reason as us, and they said the same, they couldn't buy anything without something having to go to the charity shop to make room. And we drove past a huge car boot sale getting to the hall. There is a vast reservoir of objects in circulation, accumulated over decades of post war comparative prosperity, depleted only by whatever the nation's pets and butter fingered owners or their rampaging children have managed to break. Modern day craftspeople face an uphill task persuading anyone to part with hard cash to add to the existing stock.
It was a beautiful sunny morning as we trundled around the village hall and down to Screwfix so that the SA could buy some new welding gloves (not for welding in but for cutting brambles. New ones are near to thorn proof). By early afternoon just as we'd both got out into the garden it began to rain. I thought that was my cue to fit my new pump for the trough in the conservatory, since I now had all the parts and the SA had finished the other half of the job and installed the new waterproof trailing socket for the lights and the heater.
I was pleased with my initial progress, since I managed to thread the cable of the new pump through the hole in the back of the trough without dipping the end in the water, and to wire up the plug. Only then did I test the pump in a bowl of clean water, because I couldn't be bothered to wire up the plug and then unwire it and fit it all over again. I remembered to immerse the pump before switching it on, and it whirred into life and water came out of the tube at the top where it was supposed to. I had even remembered to fetch an engineering brick to put in the trough for the pump to stand on, so that it would not be right down at the bottom sucking up any silt. So far, so good. Then I discovered that the outlet tube of the pump was exactly the same diameter as the hose in the trough leading up to the spout. I could not squash the hose enough to fit it inside the outlet pipe, or stretch it enough to fit outside, and the only fitting supplied with the pump didn't seem to help at all. Alas, my self reliance in DIY plumbing ground to a halt and I had to ask the SA what sort of tape I should use to butt the two together.
The SA said there was no tape that would hold under water, but found a little bit of old hose from a defunct washing machine that fitted snugly over both and made an adequate join. After all, the trough isn't going to move about. It's not like plumbing in a washing machine or a boat. The pump was duly lowered into the trough and switched on, and nothing came out of the spout at all. The SA asked whether I had tested the hose. I hadn't. The SA blew down it experimentally and hard as possible and said it was blocked. This was a nuisance, since in order to poke anything through the hose or even see it we were going to have to pull the trough out from against the wall, which meant I had to empty it. I think the SA entertained a vague idea that we might be able to tip it over given there is a drain in the middle of the conservatory, but on the basis that it weighed a tonne and the first one I ordered got stoved in during delivery through being tipped over, I said firmly that I would bail it out. The water proved to be so filthy once seen in a white plastic bucket that I'm very glad I did. I wouldn't want my new pump sucking that up.
As soon as we were able to shuffle the trough six inches out from the wall the problem with the hose was obvious. It had kinked just behind the spout where it was required to go through a ninety degree turn. The SA chopped off the last three inches and refitted it. We moved the trough back, trying to leave a little more room for the hose this time, I refilled it, stood the pump on the brick, plugged it in and voila, I had a working water spout. I fiddled with the pump's flow rate until it tinkled pleasantly rather than sounding like a horse peeing, and arranged a convenient fern on top of an upturned flower pot to hide the hose and cable, now suddenly visible since the water got so much cleaner.
We ate our cake down there to celebrate. I am very fond of the conservatory. I daresay whoever has the house after us will just put a dining table and armchairs in there and use it as a garden room, but I get enormous fun out of messing about with the tender plants and the fountain. Conservatories used for actually growing plants in, so popular in Victorian and Edwardian times, are now massively out of fashion: there wasn't one in any of the gardens featured in Tim Richardson's book about significant modern English gardens. Ours is a relict of our City days and we could never afford to build it now, but I'm delighted that we did while we could.
Friday, 14 October 2016
banned
I called in at the Clacton garden centre on my way to pick up some 13 amp plugs, thinking I'd stock up on Provado root drench in case I found any outbreaks of root aphid as I put the tender things in pots away in the greenhouse for the winter. There was none on the shelves, and when I asked at the till whether they would be getting some in the answer was a very unwelcome No, not ever. It had been withdrawn and they could no longer sell it. Something to do with the safety of one of the ingredients.
It must have been one of the neonicotinoids that are suspected of causing harm to bees. I am all in favour of not harming bees, on the other hand I am not at all in favour of root aphids wreaking havoc in my greenhouse. I asked whether they had anything else I could use instead, but the chap on the till seemed uncertain, beaten down by the succession of products that had been outlawed. Soon, he opined, we would not be allowed to use anything.
I had a quick look on the RHS website when I got home to see what advice they had to offer on the subject. Only a quick look because I had things to do, but it didn't turn anything up. Typing 'root aphid' into the search box yielded an article about golden root aphids that included the comment that if they were white they not the golden ones but the ordinary sort, but nothing about common or garden root aphids. Pretty quickly the list of diseases got on to canna virus and other topics having absolutely nothing to do with root aphid whatsoever.
I will have to return to the problem when I'm not in a rush, and go via Google rather than trying to interrogate the RHS website directly. It is one of the ultimate signs that a website is badly designed when it is faster getting to the information you want using Google than by using the site's own menu and search facilities. The BBC is another culprit, their site so unwieldy that while it does have some useful things on it, half the time if I want details of a specific programme I find them by Googling.
It is possible that there is nothing to be found on the RHS site about root aphid treatments post Provado. Perhaps there is no approved treatment any more. In which case are there any unapproved treatments, dilute solutions of household products like washing up liquid that will suffocate the aphids without causing too much damage to the roots? Or maybe the manufacturers are on the case and something will be released before too long. It would be nice to have some guidance. Fast growing and easily rooted plants like zonal geraniums can always be renewed from cuttings, but not so slower growing and seed raised specimens. And what are the professional growers doing about vine weevil grubs? Or are they still allowed to use compost treated with systemic insecticide, while us poor amateurs are left with nothing?
It must have been one of the neonicotinoids that are suspected of causing harm to bees. I am all in favour of not harming bees, on the other hand I am not at all in favour of root aphids wreaking havoc in my greenhouse. I asked whether they had anything else I could use instead, but the chap on the till seemed uncertain, beaten down by the succession of products that had been outlawed. Soon, he opined, we would not be allowed to use anything.
I had a quick look on the RHS website when I got home to see what advice they had to offer on the subject. Only a quick look because I had things to do, but it didn't turn anything up. Typing 'root aphid' into the search box yielded an article about golden root aphids that included the comment that if they were white they not the golden ones but the ordinary sort, but nothing about common or garden root aphids. Pretty quickly the list of diseases got on to canna virus and other topics having absolutely nothing to do with root aphid whatsoever.
I will have to return to the problem when I'm not in a rush, and go via Google rather than trying to interrogate the RHS website directly. It is one of the ultimate signs that a website is badly designed when it is faster getting to the information you want using Google than by using the site's own menu and search facilities. The BBC is another culprit, their site so unwieldy that while it does have some useful things on it, half the time if I want details of a specific programme I find them by Googling.
It is possible that there is nothing to be found on the RHS site about root aphid treatments post Provado. Perhaps there is no approved treatment any more. In which case are there any unapproved treatments, dilute solutions of household products like washing up liquid that will suffocate the aphids without causing too much damage to the roots? Or maybe the manufacturers are on the case and something will be released before too long. It would be nice to have some guidance. Fast growing and easily rooted plants like zonal geraniums can always be renewed from cuttings, but not so slower growing and seed raised specimens. And what are the professional growers doing about vine weevil grubs? Or are they still allowed to use compost treated with systemic insecticide, while us poor amateurs are left with nothing?
Thursday, 13 October 2016
online shopper
First, the acrylic sheet for the greenhouse roof. My order from Midland Plastics never arrived, and since their site has now vanished from the web I presume they went bust. They wasted quite a lot of my time and ratcheted up our phone bill first in numerous calls to try and establish what was going on. The sheet was allegedly broken twice in transit by the couriers, and as the bad online reviews started to appear I began to suspect that they were in trouble. It was particularly disappointing as we'd used them twice before and they were fine, on the strength of which I'd ordered two sheets so as to have one in stock for when another pane of glass broke. The good news is that PayPal refunded my account in full within a couple of weeks of my lodging a complaint.
After the bad experience with the acrylic I was understandably jumpy when my auricula pots took ages to arrive. I ordered them from Littlethorpe Potteries up in Yorkshire back in the first half of August. I was awfully pleased to have finally tracked down somebody making traditional straight sided auricula pots, and liked some of the other designs on their website as well. Whichford, who used to be my go-to supplier for proper frost proof pots, seem to have largely given up on plain flowerpots in favour of more highly decorated and correspondingly expensive designs.
Littlethorpe are halfway to full online retailing, which is to say that you can choose what you want on their website, but somebody will then contact you with the full price once they've worked out the carriage costs. They don't use PayPal, and you have to send them a cheque which they promise not to cash until the order is ready to be dispatched. It turned out when they did contact me that the auricula pots I wanted were out of stock, and I would have to wait until they made the next batch in around four weeks. On the basis that the website looked genuine I decided to go ahead, and took some comfort from the fact that as the weeks went by the cheque still hadn't been cashed. It was a disappointment to return from holiday and find the pots still hadn't turned up, and became mildly stressful after I'd emailed them for an expected delivery date which came and then went. A further email produced the apologetic reply that they'd had the sickness bug and not packed any orders that week, I explained about the acrylic, they promised the pots really were on the way now, the cheque still hadn't been cashed, and yesterday the pots arrived.
They look pretty good. The finish is rougher than I'd expect from Whichford, on the other hand they were three pounds each versus £7.50 from Whichford, and Whichford's pots are slightly smaller than I want and not the classic long tom shape. The only way to find out whether they are truly frost proof is to leave them outside all winter and see what happens. I was not utterly delighted by the whole experience, in that I'd have liked to have them a month ago as originally promised, so that I could have repotted the auriculas earlier in the autumn. As it was I dithered about whether to do it now and risk letting them sit in excess unused wet compost over the winter. On the other hand, they have barely started back into growth after the hot weather, and it could stay mild for another month yet, so they should make some new roots. I decided to risk it. They are in the rain shadow of the house and the back wall of the conservatory, and if we get a very wet spell and they get rained on too much I can move the pots into the porch. As long as I don't let them sit wet they should be fine (fingers crossed. The auricula project is still at the experimental stage). I would use Littlethorpe again next year, assuming the pots come through the winter OK.
