It was not really a very nice day at work. Normally I enjoy my job, since close contact with a lot of interesting different plants, plus human company in the form of my colleagues and assorted customers, with the odd bit of livestock and wildlife, in a beautiful setting, ticks most of the boxes, but today the atmosphere was leaden in both senses. The boss was suffering from hay fever and had broken a link on his tractor, while the owner greeted us with the news that, not to mince words, she was very worried. Trade is still bad, and yesterday was dreadful.
I don't blame her for being worried. I'm a bit worried, and it isn't my money tied up in the business. When I was finishing at horticultural college various relatives and acquaintances on hearing I was going to work in a plant centre asked me if I was starting my own nursery. Running your own business in their eyes ranked above working in a shop, which ranked socially as the pits. I was quite happy to have all the advantages of being with the plants and the customers without the headache of having a significant portion of my savings tied up in perishable stock and polytunnels. So I see the owner's point. On the other hand, it doesn't help things to share it with the staff first thing on a Monday morning. Yesterday it rained relentlessly until mid afternoon, and then there was the first Wimbledon men's final for 75 years with a Brit in it. According to R4 on the way home today approximately one in four of the population were watching. It wasn't a great day for going out shopping.
One of my absolute heroes is Ernest Shackleton, who successfully brought every man home from his Antarctic expedition after their ship was crushed by ice and lost. Shackleton probably was worried, but what he told his crew was that they would be rescued, and then he kept them all busy with games and improvised theatricals and anything he could think of so that they would not have time to be bored and afraid. When you are in charge of people, it pays to keep up a good front. Sharing your candid feelings may make you feel better, but unless it is going to improve the situation, or at least not make it worse, you probably shouldn't.
A subdued little gaggle of staff made their way out into the plant centre. We had been told how important it was to sell, sell, sell. One of the things I discovered through the course of the day is that thinking about selling makes me worse at it. Normally I work on the basis of genuinely liking plants, and wanting people to choose the right thing for their garden, and a combination of enthusiasm and honesty serves. Making a conscious effort to sell seemed to have the effect of making me less convincing at it. We could have done with more customers anyway, but it was a grey, dreary day.
One of the suppliers rang to speak to the manager, who had to tell her that he wasn't going to place an order at the moment because we had so much stock already, he wasn't taking anything this week. She said that he was the ninth customer she'd spoken to today who'd said that. Later on somebody else from the same supplier rang. Her manager? The owner? The pain the weather is causing is cascading through the whole gardening sector. I saw in the paper the other day that Marshalls, the paving slab firm, came out with some dire results, and it's not surprising.
At least I got an odd bit of wildlife, in the form of a frog that I disturbed while I was sweeping one of the shrub beds. They have more pointed faces and a more streamlined air than toads. This one leaped away from my gloved hands in a great arc, then sat safely out of reach looking at me for a long time.
Monday, 9 July 2012
Sunday, 8 July 2012
tidy
We've had 31mm of rain in the past twenty four hours. That's nearly twice as much as fell in the whole of the first three months that we had the rain gauge. It's about six per cent of our average annual total. It's a lot of rain. Not as much as they've been getting in parts of the West Country and the North, but still a lot. It lasted until late afternoon.
I decided this meant it was time to tackle the job of tidying my desk. I am not by nature a tidy person, while being averse to throwing away any sort of documents that might come in useful later, so my desk tends to accumulate paper. Credit card bills (generally paid on time), wage slips, bank statements, letters from garden clubs confirming the dates of my talk some time in the second half of 2013, letters from friends, handouts about woodland conservation collected at the woodland charity conference three months ago, tax certificates, six month old correspondence with my MP regarding the campaign for libel reform, the schedule summarising what items are collected which week under the new recycling arrangements, postcards from Cornwall and Australia, the vet's bill for putting the cat down, my last garage bill and MoT certificate, my car insurance, passport, it's all there.