Some online research also brought me a replacement pump for the lead trough in the conservatory only one working day after ordering. I can't say if it works yet, because it was supplied without a plug (sort of fair enough given I'll need to thread the flex through the hole in the back of the trough so I didn't want a plug already fitted). B&Q no longer sell plugs, or at least the Systems Administrator couldn't find them, so I will have to pay a visit to Screwfix in Clacton. The firm who sold me the pump did have a number for me to ring for help when neither of us could work out how to get the back off the pump to clear dirt from the impeller, or even which end of the pump was supposed to unclip. It came with instructions, but no diagram. Provisional high marks to the pump supplier, but only if the pump works.
Some more ferreting about online brought me some Geum 'Totally Tangerine' and some Selinum wallichianum which I want to bulk up existing displays. The Chatto gardens don't list the former and were out of stock of the latter. While I was at it I bought three scented pink violets for the planned extension to the ditch bed (necessary to accommodate the spreading girth of one of the trees along the ditch) and a hairy leaved Begonia ciliata, which I've liked the sound of for years and was smitten by at the open garden in Lavenham I visited in August. It is supposed to be happy in shade, and I shall keep it in a pot as part of the exotic foliage planting at the back of the conservatory, moving it outside for the summer to consort with the potted ferns and huge overarching leaves of the Tetrapanax. The supplier of all these nice things was Dorset Perennials, the plants came very quickly, look extremely healthy, were very reasonably priced, and because I bumped my order up to £35 shipping was free. Dorset Perennials' list seemed really sound, not offering dozens of forms of everything but including varieties and species I know from experience or by repute to be good garden plants, and I'm sure I'll be using them again. They used to be wholesalers, but are branching out into direct selling partly courtesy of the net. As are Marcel Floyd with his clematis and Trevor White with his roses. This could be a trend.
On balance mail order is great for gardeners. OK, you get the odd stressful experience, but most of the time it works. I don't believe an out and out scammer would ever bother to build a full blown nursery website, and on the whole I don't worry about buying plants unseen. Anybody persistently sending out poor stock will soon pick up negative reviews, and you can tell quite a lot about a small nursery from which plant fairs they are invited to attend. I've had a couple of disappointments with too many substitutes, but overall I've enjoyed a wider choice and saved a whole lot of running around compared to trying to source everything from my local garden centres and nurseries.
After the bad experience with the acrylic I was understandably jumpy when my auricula pots took ages to arrive. I ordered them from Littlethorpe Potteries up in Yorkshire back in the first half of August. I was awfully pleased to have finally tracked down somebody making traditional straight sided auricula pots, and liked some of the other designs on their website as well. Whichford, who used to be my go-to supplier for proper frost proof pots, seem to have largely given up on plain flowerpots in favour of more highly decorated and correspondingly expensive designs.
Littlethorpe are halfway to full online retailing, which is to say that you can choose what you want on their website, but somebody will then contact you with the full price once they've worked out the carriage costs. They don't use PayPal, and you have to send them a cheque which they promise not to cash until the order is ready to be dispatched. It turned out when they did contact me that the auricula pots I wanted were out of stock, and I would have to wait until they made the next batch in around four weeks. On the basis that the website looked genuine I decided to go ahead, and took some comfort from the fact that as the weeks went by the cheque still hadn't been cashed. It was a disappointment to return from holiday and find the pots still hadn't turned up, and became mildly stressful after I'd emailed them for an expected delivery date which came and then went. A further email produced the apologetic reply that they'd had the sickness bug and not packed any orders that week, I explained about the acrylic, they promised the pots really were on the way now, the cheque still hadn't been cashed, and yesterday the pots arrived.
They look pretty good. The finish is rougher than I'd expect from Whichford, on the other hand they were three pounds each versus £7.50 from Whichford, and Whichford's pots are slightly smaller than I want and not the classic long tom shape. The only way to find out whether they are truly frost proof is to leave them outside all winter and see what happens. I was not utterly delighted by the whole experience, in that I'd have liked to have them a month ago as originally promised, so that I could have repotted the auriculas earlier in the autumn. As it was I dithered about whether to do it now and risk letting them sit in excess unused wet compost over the winter. On the other hand, they have barely started back into growth after the hot weather, and it could stay mild for another month yet, so they should make some new roots. I decided to risk it. They are in the rain shadow of the house and the back wall of the conservatory, and if we get a very wet spell and they get rained on too much I can move the pots into the porch. As long as I don't let them sit wet they should be fine (fingers crossed. The auricula project is still at the experimental stage). I would use Littlethorpe again next year, assuming the pots come through the winter OK.
Some online research also brought me a replacement pump for the lead trough in the conservatory only one working day after ordering. I can't say if it works yet, because it was supplied without a plug (sort of fair enough given I'll need to thread the flex through the hole in the back of the trough so I didn't want a plug already fitted). B&Q no longer sell plugs, or at least the Systems Administrator couldn't find them, so I will have to pay a visit to Screwfix in Clacton. The firm who sold me the pump did have a number for me to ring for help when neither of us could work out how to get the back off the pump to clear dirt from the impeller, or even which end of the pump was supposed to unclip. It came with instructions, but no diagram. Provisional high marks to the pump supplier, but only if the pump works.
Some more ferreting about online brought me some Geum 'Totally Tangerine' and some Selinum wallichianum which I want to bulk up existing displays. The Chatto gardens don't list the former and were out of stock of the latter. While I was at it I bought three scented pink violets for the planned extension to the ditch bed (necessary to accommodate the spreading girth of one of the trees along the ditch) and a hairy leaved Begonia ciliata, which I've liked the sound of for years and was smitten by at the open garden in Lavenham I visited in August. It is supposed to be happy in shade, and I shall keep it in a pot as part of the exotic foliage planting at the back of the conservatory, moving it outside for the summer to consort with the potted ferns and huge overarching leaves of the Tetrapanax. The supplier of all these nice things was Dorset Perennials, the plants came very quickly, look extremely healthy, were very reasonably priced, and because I bumped my order up to £35 shipping was free. Dorset Perennials' list seemed really sound, not offering dozens of forms of everything but including varieties and species I know from experience or by repute to be good garden plants, and I'm sure I'll be using them again. They used to be wholesalers, but are branching out into direct selling partly courtesy of the net. As are Marcel Floyd with his clematis and Trevor White with his roses. This could be a trend.
On balance mail order is great for gardeners. OK, you get the odd stressful experience, but most of the time it works. I don't believe an out and out scammer would ever bother to build a full blown nursery website, and on the whole I don't worry about buying plants unseen. Anybody persistently sending out poor stock will soon pick up negative reviews, and you can tell quite a lot about a small nursery from which plant fairs they are invited to attend. I've had a couple of disappointments with too many substitutes, but overall I've enjoyed a wider choice and saved a whole lot of running around compared to trying to source everything from my local garden centres and nurseries.
Wednesday, 12 October 2016
two exhibitions
I went to London today to see Beyond Caravaggio at the National Gallery with an old colleague. Originally we were going to go and see the Abstract Expressionists at the Royal Academy yesterday, but then the RA sent out an email warning that they would be closing at 1.00 pm on Tuesday because the Queen was visiting, so the expedition was switched to Wednesday, then changed into a trip to a different exhibition but on the new date. I had to send an extra precautionary text to confirm I had kept up at the back and got all the details right. It would have been sad to come in from the garden for lunch on Tuesday and find a reproachful text and several missed calls on my phone asking where the hell I was.
I like Caravaggio. I am doubtless biased by having fallen completely under the spell of Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman's film and remained that way ever since. It's thirty years since the film came out, terrifying how time flies. This exhibition has a small number of paintings by Caravaggio himself, but the bulk of it is works by his followers. Some of them were very good, some I was less convinced by. The midget Christ child with the glowing head like a sinister infant out of a B movie horror film perched on the gigantic shoulders of a tottering Saint Christopher was especially perplexing. Saint Peter's denial to an expostulating young woman and Tobias' meeting with the angel were especially brilliant. Some of the candlelit scenes in which the candle itself was concealed behind an arm or musical score were virtuosic, although apparently Caravaggio himself never painted scenes with candles in them, or at least none survive. And there were some excellent sheep.
The few actual Caravaggio originals stole the show for me. A pouting, indignant, faintly and sensuously chubby boy being bitten by a lizard, ripe fruit and a glass of water at his elbow, painted when the artist was only in his early twenties, was extraordinarily vivid. Judas planting his kiss on Jesus' face as the mail clad soldiers reach forward to seize him was dramatic and touching, Christ's downcast face already reconciled to his fate as a second disciple screamed towards the edge of the canvas. The composition is objectively bonkers, since why are Christ, Judas and the third disciple all sharing one great big red cloak over their heads and around their shoulders, but the painting is brilliant. Caravaggio's pictures have that indefinable extra something that most of his followers don't have, or only display spasmodically, and I left convinced he was a genius. If I have time to go back for a second look then I will. The exhibition only opened today, and I don't generally go so early in the run to give the fuss time to die down, but my friend who booked the tickets earlier this week said there were lots available. Homoerotic Renaissance chiaroscuro can't be as popular with the great British public as water lilies.
After lunch I went round the corner to catch American photographer William Eggleston at the National Portrait Gallery before it ends in a couple of weeks. I read a rave review of the show somewhere, and I like photography as an art form. If it is an art form. Grayson Perry's verdict in his short Guide to Art Playing To The Gallery on whether photography can be art is that it is problematic. According to Martin Parr, if a photograph is bigger than two metres and priced higher than five figures then it's probably Art. On that basis most of the photos on show at the Portrait Gallery couldn't have been art, but never mind. They were utterly absorbing. Two girls on a couch, one lying back and one leaning forward consoling her friend had me wracking my brains trying to remember which painting it was I'd seen recently that used almost the same composition but a hundred years earlier. Why was the dignified young black woman standing by a road with a jerry can of petrol? Or water? And why was the stony faced, immaculately coiffed young blonde woman sitting on a shabby wall next to a bollard with a chain wound round it? Who could resist any portrait of a nude man in a graffiti covered room with a caption beginning 'The eccentric dentist'? The pictures spanned a narrow range of time, only ten or twelve years from the mid 1960s, and many were taken around the small town in Mississippi where Eggleston grew up. I didn't buy the book, on the grounds that you can't collect everything and so general art books are out, but I coveted it.
I couldn't judge the photographs on technical grounds because I don't know anything about the techniques and methods of photography, but they included some tantalising images that stuck in the mind and invited you to build a whole narrative around them. Good photographers can make it look as though the image just presented itself in front of them and they pointed the camera, but the truly enormous number of bad and boring images in circulation on the internet shows that this must be very far from the truth. I don't generally take photos myself, on the grounds that the world is full of bad photos already and the act of photography gets in the way of the experience of being there.
I like Caravaggio. I am doubtless biased by having fallen completely under the spell of Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman's film and remained that way ever since. It's thirty years since the film came out, terrifying how time flies. This exhibition has a small number of paintings by Caravaggio himself, but the bulk of it is works by his followers. Some of them were very good, some I was less convinced by. The midget Christ child with the glowing head like a sinister infant out of a B movie horror film perched on the gigantic shoulders of a tottering Saint Christopher was especially perplexing. Saint Peter's denial to an expostulating young woman and Tobias' meeting with the angel were especially brilliant. Some of the candlelit scenes in which the candle itself was concealed behind an arm or musical score were virtuosic, although apparently Caravaggio himself never painted scenes with candles in them, or at least none survive. And there were some excellent sheep.
The few actual Caravaggio originals stole the show for me. A pouting, indignant, faintly and sensuously chubby boy being bitten by a lizard, ripe fruit and a glass of water at his elbow, painted when the artist was only in his early twenties, was extraordinarily vivid. Judas planting his kiss on Jesus' face as the mail clad soldiers reach forward to seize him was dramatic and touching, Christ's downcast face already reconciled to his fate as a second disciple screamed towards the edge of the canvas. The composition is objectively bonkers, since why are Christ, Judas and the third disciple all sharing one great big red cloak over their heads and around their shoulders, but the painting is brilliant. Caravaggio's pictures have that indefinable extra something that most of his followers don't have, or only display spasmodically, and I left convinced he was a genius. If I have time to go back for a second look then I will. The exhibition only opened today, and I don't generally go so early in the run to give the fuss time to die down, but my friend who booked the tickets earlier this week said there were lots available. Homoerotic Renaissance chiaroscuro can't be as popular with the great British public as water lilies.
After lunch I went round the corner to catch American photographer William Eggleston at the National Portrait Gallery before it ends in a couple of weeks. I read a rave review of the show somewhere, and I like photography as an art form. If it is an art form. Grayson Perry's verdict in his short Guide to Art Playing To The Gallery on whether photography can be art is that it is problematic. According to Martin Parr, if a photograph is bigger than two metres and priced higher than five figures then it's probably Art. On that basis most of the photos on show at the Portrait Gallery couldn't have been art, but never mind. They were utterly absorbing. Two girls on a couch, one lying back and one leaning forward consoling her friend had me wracking my brains trying to remember which painting it was I'd seen recently that used almost the same composition but a hundred years earlier. Why was the dignified young black woman standing by a road with a jerry can of petrol? Or water? And why was the stony faced, immaculately coiffed young blonde woman sitting on a shabby wall next to a bollard with a chain wound round it? Who could resist any portrait of a nude man in a graffiti covered room with a caption beginning 'The eccentric dentist'? The pictures spanned a narrow range of time, only ten or twelve years from the mid 1960s, and many were taken around the small town in Mississippi where Eggleston grew up. I didn't buy the book, on the grounds that you can't collect everything and so general art books are out, but I coveted it.
I couldn't judge the photographs on technical grounds because I don't know anything about the techniques and methods of photography, but they included some tantalising images that stuck in the mind and invited you to build a whole narrative around them. Good photographers can make it look as though the image just presented itself in front of them and they pointed the camera, but the truly enormous number of bad and boring images in circulation on the internet shows that this must be very far from the truth. I don't generally take photos myself, on the grounds that the world is full of bad photos already and the act of photography gets in the way of the experience of being there.
Tuesday, 11 October 2016
autumn tidy
The great autumn shut down continues. Yesterday I remembered to open the umbrella over the table in the back garden while the sun was out, so that it could dry, and then take it down and stow it in the garage before the dew could fall on it. Today I brought in the stone with the hole in it, to symbolically mark having finished weeding and mulching the bed where it's mounted, and before I could forget until I found the frosts had crumbled it.
Although things are flagging now after three months of near drought, the wet June was enough to send some shrubs into a wild growth spurt. They are growing into each other and across paths and attempting to annhilate their smaller neighbours, and some tactful editing is called for. When we visited the marvellous garden at Millgate House in Richmond I noticed a small yew that had been pruned back to a stick, with a sign on it explaining that it had been hard pruned to control its size, something they did a lot in that garden. On a larger scale I am going to have to do the same thing in the ditch bed.
The mophead hydrangea 'King George' has got much bigger than I want it to be. It has achieved this partly by layering several of its branches to form a hydrangea thicket. I've always shrunk from pick-axing its offspring up, since it seems such a waste of potential new plants, but I don't actually need or have room for more than one. And it has simply grown, branches extending year by year, on one side muscling into an azalea and on the other flopping over a choice hellebore, while at the front it was straggling out over the lawn. The branches at the back were craning up for the light so that they overshadowed my last remaining Glendoick rhododendron ( I have to admit it to myself. This garden is for the most part too dry for rhododendrons). If I were a better and more organised gardener I would have pruned it regularly. Better late than never, I took out some of the longest and presumably oldest shoots at the base, including all the lowest growing ones that were jostling the hellebores and spotted leaf arums. Hydrangea macrophylla flowers on old wood, so the theory of pruning it and controlling the size of the plants is that you should remove some old branches completely, not go over the entire bush shortening every shoot. If you do that you will lose a year's flowering, while if you take away some of the old wood it should respond by sending up new shoots and so over the period of a few years you can renew the plant.
Pruning is different for the grandiflora and paniculata types, which is why before seeking or offering advice on hydrangea pruning you do need to know what sort of hydrangea you've got.
Near the hydrangea is a Magnolia stellata 'Waterlily', which has also made prodigious growth this year. It spends the later part of the summer draped with the herbaceous climber Dicentra scandens, which I should now call Dactylicapnos scandens. Changes to plant names feel like hard work sometimes, but I feel I ought to keep up. Otherwise we'd all still insist on referring to hosta as funkia, in defiance of the botanists. The Dactylicapnos is a climbing yellow version of the familiar cottage garden bleeding hearts. While not very rare it is not enormously common, and I grew mine from seed and am rather proud of it. When I set it to jazz up the magnolia at a time of year when its host wouldn't be doing anything interesting I had not grasped quite how big or vigorous it would grow. From a zero start its stems have pretty much buried the magnolia by late summer, but fortunately the magnolia doesn't seem to mind. They are fleshy and fragile, and I imagine this is one reason why you don't see it offered for sale as a growing plant very much. Something that quickly makes eight feet of growth, clings to all its neighbours and breaks when you touch it is not going to be easy to stock and sell in a nursery.
The slightly obscure yew relative and winter flowering viburnum have been busy as well, but since I am on chef duties this week and I need to go and check the rice they will have to wait to another day.
Although things are flagging now after three months of near drought, the wet June was enough to send some shrubs into a wild growth spurt. They are growing into each other and across paths and attempting to annhilate their smaller neighbours, and some tactful editing is called for. When we visited the marvellous garden at Millgate House in Richmond I noticed a small yew that had been pruned back to a stick, with a sign on it explaining that it had been hard pruned to control its size, something they did a lot in that garden. On a larger scale I am going to have to do the same thing in the ditch bed.
The mophead hydrangea 'King George' has got much bigger than I want it to be. It has achieved this partly by layering several of its branches to form a hydrangea thicket. I've always shrunk from pick-axing its offspring up, since it seems such a waste of potential new plants, but I don't actually need or have room for more than one. And it has simply grown, branches extending year by year, on one side muscling into an azalea and on the other flopping over a choice hellebore, while at the front it was straggling out over the lawn. The branches at the back were craning up for the light so that they overshadowed my last remaining Glendoick rhododendron ( I have to admit it to myself. This garden is for the most part too dry for rhododendrons). If I were a better and more organised gardener I would have pruned it regularly. Better late than never, I took out some of the longest and presumably oldest shoots at the base, including all the lowest growing ones that were jostling the hellebores and spotted leaf arums. Hydrangea macrophylla flowers on old wood, so the theory of pruning it and controlling the size of the plants is that you should remove some old branches completely, not go over the entire bush shortening every shoot. If you do that you will lose a year's flowering, while if you take away some of the old wood it should respond by sending up new shoots and so over the period of a few years you can renew the plant.
Pruning is different for the grandiflora and paniculata types, which is why before seeking or offering advice on hydrangea pruning you do need to know what sort of hydrangea you've got.
Near the hydrangea is a Magnolia stellata 'Waterlily', which has also made prodigious growth this year. It spends the later part of the summer draped with the herbaceous climber Dicentra scandens, which I should now call Dactylicapnos scandens. Changes to plant names feel like hard work sometimes, but I feel I ought to keep up. Otherwise we'd all still insist on referring to hosta as funkia, in defiance of the botanists. The Dactylicapnos is a climbing yellow version of the familiar cottage garden bleeding hearts. While not very rare it is not enormously common, and I grew mine from seed and am rather proud of it. When I set it to jazz up the magnolia at a time of year when its host wouldn't be doing anything interesting I had not grasped quite how big or vigorous it would grow. From a zero start its stems have pretty much buried the magnolia by late summer, but fortunately the magnolia doesn't seem to mind. They are fleshy and fragile, and I imagine this is one reason why you don't see it offered for sale as a growing plant very much. Something that quickly makes eight feet of growth, clings to all its neighbours and breaks when you touch it is not going to be easy to stock and sell in a nursery.
The slightly obscure yew relative and winter flowering viburnum have been busy as well, but since I am on chef duties this week and I need to go and check the rice they will have to wait to another day.
Monday, 10 October 2016
intimations of autumn
Autumn is here. Two nights ago I put the electric blanket on. Yesterday evening we lit a fire in the grate upstairs, to the consternation of the kittens who were not sure they liked a roaring conflagration inside their house. Today I donned thermal leggings under my gardening trousers, and this evening we lit the stove in the study, which smelt dreadful as an entire summer's worth of dust burned off. We haven't put the central heating on yet as you can't have central heating in only the second week of October, or until you've piled on the jumpers and sat shivering anyway for at least a couple of evenings.