Some of it needs to be filed away safely. The passport, for instance. I haven't actually travelled abroad since renewing it three years ago, but it comes in useful for establishing my identity with banks, most recently when I arranged to be able to view the beekeepers' account on-line. Not move any money, just look at it. Even to do that I had to produce proof of identity in the form of a passport, and they sent me a card and PIN reader for added security. The passport should not be sculling around on top of my desk where it will get lost, or a wet cat will sleep on it, but safely tucked away in the folder marked 'passports'. Letters from clubs and societies I'm talking to went in my woodland charity and general talks files, letters from friends were destroyed, so if any of them turn out to be famous I'm afraid I will be a sad loss to their biographers. The vet's bill went in the bin. I don't know why we still had that. The unopened letter from the electricity company turned out to be a nice surprise, since they were apologising for their poor past service and confusing bills, and promising not to raise prices for the rest of the year. The MP's letter went back in the pending tray, and the schedule of bin collections went back on the pin board. I think I took it down when I was painting the hall, so that I could get up to the edges of the board (which I did not unscrew and remove from the wall, any more than I took the rug down). So far we have managed to remember what sort of bin day it is each week, but we'll probably get confused one of these fortnights, and be glad of the aide memoire.
Part of the motivation for Tidying my Desk was to see if any more pieces of paper relating to the beekeepers turned up. Since becoming Treasurer I have managed to pay the capitation fees to the County association on time, and the premiums for bee disease insurance, which is critical, since I wouldn't fancy my position if I messed up on that one and a member who thought they were properly insured turned out not to be, when they needed to make a claim. And I managed to pay for some wax we bought for the candle making day, and to coax the chairman into giving me a copy of a bill he'd paid to settle with a speaker at one of the meetings, so that I could reimburse him (though I don't think he's cashed the cheque yet). However I'd been putting off until a wet day the task of understanding and writing up the transactions that occurred between the start of the year and the point at which I took over as Treasurer. The last time I tried to get to grips with it, I could not find any of the bank paying in slips the Membership Secretary had given me. I couldn't believe I would have thrown them away, on the other hand I couldn't find them after going through my box of bee bits several times, and began to have horrible thoughts that I might have accidentally left them in an envelope and chucked that in the recycling, while faintly hoping that they might be on my desk. Practically anything could have been on my desk.
I did not find the paying in slips on the desk, but in a brown folder in the box of bee bits where they were paper clipped to the membership forms in the batches the Membership Secretary used when paying them in to the bank. That was the missing link I needed. The outgoing Treasurer had told me that all of the income up to mid March was subscriptions and donations, but when I looked at it closely there was an odd eleven pounds and something paid in by somebody else, which I think related to a surplus on teas. It looked rather as though as well as the cost of the biscuits being deducted from the money raised from the teas, so had ten pounds for rechroming two trophies which strictly speaking belonged in the previous financial year, since it was in 2011. It seemed that the best thing to do with this cost was leave it as part of teas rather than complicate matters.
Then I began to worry that neither I nor the previous Treasurer had paid anything for room hire in the current financial year. We have definitely had several evening indoor meetings this year, including the AGM, so somebody must have paid for them. I checked with the person who books rooms, and it turned out that the last Treasurer had already paid her since we have to pay at the time of booking, so strictly speaking there should have been an accrual at the year end. There wasn't, but as long as the rest of the Committee are happy with that it certainly makes life easier, so I won't agitate to change it. Who needs to manipulate LIBOR when they can be divisional Treasurer of the beekeepers?
The next time I have to tidy my desk will probably be as the deadline to do my tax return approaches, in the hunt for the one vital piece of paper that isn't already in the box marked Tax.