Delightfully and unexpectedly and practically overnight, the autumn crocus have come out. I was rather concerned on my visit to the delightful garden near Lavenham to see lots of different types of autumn crocus flowering, at which point I suddenly realised that I hadn't seen any signs of life from mine. I scanned the gravel eagerly the next day, hoping to spot at least some emerging buds, but there was nothing and I began to fear the worse. It had been too dry for them, or the ground was too infertile, or mice had eaten the corms, or they had been fatally weakened by the rabbits eating the foliage when they were still in full growth. Then this morning there they were, insouciant violet blue goblets sprung from nowhere. They are Crocus speciosus, which was not one of the types recommended to me by Rod Leeds as being really easy to grow, on the other hand I'm sure I chose them because the corms were relatively inexpensive. Cost is not invariably but quite often a good indication of how easy and quick to bulk up different varieties of bulbs are, six or eight pounds a bulb rarities generally being rare for a reason.
I had hoped that the showers would have started to moisten the soil, and I would be able to give up on watering the ditch bed, but when I went and stirred the earth with my finger it was still dry as dust. Back went the hose to the bottom of the garden for another afternoon of drought relief. At teatime the Systems Administrator warned me of a band of very heavy rain approaching from the north that was showing up on the rain radar, but it never reached us, dissipating over Ipswich and the remnants sliding off to the west.
The leaves of the river birches are beginning to turn yellow, and the amelanchier below the rose bank is turning red, though it never produces such a good display of autumn colour as its fans promise that it will. The colour of the potted acers is starting to intensify. Eddie Mair has not yet begun to flag his annual chat with the head gardener at Stourhead, so either the leaves there are not close to turning or the PM programme has decided to drop the topic. Or perhaps I am not listening to PM so assiduously as I used to and I've missed it.
Delightfully and unexpectedly and practically overnight, the autumn crocus have come out. I was rather concerned on my visit to the delightful garden near Lavenham to see lots of different types of autumn crocus flowering, at which point I suddenly realised that I hadn't seen any signs of life from mine. I scanned the gravel eagerly the next day, hoping to spot at least some emerging buds, but there was nothing and I began to fear the worse. It had been too dry for them, or the ground was too infertile, or mice had eaten the corms, or they had been fatally weakened by the rabbits eating the foliage when they were still in full growth. Then this morning there they were, insouciant violet blue goblets sprung from nowhere. They are Crocus speciosus, which was not one of the types recommended to me by Rod Leeds as being really easy to grow, on the other hand I'm sure I chose them because the corms were relatively inexpensive. Cost is not invariably but quite often a good indication of how easy and quick to bulk up different varieties of bulbs are, six or eight pounds a bulb rarities generally being rare for a reason.
I had hoped that the showers would have started to moisten the soil, and I would be able to give up on watering the ditch bed, but when I went and stirred the earth with my finger it was still dry as dust. Back went the hose to the bottom of the garden for another afternoon of drought relief. At teatime the Systems Administrator warned me of a band of very heavy rain approaching from the north that was showing up on the rain radar, but it never reached us, dissipating over Ipswich and the remnants sliding off to the west.
The leaves of the river birches are beginning to turn yellow, and the amelanchier below the rose bank is turning red, though it never produces such a good display of autumn colour as its fans promise that it will. The colour of the potted acers is starting to intensify. Eddie Mair has not yet begun to flag his annual chat with the head gardener at Stourhead, so either the leaves there are not close to turning or the PM programme has decided to drop the topic. Or perhaps I am not listening to PM so assiduously as I used to and I've missed it.
Sunday, 9 October 2016
the music society season gets underway
I have been clearing the tomato plants out of the greenhouse. Some of the pinkish tomatoes will probably ripen indoors, especially if I put a ripe banana with them, but it's no good expecting any more of the little ones to swell. The forecast for the next week is still for night time temperatures comfortably above five degrees, but it can't last forever. Very soon it will be time to start tucking the outside pots of tender things away for the winter.
I potted up the tulip bulbs as well while I was at it. I hope they will be OK, since two varieties had shed their jackets in storage. I have gone back to a hot colour scheme with four different varieties, fifty of each. Those will just fill sixteen pots, allowing for a few duds, and fingers crossed that they will all flower at much the same time. I'd like a decent splash rather than a longer spell during which four pots are looking good at any one time but the others aren't quite out or have already gone over.
I wasn't expecting it to start raining around lunchtime but it did, which put paid to my gardening for the day. I was planning to pack up early anyway in order to get to the concert in good time, partly to help with anything that needed doing, and partly to bag a seat and save one for the friend who was coming with me. I already felt mean that since it was the AGM after the concert I hadn't been able to give her a lift because then she'd have been lumbered with the AGM as well, and that the interval had been shrunk to ten minutes with no tea because the quartet had to catch a flight later this evening and wanted to get away promptly.
The Calder quartet were very, very good. We were punching above our weight in booking them, but got them on the basis of asking their agent to fit us in if they were ever booking a European tour and were left with a gap. After some months we heard back that they were. An American quartet touring Europe scarcely wants to fly home for just a few days, so being put up in a very nice house in a very pretty village in a scenic part of the world not too far from London, and playing to a highly appreciative albeit small by their usual standards audience must have been judged an acceptable alternative. Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl, Wigmore Hall, St Mary the Virgin in East Bergholt. Apparently when they got there they liked the church so much they took to nipping over the road in odd moments just for the fun of playing in it.
I did not expect to enjoy the opening Debussy, since I don't generally get on with Debussy. As an escaped folkie I usually find his washes of musical colour rather dull, but I found his string quartet in G minor as played by the Calder really exciting, and was not the only one since another member remarked afterwards that she'd enjoyed the Debussy though she hadn't expected to. The variations by a famous living Swedish composer that I hadn't heard of were about as hard work as I'd have expected them to be, but that was my fault for being an uneducated middlebrow and not the Swedish composer's or the Calder's. The concluding Beethoven was marvellous. I'm afraid us uneducated middlebrows like Beethoven, that's just how it is.
The AGM was mercifully brief and my notes should not take too long to write up in the morning.
I potted up the tulip bulbs as well while I was at it. I hope they will be OK, since two varieties had shed their jackets in storage. I have gone back to a hot colour scheme with four different varieties, fifty of each. Those will just fill sixteen pots, allowing for a few duds, and fingers crossed that they will all flower at much the same time. I'd like a decent splash rather than a longer spell during which four pots are looking good at any one time but the others aren't quite out or have already gone over.
I wasn't expecting it to start raining around lunchtime but it did, which put paid to my gardening for the day. I was planning to pack up early anyway in order to get to the concert in good time, partly to help with anything that needed doing, and partly to bag a seat and save one for the friend who was coming with me. I already felt mean that since it was the AGM after the concert I hadn't been able to give her a lift because then she'd have been lumbered with the AGM as well, and that the interval had been shrunk to ten minutes with no tea because the quartet had to catch a flight later this evening and wanted to get away promptly.
The Calder quartet were very, very good. We were punching above our weight in booking them, but got them on the basis of asking their agent to fit us in if they were ever booking a European tour and were left with a gap. After some months we heard back that they were. An American quartet touring Europe scarcely wants to fly home for just a few days, so being put up in a very nice house in a very pretty village in a scenic part of the world not too far from London, and playing to a highly appreciative albeit small by their usual standards audience must have been judged an acceptable alternative. Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl, Wigmore Hall, St Mary the Virgin in East Bergholt. Apparently when they got there they liked the church so much they took to nipping over the road in odd moments just for the fun of playing in it.
I did not expect to enjoy the opening Debussy, since I don't generally get on with Debussy. As an escaped folkie I usually find his washes of musical colour rather dull, but I found his string quartet in G minor as played by the Calder really exciting, and was not the only one since another member remarked afterwards that she'd enjoyed the Debussy though she hadn't expected to. The variations by a famous living Swedish composer that I hadn't heard of were about as hard work as I'd have expected them to be, but that was my fault for being an uneducated middlebrow and not the Swedish composer's or the Calder's. The concluding Beethoven was marvellous. I'm afraid us uneducated middlebrows like Beethoven, that's just how it is.
The AGM was mercifully brief and my notes should not take too long to write up in the morning.
Saturday, 8 October 2016
the electrification of the conservatory
There is a limit beyond which safety features engineered into products can themselves become sources of hazard, as they make the product so inconvenient to use that the user will bodge up all sorts of unsafe shortcuts around the feature. Lawnmowers that turn themselves off as soon as you release your grip on the dead man's handle, for example. If you have a large area to cut and especially if the mower is difficult to start, the temptation to lash some string around the safety catch is pretty much irresistible. Or heavily sprung fire resistant doors that start shutting themselves on you when you are only half way through and carrying a tray. Stuff the fire safety, just put a stop in front of the door before somebody breaks their wrist or scalds themselves. And in my case the water resistant sockets in the conservatory.
There are two sockets on the back wall of the conservatory, one either side of the central water feature. That's handy, as I would like to plug in the water pump, and the electric heater on cold winter's nights, and the fairy lights around the windows for autumn evenings when we're having tea down there as dusk is falling. Three appliances, two sockets. That's all fine and dandy, I don't normally want to run the heater and the lights at the same time so I can unplug one and plug in the other. Getting to the wall sockets isn't as easy as it was, since the plants have grown up, but that isn't the socket designer's fault.
The sockets are pigs to use, though. The waterproof covers are incredibly stiff once clipped down shut, and it takes real effort to open them again, not the easiest thing especially when trying to do it in semi darkness and with branches of fuschsia and Canary island palm sticking in your face, because you've decided half way through the evening that the thermometer is plummeting and you'd better plug the heater in. And it is not possible to plug the fairy lights in at all, because the transformer is integrated into the plug and the whole thing is too big to fit in the waterproof box. I ended up doing what most people would do, and buying a normal three point trailing socket which I could leave permanently plugged in at the wall. I put it right at the back in the corner so that it wouldn't get watered, and clambered laboriously past the palm each time I wanted to plug the lights in.
And of course the trailing socket got damp, even though it hadn't taken a direct hit from the watering, and one day when I was unplugging the fairy lights there was a bang and everything stopped working. I couldn't tell without further investigation whether it was the trailing socket that had gone, or the wall plug, or if the switch had tripped on the fuse box in the garage, and the whole problem of the electricity supply to the conservatory along with the fact that the pump for the water feature had already stopped working got added to the list of Things To Do but never rose to the top of it. With hindsight that was an error, as red spider mite was a real nuisance this year and running the water feature to raise the humidity would probably have helped.