I decided this meant it was time to tackle the job of tidying my desk. I am not by nature a tidy person, while being averse to throwing away any sort of documents that might come in useful later, so my desk tends to accumulate paper. Credit card bills (generally paid on time), wage slips, bank statements, letters from garden clubs confirming the dates of my talk some time in the second half of 2013, letters from friends, handouts about woodland conservation collected at the woodland charity conference three months ago, tax certificates, six month old correspondence with my MP regarding the campaign for libel reform, the schedule summarising what items are collected which week under the new recycling arrangements, postcards from Cornwall and Australia, the vet's bill for putting the cat down, my last garage bill and MoT certificate, my car insurance, passport, it's all there.
Some of it needs to be filed away safely. The passport, for instance. I haven't actually travelled abroad since renewing it three years ago, but it comes in useful for establishing my identity with banks, most recently when I arranged to be able to view the beekeepers' account on-line. Not move any money, just look at it. Even to do that I had to produce proof of identity in the form of a passport, and they sent me a card and PIN reader for added security. The passport should not be sculling around on top of my desk where it will get lost, or a wet cat will sleep on it, but safely tucked away in the folder marked 'passports'. Letters from clubs and societies I'm talking to went in my woodland charity and general talks files, letters from friends were destroyed, so if any of them turn out to be famous I'm afraid I will be a sad loss to their biographers. The vet's bill went in the bin. I don't know why we still had that. The unopened letter from the electricity company turned out to be a nice surprise, since they were apologising for their poor past service and confusing bills, and promising not to raise prices for the rest of the year. The MP's letter went back in the pending tray, and the schedule of bin collections went back on the pin board. I think I took it down when I was painting the hall, so that I could get up to the edges of the board (which I did not unscrew and remove from the wall, any more than I took the rug down). So far we have managed to remember what sort of bin day it is each week, but we'll probably get confused one of these fortnights, and be glad of the aide memoire.
Part of the motivation for Tidying my Desk was to see if any more pieces of paper relating to the beekeepers turned up. Since becoming Treasurer I have managed to pay the capitation fees to the County association on time, and the premiums for bee disease insurance, which is critical, since I wouldn't fancy my position if I messed up on that one and a member who thought they were properly insured turned out not to be, when they needed to make a claim. And I managed to pay for some wax we bought for the candle making day, and to coax the chairman into giving me a copy of a bill he'd paid to settle with a speaker at one of the meetings, so that I could reimburse him (though I don't think he's cashed the cheque yet). However I'd been putting off until a wet day the task of understanding and writing up the transactions that occurred between the start of the year and the point at which I took over as Treasurer. The last time I tried to get to grips with it, I could not find any of the bank paying in slips the Membership Secretary had given me. I couldn't believe I would have thrown them away, on the other hand I couldn't find them after going through my box of bee bits several times, and began to have horrible thoughts that I might have accidentally left them in an envelope and chucked that in the recycling, while faintly hoping that they might be on my desk. Practically anything could have been on my desk.
I did not find the paying in slips on the desk, but in a brown folder in the box of bee bits where they were paper clipped to the membership forms in the batches the Membership Secretary used when paying them in to the bank. That was the missing link I needed. The outgoing Treasurer had told me that all of the income up to mid March was subscriptions and donations, but when I looked at it closely there was an odd eleven pounds and something paid in by somebody else, which I think related to a surplus on teas. It looked rather as though as well as the cost of the biscuits being deducted from the money raised from the teas, so had ten pounds for rechroming two trophies which strictly speaking belonged in the previous financial year, since it was in 2011. It seemed that the best thing to do with this cost was leave it as part of teas rather than complicate matters.
Then I began to worry that neither I nor the previous Treasurer had paid anything for room hire in the current financial year. We have definitely had several evening indoor meetings this year, including the AGM, so somebody must have paid for them. I checked with the person who books rooms, and it turned out that the last Treasurer had already paid her since we have to pay at the time of booking, so strictly speaking there should have been an accrual at the year end. There wasn't, but as long as the rest of the Committee are happy with that it certainly makes life easier, so I won't agitate to change it. Who needs to manipulate LIBOR when they can be divisional Treasurer of the beekeepers?