Finally the conservatory electricity problem rose to the top of the Systems Administrator's list. The SA tested things methodically and announced that the fuse had tripped but the wall socket was fine. The trailing socket, however, was verboten, and the SA promised to buy a new waterproof one and did. This has the triple advantages of a lid that opens without requiring the application of brute force, a long enough lead that it can sit where I can reach it without scrambling through the palm and the fuchsia, and individual switches for each socket so things can stay plugged in under the waterproof cover even when not in use. Unfortunately, the fairy light plug still won't fit inside, so the SA will have to fix the lights into a short lead with a conventional plug, bag up the join in waterproof fashion and put the bag at the back in the corner where it won't get watered. (And the trailing socket only takes two plugs when I have three electrical appliances).
Meanwhile I was galvanised by the SA's progress into investigating the small pump I found sitting in its original box down in the garage the last time I tidied up, instructions only slightly eaten by snails. I think I originally bought it for the pond in the front garden and then never installed it. I even managed to find a spare plug with a thirteen amp fuse and wire it in, blue to neutral and brown to live, but when I tested it in a bowl of water in the kitchen while the engine made a whirring noise no water came out of the exit pipe. The Systems Administrator came and looked at it too but there was no magic solution that I'd failed to spot, it simply didn't work. It must have been very old so maybe some part had crumbled away in storage.
Small straightforward pond pumps are not too expensive and I have ordered another one from a Google Certified Shop. All I need now is for it to arrive, and me to work out how to plumb it in, and the SA to fix up the waterproof connection for the fairy lights, and I shall be able to strike Sort out conservatory electrics off the list of Things To Do, a mere six months or so after adding it to the list.
There are two sockets on the back wall of the conservatory, one either side of the central water feature. That's handy, as I would like to plug in the water pump, and the electric heater on cold winter's nights, and the fairy lights around the windows for autumn evenings when we're having tea down there as dusk is falling. Three appliances, two sockets. That's all fine and dandy, I don't normally want to run the heater and the lights at the same time so I can unplug one and plug in the other. Getting to the wall sockets isn't as easy as it was, since the plants have grown up, but that isn't the socket designer's fault.
The sockets are pigs to use, though. The waterproof covers are incredibly stiff once clipped down shut, and it takes real effort to open them again, not the easiest thing especially when trying to do it in semi darkness and with branches of fuschsia and Canary island palm sticking in your face, because you've decided half way through the evening that the thermometer is plummeting and you'd better plug the heater in. And it is not possible to plug the fairy lights in at all, because the transformer is integrated into the plug and the whole thing is too big to fit in the waterproof box. I ended up doing what most people would do, and buying a normal three point trailing socket which I could leave permanently plugged in at the wall. I put it right at the back in the corner so that it wouldn't get watered, and clambered laboriously past the palm each time I wanted to plug the lights in.
And of course the trailing socket got damp, even though it hadn't taken a direct hit from the watering, and one day when I was unplugging the fairy lights there was a bang and everything stopped working. I couldn't tell without further investigation whether it was the trailing socket that had gone, or the wall plug, or if the switch had tripped on the fuse box in the garage, and the whole problem of the electricity supply to the conservatory along with the fact that the pump for the water feature had already stopped working got added to the list of Things To Do but never rose to the top of it. With hindsight that was an error, as red spider mite was a real nuisance this year and running the water feature to raise the humidity would probably have helped.
Finally the conservatory electricity problem rose to the top of the Systems Administrator's list. The SA tested things methodically and announced that the fuse had tripped but the wall socket was fine. The trailing socket, however, was verboten, and the SA promised to buy a new waterproof one and did. This has the triple advantages of a lid that opens without requiring the application of brute force, a long enough lead that it can sit where I can reach it without scrambling through the palm and the fuchsia, and individual switches for each socket so things can stay plugged in under the waterproof cover even when not in use. Unfortunately, the fairy light plug still won't fit inside, so the SA will have to fix the lights into a short lead with a conventional plug, bag up the join in waterproof fashion and put the bag at the back in the corner where it won't get watered. (And the trailing socket only takes two plugs when I have three electrical appliances).
Meanwhile I was galvanised by the SA's progress into investigating the small pump I found sitting in its original box down in the garage the last time I tidied up, instructions only slightly eaten by snails. I think I originally bought it for the pond in the front garden and then never installed it. I even managed to find a spare plug with a thirteen amp fuse and wire it in, blue to neutral and brown to live, but when I tested it in a bowl of water in the kitchen while the engine made a whirring noise no water came out of the exit pipe. The Systems Administrator came and looked at it too but there was no magic solution that I'd failed to spot, it simply didn't work. It must have been very old so maybe some part had crumbled away in storage.
Small straightforward pond pumps are not too expensive and I have ordered another one from a Google Certified Shop. All I need now is for it to arrive, and me to work out how to plumb it in, and the SA to fix up the waterproof connection for the fairy lights, and I shall be able to strike Sort out conservatory electrics off the list of Things To Do, a mere six months or so after adding it to the list.
Friday, 7 October 2016
stage hands
I made a special extra trip today to East Bergholt to help transport the stage over to the church ready for Sunday's concert. The stage has been the subject of much debate, research and hand wringing by the committee over the past several years. It is very old, made out of massive sheets of wood supported on a slot together steel frame, and heavy. The community in the former convent opposite the church, which is quite possibly the most upmarket commune in England, kindly stores it, and one of their members has for years masterminded getting it over the road to the church, putting it up, and then reversing the whole process after the concert. But he is now in his mid eighties, and although fit and healthy he no longer feels like manhandling enormous pieces of wood about.
Various attempts were made to recruit some younger and fitter helpers for him, but none proved reliable. The committee are not as young as they used to be, as is the nature of committees, and once we'd resolved the question of whether modern modular stages could support the weight of a grand piano it was generally felt that a new stage, a lightweight system made out of much smaller individual components, suitable for being assembled and disassembled by a party of pensioners and (ahem) ladies would be more suitable. If we had to have a stage, that is. Discussions in committee went round and round the houses about whether we really needed one and which other local music events had a stage or managed without, at the end of which we were back where we started, which was that we wanted to have a stage. I certainly did. Part of the fun of going to a live concert is being able to see the musicians, otherwise you are getting perilously close to thinking that you might as well save yourself a drive and a chilly evening in a not very comfortable pew and the risk of other people coughing, and just buy the CD (or the download if you are a young person).
However, after all the debates about which stage system to get we have not bought any of them in time for the start of the season, so for Sunday's concert we are stuck with the monster timbers. The Chairman was worried about whether there would be enough people to help the guardian of the stage with transporting and erecting it, since she and her husband might be busy looking after the musicians. I told her I would help if required, since I was quite strong although small and quamquam est femina, though if not needed I'd as soon save myself the hour's round trip to East Bergholt. I thought I detected some scepticism on the Treasurer's face during the last committee meeting when she said I'd offered to help. Humping large wooden stage panels about was clearly man's work. I got the call, and to be on the safe side persuaded the Systems Administrator to come and help as well, which was very good of the SA since the music society is really nothing to do with him.
The guardian of the stage thought there might be a gaggle of helpers from the primary school who have arranged to use the stage after us, but in the event nobody else turned up and it was just the three of us. It wasn't really very difficult. The stage turned out to be stored in the convent's former chapel, along with a remarkable quantity of other bits and pieces, and it took us three runs up the road with a four wheeled trailer, only holding up the traffic slightly. The boards were heavy, but not so heavy I felt nervous trying to carry them in case something ruptured. It turned out the verger allowed the keeper of the stage to wheel the trailer right into the church, which is a considerable honour when I think of the trouble the music society got into after dropping cheese crumbs on the vestry carpet a couple of years ago. The turns were pretty tight, but we made it up the aisle and thankfully the SA did not ping his back in the course of obeying the instruction to heave the trailer over a bit. The whole process only took three quarters of an hour with three people, and by the end of it the SA and I were beginning to rediscover the partnership that used to let the two of us put a ten metre long-keeled yacht into a marina berth without once needing to speak to each other, once we'd agreed which slot we were going into.
It is impossible to do anything in a village without being spotted. When I got home I found a message on my phone from a friend who lives in East Bergholt. I saw you outside the church!
Various attempts were made to recruit some younger and fitter helpers for him, but none proved reliable. The committee are not as young as they used to be, as is the nature of committees, and once we'd resolved the question of whether modern modular stages could support the weight of a grand piano it was generally felt that a new stage, a lightweight system made out of much smaller individual components, suitable for being assembled and disassembled by a party of pensioners and (ahem) ladies would be more suitable. If we had to have a stage, that is. Discussions in committee went round and round the houses about whether we really needed one and which other local music events had a stage or managed without, at the end of which we were back where we started, which was that we wanted to have a stage. I certainly did. Part of the fun of going to a live concert is being able to see the musicians, otherwise you are getting perilously close to thinking that you might as well save yourself a drive and a chilly evening in a not very comfortable pew and the risk of other people coughing, and just buy the CD (or the download if you are a young person).
However, after all the debates about which stage system to get we have not bought any of them in time for the start of the season, so for Sunday's concert we are stuck with the monster timbers. The Chairman was worried about whether there would be enough people to help the guardian of the stage with transporting and erecting it, since she and her husband might be busy looking after the musicians. I told her I would help if required, since I was quite strong although small and quamquam est femina, though if not needed I'd as soon save myself the hour's round trip to East Bergholt. I thought I detected some scepticism on the Treasurer's face during the last committee meeting when she said I'd offered to help. Humping large wooden stage panels about was clearly man's work. I got the call, and to be on the safe side persuaded the Systems Administrator to come and help as well, which was very good of the SA since the music society is really nothing to do with him.
The guardian of the stage thought there might be a gaggle of helpers from the primary school who have arranged to use the stage after us, but in the event nobody else turned up and it was just the three of us. It wasn't really very difficult. The stage turned out to be stored in the convent's former chapel, along with a remarkable quantity of other bits and pieces, and it took us three runs up the road with a four wheeled trailer, only holding up the traffic slightly. The boards were heavy, but not so heavy I felt nervous trying to carry them in case something ruptured. It turned out the verger allowed the keeper of the stage to wheel the trailer right into the church, which is a considerable honour when I think of the trouble the music society got into after dropping cheese crumbs on the vestry carpet a couple of years ago. The turns were pretty tight, but we made it up the aisle and thankfully the SA did not ping his back in the course of obeying the instruction to heave the trailer over a bit. The whole process only took three quarters of an hour with three people, and by the end of it the SA and I were beginning to rediscover the partnership that used to let the two of us put a ten metre long-keeled yacht into a marina berth without once needing to speak to each other, once we'd agreed which slot we were going into.
It is impossible to do anything in a village without being spotted. When I got home I found a message on my phone from a friend who lives in East Bergholt. I saw you outside the church!
Thursday, 6 October 2016
watering and pruning
The plants that got watered yesterday look immeasurably happier. The mottled, green and silver leaves of the Chinese wild ginger Asarum splendens are once again standing up perkily, when previously they were flopping on the soil, colour muted to a dull grey. This species makes attractive ground cover in shade, though it is rather prone to being nibbled by snails. Or slugs, or something. The leaves that have not been eaten echo the shape and colour of the emerging leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium, and the two make a good combination.
Accordingly I went on watering today, shuttling back and forth across the lawn to keep moving the hose along. I have weeded half the bog bed, which is shamefully, miserably dry, the days of knee deep mud soup being but a distant memory. I hope that most of the inhabitants are merely prematurely dormant, and not actually dead.
Eventually, to save so much trotting about, I cut down the stems of the Gillenia trifoliata in the birch bed by the next section of the ditch bed that was in line for emergency water. Gillenia, or Bowman's root, is a lovely thing. Originally from Eastern north America, it carries starry white flowers on wiry stems in the latter half of summer. Although I'm sure it would prefer a moister and more woodlandy soil it copes remarkably well around the river birches in the lower lawn. The autumn foliage can colour quite attractively, and in a normal year I'd leave it to die down naturally, but in this drought it had begun to scrunch and go a dirty shade of brown, and being pragmatic about it I can't sort out every bed at once and wanted something to be getting on with in that corner of the garden while minding the hose. Gillenia seeds itself in a modest way, and by now I have a fair sized patch of it around the birches without ever having found plants in other parts of the garden, like I do with Hesperis matronalis.
Once I'd finished tidying the birch bed, which is ready for winter now save watering and a light mulch of mushroom compost, I turned my attentions to the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' which has been blocking the wooden steps down to the bottom lawn all summer. This annoying state of affairs came about because I was much too timid about pruning it last time. The half-hearted little passage way down the steps I cleared last winter soon closed up again as new growth shot out in all directions, and the old growth sagged further out of the supporting tree, and one reason why the beds around the bottom lawn haven't been better watered this summer is that with the steps blocked off it was such a performance getting a hose down there.
The steps were left blocked for so long partly because I can't do everything at once, and partly because I was putting off the awful day when I would have to cut great branches out of the rose, but also because the steps themselves had rotted through and it was quite handy having them obstructed by a plant so vast and so prickly that visitors would not be tempted to try and use them. But today I took my new pruning saw and cut through one large branch near ground level, that had sagged out by degrees until it protruded a couple of feet across the steps, and began to tug out the top growth supported by that branch. Thankfully it didn't account for nearly as much of the bush as I was afraid it was going to. There's plenty more wood to come out yet, and then I have to persuade the Systems Administrator to rebuild the steps. The SA has known for some time that this task was outstanding, without displaying any conspicuous signs of enthusiasm.
There is still a very long way to go along the ditch bed with the hose. When I've finished the rose then for my next act it might be time to try and dig the nettles out of the lawn below the rose bank.
Accordingly I went on watering today, shuttling back and forth across the lawn to keep moving the hose along. I have weeded half the bog bed, which is shamefully, miserably dry, the days of knee deep mud soup being but a distant memory. I hope that most of the inhabitants are merely prematurely dormant, and not actually dead.
Eventually, to save so much trotting about, I cut down the stems of the Gillenia trifoliata in the birch bed by the next section of the ditch bed that was in line for emergency water. Gillenia, or Bowman's root, is a lovely thing. Originally from Eastern north America, it carries starry white flowers on wiry stems in the latter half of summer. Although I'm sure it would prefer a moister and more woodlandy soil it copes remarkably well around the river birches in the lower lawn. The autumn foliage can colour quite attractively, and in a normal year I'd leave it to die down naturally, but in this drought it had begun to scrunch and go a dirty shade of brown, and being pragmatic about it I can't sort out every bed at once and wanted something to be getting on with in that corner of the garden while minding the hose. Gillenia seeds itself in a modest way, and by now I have a fair sized patch of it around the birches without ever having found plants in other parts of the garden, like I do with Hesperis matronalis.
Once I'd finished tidying the birch bed, which is ready for winter now save watering and a light mulch of mushroom compost, I turned my attentions to the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' which has been blocking the wooden steps down to the bottom lawn all summer. This annoying state of affairs came about because I was much too timid about pruning it last time. The half-hearted little passage way down the steps I cleared last winter soon closed up again as new growth shot out in all directions, and the old growth sagged further out of the supporting tree, and one reason why the beds around the bottom lawn haven't been better watered this summer is that with the steps blocked off it was such a performance getting a hose down there.
The steps were left blocked for so long partly because I can't do everything at once, and partly because I was putting off the awful day when I would have to cut great branches out of the rose, but also because the steps themselves had rotted through and it was quite handy having them obstructed by a plant so vast and so prickly that visitors would not be tempted to try and use them. But today I took my new pruning saw and cut through one large branch near ground level, that had sagged out by degrees until it protruded a couple of feet across the steps, and began to tug out the top growth supported by that branch. Thankfully it didn't account for nearly as much of the bush as I was afraid it was going to. There's plenty more wood to come out yet, and then I have to persuade the Systems Administrator to rebuild the steps. The SA has known for some time that this task was outstanding, without displaying any conspicuous signs of enthusiasm.
There is still a very long way to go along the ditch bed with the hose. When I've finished the rose then for my next act it might be time to try and dig the nettles out of the lawn below the rose bank.
Wednesday, 5 October 2016
drought
The chat at last night's garden club meeting was of how dry it was. Certainly our garden is horribly dry. Things aren't so bad at the base of the rose bank, where there seems to be something approaching a spring line and moisture is still working its way through even after three months of very little rain. That's the flip side of the ground below the bank turning to quicksand and killing shrubs through waterlogging after prolonged wet spells.
But the whole of the ditch bed is dry. The display of autumn flowering Cyclamen hederifolium is pitiful, not a patch on the garden I visited last week. Thankfully the tubers are still alive, as I can tell now that the leaves are coming through, but the majority didn't flower. The ferns have collapsed into sad piles of broken fronds. The hellebores and hydrangea are wilting. The bed around the river birches is no better, or rather even worse, and the bog bed is dry as a bone.
Out came the hose again, and hang the cost of water. The Systems Administrator had removed the last section of hose back in the spring, claiming that the friction caused by that long a flow reduced pressure too far for the pressure jet to work properly. I don't know if it was really down to the length of the hose, or the fact that the old pressure jet was on its last legs. Either way, today I reattached the missing section so that the hose would comfortably reach to all parts of the lower lawn even by the roundabout route missing out the steps which are (a) broken and (b) blocked by 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', and started watering.
After that my day's gardening was determined by what else needed doing that was compatible with moving the hose every ten minutes. I cleared away a lot of prunings, and began weeding the bog bed that's not a bog, and finished pollarding the self sown willow with my new sharp pruning saw, plus the bow saw for the biggest branches. I need to work out when the right time is to do that job, so that the willow never gets too big but still produces catkins. The answer is quite possibly not October, but the willow was getting much too big and casting too much shade. There are two kinds of undone gardening tasks, those that you know you should have done but haven't managed to get round to, and those that you don't even have a plan for doing. Pollarding the willow currently belongs in the latter category.
The Systems Administrator was greatly taken with the red flowers of the Mandevilla, and we have agreed that for now it might as well live on the telephone table on an experimental and temporary basis as a house plant. It is within two feet of a glass door, which might or might not give it enough light. Remembering what the Tynings ladies said about being able to control the size of Mandevilla through regular pruning I snipped off the last six inches of the longest and most wavering shoot, taking it back to a pair of leaves. In theory that should stimulate the production of side shoots. The Mandevilla mourned its loss with the production of a bead of white latex like sap over its severed end. The flowers are truly gorgeous, a vivid, deep but not purplish shade of red, with five slightly pointed petals arranged in an open funnel shape. It occurred to me that if it lasted a fortnight on the hall table it would have done better than most bunches of flowers, but of course because I have bought it as a conservatory plant I should be quite miffed if my seven pounds didn't buy me at least a couple of years of pleasure.
But the whole of the ditch bed is dry. The display of autumn flowering Cyclamen hederifolium is pitiful, not a patch on the garden I visited last week. Thankfully the tubers are still alive, as I can tell now that the leaves are coming through, but the majority didn't flower. The ferns have collapsed into sad piles of broken fronds. The hellebores and hydrangea are wilting. The bed around the river birches is no better, or rather even worse, and the bog bed is dry as a bone.
Out came the hose again, and hang the cost of water. The Systems Administrator had removed the last section of hose back in the spring, claiming that the friction caused by that long a flow reduced pressure too far for the pressure jet to work properly. I don't know if it was really down to the length of the hose, or the fact that the old pressure jet was on its last legs. Either way, today I reattached the missing section so that the hose would comfortably reach to all parts of the lower lawn even by the roundabout route missing out the steps which are (a) broken and (b) blocked by 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', and started watering.
After that my day's gardening was determined by what else needed doing that was compatible with moving the hose every ten minutes. I cleared away a lot of prunings, and began weeding the bog bed that's not a bog, and finished pollarding the self sown willow with my new sharp pruning saw, plus the bow saw for the biggest branches. I need to work out when the right time is to do that job, so that the willow never gets too big but still produces catkins. The answer is quite possibly not October, but the willow was getting much too big and casting too much shade. There are two kinds of undone gardening tasks, those that you know you should have done but haven't managed to get round to, and those that you don't even have a plan for doing. Pollarding the willow currently belongs in the latter category.
The Systems Administrator was greatly taken with the red flowers of the Mandevilla, and we have agreed that for now it might as well live on the telephone table on an experimental and temporary basis as a house plant. It is within two feet of a glass door, which might or might not give it enough light. Remembering what the Tynings ladies said about being able to control the size of Mandevilla through regular pruning I snipped off the last six inches of the longest and most wavering shoot, taking it back to a pair of leaves. In theory that should stimulate the production of side shoots. The Mandevilla mourned its loss with the production of a bead of white latex like sap over its severed end. The flowers are truly gorgeous, a vivid, deep but not purplish shade of red, with five slightly pointed petals arranged in an open funnel shape. It occurred to me that if it lasted a fortnight on the hall table it would have done better than most bunches of flowers, but of course because I have bought it as a conservatory plant I should be quite miffed if my seven pounds didn't buy me at least a couple of years of pleasure.