The next time I have to tidy my desk will probably be as the deadline to do my tax return approaches, in the hunt for the one vital piece of paper that isn't already in the box marked Tax.
Saturday, 7 July 2012
spy stories in the mud
I was weeding in the back garden today. Where I started the ground was quite solid, and I was able to dig in one of the remaining bags of organic mushroom compost, and plant out a little Geranium versicolor I bought at the Open Gardens, which I am hoping will seed itself, since one looks rather pathetic, three Astrantia major subsp. involucrata 'Shaggy', and an Acer japonicum 'Aconitifolium'. The Astrantia should grow about 75cm tall, once released from the confines of their small pots, and have strange, greenish white flowers with conspicuous bracts from which they get their name, since the flowers are indeed shaggy. The Acer has lobed leaves that do vaguely resemble those of an Aconitum, in a pleasant shade of mid green, which should go red in the autumn. The boss's label says it requires full sun, and it will be in part shade where I've put it, so we'll see. It's been sitting in the greenhouse waiting for the bed to be ready for a while, and I think that when I was thinking about buying one and checking in my reference books the consensus of expert opinion seemed to be that part shade was acceptable. Maybe the autumn colour won't be quite so vivid, but the leaves in spring and summer would be enough. It is supposed to go to 7m according to the boss's label, and I'll need to train it up to form a little tree rather than a giant bush. The coloured swing tag that came with it gave its height and spread after tend years as 1.5m by 1.2m, but I think somebody is fibbing about that so as not to scare off potential customers with small gardens. It was already the best part of a metre tall when I bought it. All of these plants require soil that's not too dry, and this is one of the relatively moister beds in the garden.
As I worked my way down the slope it got moister still, until I was standing in 30cm of mud on top of solid clay, at which point I managed to get my boots stuck. I rocked my feet to try and break the suction, and took one step towards dry land, but with the next my right foot shot out of the boot and, caught by surprise, I put it down on the mud to prevent myself from falling over. If I didn't love gardening very, very much I would have been a bit pissed off about that.
While I worked I listened to all three parts of the BBC R4 adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. All the Smiley novels were adapted for the classic serial slot a few years back, but I missed them, because working alternate weekends means that you miss every other episode, and it would have spoiled them listening in odd snatches. As I hoped, after offering some individual stories on CD, the BBC finally got its act together and released them as a boxed set, which after dropping some brick sized hints I got for my birthday. I am pacing myself very carefully as I work my way through them, as like the boxed set of The Sopranos once you've heard each episode for the first time that's it. They will bear repeated listening, or viewing, but the thrill of the first encounter can't be repeated. Hearing them for the first time is thrilling, because they are such taut and well constructed tales, and because Le Carre's evocation of period is so good, and the BBC did a fine job of adapting them. I've read some of the later books, and seen the recent film of Tinker Tailor (which is not about spying. Discuss) so they won't be quite as thrilling.
I have a practical problem listening to my iPod in the garden, which is that I hate wearing earphones. I really, really dislike them. I hate the ones that clamp over your head, and loathe the ones that you stick into your ears. I always recoil slightly in revulsion when offered audio guides at galleries or museums, when the earpiece phobia is exacerbated by the knowledge that they will have been on lots of other people's ears first. That is so unpleasant, I don't see how I could be expected to countenance it, and I don't. But even when they're my own earphones for my own exclusive use I don't like them. I don't like the feeling of being hemmed in. If I'm outdoors and it's wet, I would rather put on a hat than pull up the hood of a waterproof jacket, and have sat in the cockpit in a soaking fleece beanie for hours, only reluctantly yielding if the rain or spray is absolutely torrential. I don't like the sensation of noise being delivered directly into my ears. Several years ago I suddenly developed a sense of constant pressure in both ears, which medical tests utterly failed to find any physiological cause for, and which gradually went away, only recurring occasionally in wet weather or if I listen to loud music. I've never liked loud music since going to one disco in my teens that left me with ringing in my head, and being shown a photograph in school biology of a guinea pig's inner ear with its little sensory hairs all awry after being exposed to a loud sudden noise (I think a gun fired near it, rather than at it). Nowadays I avoid concerts I expect to be too loud, physically flee parties with loud bands to stand outside the building, and avoid earphones.