Tuesday, 4 October 2016
an evening of climbers
This evening I went to the garden club meeting, it being the first Tuesday of the month. The speakers, Chelsea Gold medal winners Tynings Climbers, had come all the way from Somerset to talk to us. I was impressed. I don't know how the committee do it, other than that they are very persuasive and strong minded ladies.
My notebook now has a couple of pages of densely scribbled advice about a variety of climbing plants, from the bone hardy to those needing a higher minimum winter temperature than they are going to get in my conservatory. The overarching theme seemed to be to prune vigorous species regularly to keep them compact and with plenty of new growth, rather than waiting until they had got massively out of control and then hacking them back hard so removing every scrap of flowering growth in the process. Also to avoid over watering, especially in the winter, which I already knew, and not to over feed perennial varieties.
The twin horrors of mealy bug and red spider mite are apparently unavoidable under glass, so apart from keeping ventilation and humidity up their advice was to spray early in the year and several times to break the egg laying cycle, rather than waiting until August when there was a visible problem and trying to get on top of it after the event. Provado was said to be very good, but I noticed that natural controls didn't get a mention. In the past I've spent quite a lot on various predatory wasps and things that were supposed to devour my woolly aphids and mites, but they never seemed to get close to solving the problem.
I could not resist buying a plant, a red flowered Mandevilla. It wasn't very big and didn't have a label, and when I asked about it, as in what its name was and whether it would take some shade and what minimum winter temperature it required and how much is was, I was told that it was simply a Mandevilla hybrid. Some shade would be perfectly acceptable given that in the wild they grew under the canopy of other plants (though that doesn't always work, because the UK is quite far north and the sun is weaker at the best of times than in the tropics, or even the Canaries). It would like a minimum of three degrees, and it was seven pounds. In the coldest weather the conservatory might dip below three degrees, on the other hand I could keep the Mandevilla good and dry. For seven pounds I thought it was worth a punt, and bought it with a promise not to repot it until spring. You never quite know with minimum winter temperatures until you try.
My notebook now has a couple of pages of densely scribbled advice about a variety of climbing plants, from the bone hardy to those needing a higher minimum winter temperature than they are going to get in my conservatory. The overarching theme seemed to be to prune vigorous species regularly to keep them compact and with plenty of new growth, rather than waiting until they had got massively out of control and then hacking them back hard so removing every scrap of flowering growth in the process. Also to avoid over watering, especially in the winter, which I already knew, and not to over feed perennial varieties.
The twin horrors of mealy bug and red spider mite are apparently unavoidable under glass, so apart from keeping ventilation and humidity up their advice was to spray early in the year and several times to break the egg laying cycle, rather than waiting until August when there was a visible problem and trying to get on top of it after the event. Provado was said to be very good, but I noticed that natural controls didn't get a mention. In the past I've spent quite a lot on various predatory wasps and things that were supposed to devour my woolly aphids and mites, but they never seemed to get close to solving the problem.
I could not resist buying a plant, a red flowered Mandevilla. It wasn't very big and didn't have a label, and when I asked about it, as in what its name was and whether it would take some shade and what minimum winter temperature it required and how much is was, I was told that it was simply a Mandevilla hybrid. Some shade would be perfectly acceptable given that in the wild they grew under the canopy of other plants (though that doesn't always work, because the UK is quite far north and the sun is weaker at the best of times than in the tropics, or even the Canaries). It would like a minimum of three degrees, and it was seven pounds. In the coldest weather the conservatory might dip below three degrees, on the other hand I could keep the Mandevilla good and dry. For seven pounds I thought it was worth a punt, and bought it with a promise not to repot it until spring. You never quite know with minimum winter temperatures until you try.
Monday, 3 October 2016
an evening of comedy
We went this evening to see Miles Jupp at the Mercury Theatre and he was very, very funny. I like Miles Jupp, which is to say that I find him engaging, or rather find his stage persona engaging since you don't really know what any performer is like merely from seeing them perform. The public face of Miles Jupp the comic, considered, polite, inwardly enraged at his own politeness in circumstances where he would be justified in being furious, frequently thwarted by technology, and detesting games, seems an uncanny reflection of my own world view, apart from the fact that he has five children and I am practically old enough to be his mother. The show was virtually sold out and from the volume of laughter and happy buzz as everybody left at the end I should say there were a lot of Miles Jupp fans around Colchester.
I was sorry to read the story in the Guardian that Jon Holmes had been sacked from Radio 4's The Now Show, to put it his way, or that his contract had not been renewed, to put it the BBC's way. Apparently the programme makers want more women and minorities. I am all in favour of women and minorities being given a fair shout on the BBC but I wish the management could manage it without messing around with the lineup of perfectly good shows that used to be funny. Most of the comedy on R4 at the moment is absolutely dire, so couldn't that be replaced by some women and minorities who were actually funny, instead of discriminating against Jon Holmes on the grounds that he is white and male? I don't generally bother with the Now Show any more, having lost patience with most of their new crop of guests. Comedy needs some wit. Merely insulting the Tories is not enough.
We got home to find Mr Fluffy in the hall looking as if he hoped for more food, and Mr Fidget sitting on the stairs looking pathetic. Mr Cool was nowhere to be seen. Mr Fidget came and sat with me on the sofa once he'd been fed, and burrowed vigorously into my fleece before settling down in unusually unfidgety mode and purring a good deal. They are not used to both of us being out in the evenings, and while Mr Fidget ignores us half the time when we're at home it seems he misses us when we're gone.
I was sorry to read the story in the Guardian that Jon Holmes had been sacked from Radio 4's The Now Show, to put it his way, or that his contract had not been renewed, to put it the BBC's way. Apparently the programme makers want more women and minorities. I am all in favour of women and minorities being given a fair shout on the BBC but I wish the management could manage it without messing around with the lineup of perfectly good shows that used to be funny. Most of the comedy on R4 at the moment is absolutely dire, so couldn't that be replaced by some women and minorities who were actually funny, instead of discriminating against Jon Holmes on the grounds that he is white and male? I don't generally bother with the Now Show any more, having lost patience with most of their new crop of guests. Comedy needs some wit. Merely insulting the Tories is not enough.
We got home to find Mr Fluffy in the hall looking as if he hoped for more food, and Mr Fidget sitting on the stairs looking pathetic. Mr Cool was nowhere to be seen. Mr Fidget came and sat with me on the sofa once he'd been fed, and burrowed vigorously into my fleece before settling down in unusually unfidgety mode and purring a good deal. They are not used to both of us being out in the evenings, and while Mr Fidget ignores us half the time when we're at home it seems he misses us when we're gone.
Sunday, 2 October 2016
an afternoon with the bees
Now it's October I thought I really had better get the bees ready for the winter, fed, snugged down, not too much surplus space in their hives to waste valuable heat. Some books and magazine articles would have had me start in August as soon as I'd finished taking the honey off, since the rate at which the queen lays eggs has peaked by then and colonies are decreasing rather than increasing in size.
I didn't, for all sorts of reasons. It was jolly hot, for starters, and I thought the bees would be grateful for some surplus space. If you try to cram them in too densely during hot weather they have to come out and sit all over the front of the beehive, and the thermometer hit thirty as recently as a couple of weeks ago, while we were on holiday.
Also they had half finished supers of honey they were still messing around with. Last year I took these, using clearer boards to get the bees out, and the mixed bucket of odds and ends of honey fermented in storage and was wasted, no use to me and no good to the bees either. I thought that this year I'd leave it on the beehives until it was well and truly ready, capped with wax and sealed, rather than following the hopeful rule that if the combs didn't drip when I shook them then the honey was ready to harvest. I tried that last year, and it wasn't.
And then there was the rush to get ready to go away and I was frankly knackered, and then we got back and I was busy, and it was still warm and forecast to be warm and the bees I saw around and about in the garden seemed happy enough. But the weather will turn, sooner or later, and I don't want to be still messing around with supers and buckets of sugar syrup when that happens. So yesterday I dissolved a couple of big bags of granulated sugar in four and a half pints of water, and once it had warmed up today I suited up and set off for the beehives with some feeding buckets containing syrup, an extra clearing board, and secateurs for the brambles.
The first hive I looked at still had two supers on, both with quite a lot of bees in, and one full of honey. I wasn't really expecting that. I have already taken more honey than I am likely to eat, give away or sell, so I didn't really want any more, and besides the bees have been on the ivy flowers by now and ivy honey tastes completely disgusting. I decided to leave the full super on the hive for the winter and try overwintering them with their own stores. I swapped the supers over so that the full one was next to the brood box with the empty one on top, separated by a clearer board. Give it a day or two and that should be empty of bees so that I can put it away in the garage for the winter.
I never have tried leaving the bees with a full super of their own honey before. There never seemed to be that much honey to spare, and I had an anxious feeling that the winter stores should be down in the brood box with the queen. Which said, last autumn half the colonies were extremely dilatory about taking sugar syrup down into the brood nest. Bees have evolved to live off their own stores, and this year I am going to trust them to know what they're doing and leave them to get on with doing it.
The next hive had only one super left, and again it was absolutely full of honey. That was easy, I left it there. Then came my star performers of 2016, and I found that while I had left them with two supers to make space for all the bees, they had moved what little honey was left in the supers down to the brood chamber, though again there were still lots of bees up top. I thought about this for a while, the bees getting gradually buzzier. A strong work ethic in bees often goes with a shorter temper, and so it has been with this lot, though where they got the work ethic from is a mystery because that same colony never did a thing in 2015. I ended up putting an eke and a bucket of syrup directly over the brood chamber, which is unorthodox, then a clearer board above the eke, then the two supers with the bees in, and hoped that by tomorrow the bees would be out of the supers and I could tidy the whole thing up.