The Systems Administrator came up with the solution, in terms of a small connector to plug the iPod into my gardening radio. This is a digital radio by Oasis, originally waterproof, though now it's on its third battery the seal is probably not what it was. It is quite bulky and rectangular, reminding me of the cooker on the moon in A Grand Day out. After many years' use in the garden it is caked in mud. It is capable of cranking out an impressive volume, handy for gardening since I can step several paces away from it as I work and still hear what's going on. If we had any near neighbours it would drive them insane, or rather, I would not be able to use it outside, but happily we don't. So for all three episodes of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold I perched the iPod on top of the radio, wrapped in a plastic bag to keep it clean, and listened blissfully. I adore that radio, and will be devastated when it finally breaks, since I'm not sure Oasis still make them just like that.
As I worked my way down the slope it got moister still, until I was standing in 30cm of mud on top of solid clay, at which point I managed to get my boots stuck. I rocked my feet to try and break the suction, and took one step towards dry land, but with the next my right foot shot out of the boot and, caught by surprise, I put it down on the mud to prevent myself from falling over. If I didn't love gardening very, very much I would have been a bit pissed off about that.
While I worked I listened to all three parts of the BBC R4 adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. All the Smiley novels were adapted for the classic serial slot a few years back, but I missed them, because working alternate weekends means that you miss every other episode, and it would have spoiled them listening in odd snatches. As I hoped, after offering some individual stories on CD, the BBC finally got its act together and released them as a boxed set, which after dropping some brick sized hints I got for my birthday. I am pacing myself very carefully as I work my way through them, as like the boxed set of The Sopranos once you've heard each episode for the first time that's it. They will bear repeated listening, or viewing, but the thrill of the first encounter can't be repeated. Hearing them for the first time is thrilling, because they are such taut and well constructed tales, and because Le Carre's evocation of period is so good, and the BBC did a fine job of adapting them. I've read some of the later books, and seen the recent film of Tinker Tailor (which is not about spying. Discuss) so they won't be quite as thrilling.
I have a practical problem listening to my iPod in the garden, which is that I hate wearing earphones. I really, really dislike them. I hate the ones that clamp over your head, and loathe the ones that you stick into your ears. I always recoil slightly in revulsion when offered audio guides at galleries or museums, when the earpiece phobia is exacerbated by the knowledge that they will have been on lots of other people's ears first. That is so unpleasant, I don't see how I could be expected to countenance it, and I don't. But even when they're my own earphones for my own exclusive use I don't like them. I don't like the feeling of being hemmed in. If I'm outdoors and it's wet, I would rather put on a hat than pull up the hood of a waterproof jacket, and have sat in the cockpit in a soaking fleece beanie for hours, only reluctantly yielding if the rain or spray is absolutely torrential. I don't like the sensation of noise being delivered directly into my ears. Several years ago I suddenly developed a sense of constant pressure in both ears, which medical tests utterly failed to find any physiological cause for, and which gradually went away, only recurring occasionally in wet weather or if I listen to loud music. I've never liked loud music since going to one disco in my teens that left me with ringing in my head, and being shown a photograph in school biology of a guinea pig's inner ear with its little sensory hairs all awry after being exposed to a loud sudden noise (I think a gun fired near it, rather than at it). Nowadays I avoid concerts I expect to be too loud, physically flee parties with loud bands to stand outside the building, and avoid earphones.
The Systems Administrator came up with the solution, in terms of a small connector to plug the iPod into my gardening radio. This is a digital radio by Oasis, originally waterproof, though now it's on its third battery the seal is probably not what it was. It is quite bulky and rectangular, reminding me of the cooker on the moon in A Grand Day out. After many years' use in the garden it is caked in mud. It is capable of cranking out an impressive volume, handy for gardening since I can step several paces away from it as I work and still hear what's going on. If we had any near neighbours it would drive them insane, or rather, I would not be able to use it outside, but happily we don't. So for all three episodes of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold I perched the iPod on top of the radio, wrapped in a plastic bag to keep it clean, and listened blissfully. I adore that radio, and will be devastated when it finally breaks, since I'm not sure Oasis still make them just like that.
Friday, 6 July 2012
booking ahead
I woke in the night to hear the rain drumming on the roof. When I awoke again in the morning the noise had stopped, and from the view out of the bathroom window it could almost have ceased raining, but when I got up and went out to let the chickens out of their house I found rain was still falling, lightly and persistently. We've had 14mm in the past twenty four hours, so have got off lightly compared to the north of England and the Welsh borders, but 14mm is still enough to be seriously disruptive to gardening.
I spent the first half of the morning potting on plug plants from their six by four trays into 11cm pots, and juggling things around to make room for the newly potted plants on the racks. Eight square pots just fit into a seed tray. The Digitalis thapsi and Verbascum I potted on a while back are starting to look much perkier, like proper little plants. I'm back on the traditional multipurpose compost, even though it does contain peat. The last couple of peat free brands I've tried have been disappointing, as the things potted in them have made noticeably slow growth. Of course it might just be down to the low temperatures and lack of light compared to a normal summer.
By mid morning I was starting to run out of compost. I would have bought more on my way back from the dump, if I'd been going to the dump, which I would have done if it hadn't been raining. I switched to admin and drill instead, and booked tickets for the Systems Administrator and I to see Arsenic and Old Lace at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester. It's on in October. Do go, if you live locally, and support the Mercury. I've seen A & O L somewhere, probably Exeter's Northcott, a very long time ago, and remember it being funny. The performance with the slightly distracting sign for the hard of hearing is on Tuesday 16th October, if you want to avoid it. I had to ring the box office to find that out, since it isn't mentioned anywhere I could find on their website, but the online booking system is good, letting you choose your exact seats and not just a price zone.
While I was at it I checked the dates of Miriam Margolyes' one woman show on Dickens, which a friend had spotted was coming up in October at the Colchester Institute and suggested we go to, and discovered that booking had opened for that as well. Monday 2nd July appears by some theatrical convention to be the date when tickets for the autumn season are put on general release. Anyway, I booked that as well, since I could. The Institute's website says it is expected to sell out fast. I wouldn't know about that. I never went to a performance there before. In fact, I didn't even know that the Colchester Institute hosted that sort of thing. It is on Thursday 4th October, if you want to go.
After lunch it stopped raining, and I went and weeded the gravel. One advantage of having light soil is that you can get on it to work approximately ten minutes after rain. I've been too slow off the mark with the fine leaved annual grass, which has seeded itself, so there'll be plenty more of that next year.
And now it's time for The Now Show. Maybe tomorrow it will rain less.
I spent the first half of the morning potting on plug plants from their six by four trays into 11cm pots, and juggling things around to make room for the newly potted plants on the racks. Eight square pots just fit into a seed tray. The Digitalis thapsi and Verbascum I potted on a while back are starting to look much perkier, like proper little plants. I'm back on the traditional multipurpose compost, even though it does contain peat. The last couple of peat free brands I've tried have been disappointing, as the things potted in them have made noticeably slow growth. Of course it might just be down to the low temperatures and lack of light compared to a normal summer.