That was the end of my operations because I'd run out of clearer boards, so there was no point in disturbing the last two hives. I took the two spare buckets of syrup back to the house and returned to scooping dead leaves out from under the eleagnus hedge, until the Systems Administrator came rushing up to tell me that the bees were coming into the house. They had discovered the syrup in the kitchen. I shut the front door, and rounded up the half dozen bees that were bouncing off the inside of the kitchen window, and the SA caught the ones in the sitting room and put them out. They all made off in the direction of my apiary so I can't even argue that they weren't mine. We left the doors shut and thankfully we now have a cat flap so they couldn't come in again, and by tomorrow I expect they'll have forgotten all about it, though I put the spare syrup back in the stock pot which has a close fitting lid, just to be on the safe side. It is very fortunate that the Systems Administrator does not get upset when I accidentally begin to fill the house up with bees.
I didn't, for all sorts of reasons. It was jolly hot, for starters, and I thought the bees would be grateful for some surplus space. If you try to cram them in too densely during hot weather they have to come out and sit all over the front of the beehive, and the thermometer hit thirty as recently as a couple of weeks ago, while we were on holiday.
Also they had half finished supers of honey they were still messing around with. Last year I took these, using clearer boards to get the bees out, and the mixed bucket of odds and ends of honey fermented in storage and was wasted, no use to me and no good to the bees either. I thought that this year I'd leave it on the beehives until it was well and truly ready, capped with wax and sealed, rather than following the hopeful rule that if the combs didn't drip when I shook them then the honey was ready to harvest. I tried that last year, and it wasn't.
And then there was the rush to get ready to go away and I was frankly knackered, and then we got back and I was busy, and it was still warm and forecast to be warm and the bees I saw around and about in the garden seemed happy enough. But the weather will turn, sooner or later, and I don't want to be still messing around with supers and buckets of sugar syrup when that happens. So yesterday I dissolved a couple of big bags of granulated sugar in four and a half pints of water, and once it had warmed up today I suited up and set off for the beehives with some feeding buckets containing syrup, an extra clearing board, and secateurs for the brambles.
The first hive I looked at still had two supers on, both with quite a lot of bees in, and one full of honey. I wasn't really expecting that. I have already taken more honey than I am likely to eat, give away or sell, so I didn't really want any more, and besides the bees have been on the ivy flowers by now and ivy honey tastes completely disgusting. I decided to leave the full super on the hive for the winter and try overwintering them with their own stores. I swapped the supers over so that the full one was next to the brood box with the empty one on top, separated by a clearer board. Give it a day or two and that should be empty of bees so that I can put it away in the garage for the winter.
I never have tried leaving the bees with a full super of their own honey before. There never seemed to be that much honey to spare, and I had an anxious feeling that the winter stores should be down in the brood box with the queen. Which said, last autumn half the colonies were extremely dilatory about taking sugar syrup down into the brood nest. Bees have evolved to live off their own stores, and this year I am going to trust them to know what they're doing and leave them to get on with doing it.
The next hive had only one super left, and again it was absolutely full of honey. That was easy, I left it there. Then came my star performers of 2016, and I found that while I had left them with two supers to make space for all the bees, they had moved what little honey was left in the supers down to the brood chamber, though again there were still lots of bees up top. I thought about this for a while, the bees getting gradually buzzier. A strong work ethic in bees often goes with a shorter temper, and so it has been with this lot, though where they got the work ethic from is a mystery because that same colony never did a thing in 2015. I ended up putting an eke and a bucket of syrup directly over the brood chamber, which is unorthodox, then a clearer board above the eke, then the two supers with the bees in, and hoped that by tomorrow the bees would be out of the supers and I could tidy the whole thing up.
That was the end of my operations because I'd run out of clearer boards, so there was no point in disturbing the last two hives. I took the two spare buckets of syrup back to the house and returned to scooping dead leaves out from under the eleagnus hedge, until the Systems Administrator came rushing up to tell me that the bees were coming into the house. They had discovered the syrup in the kitchen. I shut the front door, and rounded up the half dozen bees that were bouncing off the inside of the kitchen window, and the SA caught the ones in the sitting room and put them out. They all made off in the direction of my apiary so I can't even argue that they weren't mine. We left the doors shut and thankfully we now have a cat flap so they couldn't come in again, and by tomorrow I expect they'll have forgotten all about it, though I put the spare syrup back in the stock pot which has a close fitting lid, just to be on the safe side. It is very fortunate that the Systems Administrator does not get upset when I accidentally begin to fill the house up with bees.
Saturday, 1 October 2016
if at first you don't succeed
It was forecast to rain heavily in the early afternoon, followed by showers and thunderstorms. Accordingly, as the morning greyed over and I felt the first drops of rain I packed up my kit and shut the garage, awaiting the deluge. I wasn't too fussed. The garden needs rain very badly, and I was all set to spend a happy afternoon working out my bare root rose order from Trevor White.
Except that it didn't rain properly at all. There was one fierce downpour just as the Systems Administrator returned from a model railway exhibition in Sudbury and remarked that there'd been some sharp showers on the way back, and that was pretty much it. It was grey, it spat a bit from time to time and I wasn't sure whether to go back into the garden, but there was nothing like the slab of rain I'd been looking forward to from the forecast.
I put the rose order together anyway. Trevor White's delivery charge is a very reasonable £6.90 per order, so I might put in a second order during the winter if I find I have space for any shrub roses, but I wanted to get the next lot of ramblers sorted out. Dispatch starts in November (the exact date presumably depending on how cold the autumn is) and I'd like to get my plants as soon as possible after that. Perversely, I am going to pot several of them, or maybe even all of them if I haven't cleared the undergrowth along the edge of the wood by then.
A couple are replacements for plants that only went in this February. The failures were not Trevor White's fault but mine, since the roses looked healthy when they arrived and the rest of them grew away perfectly well. 'Blushing Lucy' tucked away behind the oil tank made lots of growth for her first year, but two plants I tried to grow up into trees behind one of the decks were not so lucky. I am pretty sure the problem was that it was too dark for them. Chicken and egg, if they had reached up into the tree they'd have been in sun for most of the day and been fine, just as 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' in the next door tree is fine, but in order to see the sun they had to make five or six feet of growth first, and as newly planted specimens they weren't up to making that initial effort.
I have a plan, which is to pot them into deep pots with six foot canes, and next year feed them very well and tie the resulting growth into the canes instead of pruning it off for ease of handling like they did at the plant centre. Then when I plant them out they will already have some leaves in sight of the sun, and that should give them the strength to keep on growing into the light. That is the idea. For it to work I have to be able to persuade the roses to make that much extension growth in their pots. It has to be admitted that a rooted cutting of 'Albertine' given to me by a friend never did nearly as well as that all the time she was in a pot and even when I moved her into a bigger container, then promptly quadrupled in size the moment she was planted out in the open ground as if making up for lost time. I know that the former manager at the plant centre had experience of potting up Trevor White roses at the place he moved to when he left the plant centre, and was hoping he'd be at the Plant Heritage meeting so that I could pick his brains, but he wasn't there.
I have already cut down some of the wild holly that was shading the luckless ramblers from the side, in a belated attempt to rescue the original plants. It will grow back, though if only the roses can gain some height first that won't be a problem and the holly will actually provide rather a nice background. You can cut plain green Ilex aquifolium down hard if you need to, and it will shoot up again. A tall though still slender and youngish holly tree just inside the gate from the back lawn to the wood was toppled to a crazy angle by a freak wind a couple of years ago. Tutting to myself I sawed it off at ground level, since there was no way of righting it securely, and I noticed this morning how a dense cluster of new shoots was springing up around the stump of the original trunk. I was pleased to see them, since I'd spent several years painstakingly clipping the self sown hollies at the wood entrance into a sort of green tunnel which was just shaping up nicely when some kind of mini tornado blew half of it over.
Except that it didn't rain properly at all. There was one fierce downpour just as the Systems Administrator returned from a model railway exhibition in Sudbury and remarked that there'd been some sharp showers on the way back, and that was pretty much it. It was grey, it spat a bit from time to time and I wasn't sure whether to go back into the garden, but there was nothing like the slab of rain I'd been looking forward to from the forecast.
I put the rose order together anyway. Trevor White's delivery charge is a very reasonable £6.90 per order, so I might put in a second order during the winter if I find I have space for any shrub roses, but I wanted to get the next lot of ramblers sorted out. Dispatch starts in November (the exact date presumably depending on how cold the autumn is) and I'd like to get my plants as soon as possible after that. Perversely, I am going to pot several of them, or maybe even all of them if I haven't cleared the undergrowth along the edge of the wood by then.
A couple are replacements for plants that only went in this February. The failures were not Trevor White's fault but mine, since the roses looked healthy when they arrived and the rest of them grew away perfectly well. 'Blushing Lucy' tucked away behind the oil tank made lots of growth for her first year, but two plants I tried to grow up into trees behind one of the decks were not so lucky. I am pretty sure the problem was that it was too dark for them. Chicken and egg, if they had reached up into the tree they'd have been in sun for most of the day and been fine, just as 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' in the next door tree is fine, but in order to see the sun they had to make five or six feet of growth first, and as newly planted specimens they weren't up to making that initial effort.
I have a plan, which is to pot them into deep pots with six foot canes, and next year feed them very well and tie the resulting growth into the canes instead of pruning it off for ease of handling like they did at the plant centre. Then when I plant them out they will already have some leaves in sight of the sun, and that should give them the strength to keep on growing into the light. That is the idea. For it to work I have to be able to persuade the roses to make that much extension growth in their pots. It has to be admitted that a rooted cutting of 'Albertine' given to me by a friend never did nearly as well as that all the time she was in a pot and even when I moved her into a bigger container, then promptly quadrupled in size the moment she was planted out in the open ground as if making up for lost time. I know that the former manager at the plant centre had experience of potting up Trevor White roses at the place he moved to when he left the plant centre, and was hoping he'd be at the Plant Heritage meeting so that I could pick his brains, but he wasn't there.
I have already cut down some of the wild holly that was shading the luckless ramblers from the side, in a belated attempt to rescue the original plants. It will grow back, though if only the roses can gain some height first that won't be a problem and the holly will actually provide rather a nice background. You can cut plain green Ilex aquifolium down hard if you need to, and it will shoot up again. A tall though still slender and youngish holly tree just inside the gate from the back lawn to the wood was toppled to a crazy angle by a freak wind a couple of years ago. Tutting to myself I sawed it off at ground level, since there was no way of righting it securely, and I noticed this morning how a dense cluster of new shoots was springing up around the stump of the original trunk. I was pleased to see them, since I'd spent several years painstakingly clipping the self sown hollies at the wood entrance into a sort of green tunnel which was just shaping up nicely when some kind of mini tornado blew half of it over.
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