By mid morning I was starting to run out of compost. I would have bought more on my way back from the dump, if I'd been going to the dump, which I would have done if it hadn't been raining. I switched to admin and drill instead, and booked tickets for the Systems Administrator and I to see Arsenic and Old Lace at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester. It's on in October. Do go, if you live locally, and support the Mercury. I've seen A & O L somewhere, probably Exeter's Northcott, a very long time ago, and remember it being funny. The performance with the slightly distracting sign for the hard of hearing is on Tuesday 16th October, if you want to avoid it. I had to ring the box office to find that out, since it isn't mentioned anywhere I could find on their website, but the online booking system is good, letting you choose your exact seats and not just a price zone.
While I was at it I checked the dates of Miriam Margolyes' one woman show on Dickens, which a friend had spotted was coming up in October at the Colchester Institute and suggested we go to, and discovered that booking had opened for that as well. Monday 2nd July appears by some theatrical convention to be the date when tickets for the autumn season are put on general release. Anyway, I booked that as well, since I could. The Institute's website says it is expected to sell out fast. I wouldn't know about that. I never went to a performance there before. In fact, I didn't even know that the Colchester Institute hosted that sort of thing. It is on Thursday 4th October, if you want to go.
After lunch it stopped raining, and I went and weeded the gravel. One advantage of having light soil is that you can get on it to work approximately ten minutes after rain. I've been too slow off the mark with the fine leaved annual grass, which has seeded itself, so there'll be plenty more of that next year.
And now it's time for The Now Show. Maybe tomorrow it will rain less.
Thursday, 5 July 2012
summer pruning
We failed utterly in our attempt to get the rose 'Fritz Nobis' upright again. The Systems Administrator tied a rope around its largest branches and pulled, and I crawled in underneath it, wearing goggles and heavy gauntlets and pushed, and the base of the plant did not budge one iota. It was as if it had grown at that angle for ever. This week I bit the bullet, and began to give it a drastic prune. I'm shortening new shoots, that are sticking out at an odd angle since the shrub capsized, and taking out some of the oldest branches entirely, that will never do any good now they are close to ground level with the rest of the plant on top of them. They don't look too healthy anyway. Blackspot has been a problem this summer, with the endless wet weather providing ideal conditions for fungal infection. High summer is not the generally recommended time to carry out renewal pruning on shrub roses, but needs must. It looked ridiculous as it was, and was looming over a good hellebore as well as my precious birds nest conifer, and if it responds by making new growth the fresh stems will still have a reasonable amount of time to harden off before winter. It may be that there is something badly wrong with it. The way that the bark is flaking off the lowest parts of the stems is rather ominous, on the other hand I have seen elderly rose specimens do this before. The bottom parts of the bush are not easy to get to with the pruning saw, and I am being extremely careful how I approach it, after the disaster with 'Meg' and the thorn that broke off in my knuckle. That is still slightly redder and lumpier than the other hand, even now.
'Fritz Nobis' tipping out of the way did open up dry shod access to the ailing winter cherry, so I asked the SA if it could come out now instead of waiting until the autumn. I've got plants in the greenhouse waiting to go into that area, including an acer that should make a small and elegant tree, and it would be a pity if three months after planting it came to a premature end because a piece of the cherry got dragged through it by mistake. It is a sad thing to have to cut a tree down that you planted, long before the end of its normal span, but the rising water table was killing the cherry by degrees, so that it looked horrible. Harold Nicolson told Vita Sackville-West that one of the things that made her a great gardener was that she had the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful plants. I don't claim greatness, but if a plant really isn't doing well then there's no point in sentimentally hanging on to it. I can't face trying to dig out the stump of the cherry at this moment, in the summer's heat. I won't plant any other woody thing close to it, and will wait until time and waterlogging have done their work more thoroughly before tackling it.
While I was at it I trimmed some long branches out of the boundary hedge, that were overhanging the border or growing into specimens in the garden. It is a bit early for that sort of thing, as the birds are still nesting, but birds make their nests in the secure insides of shrubs, not the outermost whippy branches that wave in the breeze. The Systems Administrator removed one large branch under instruction with the electric chain saw, since we had it out to do the cherry, and cut down a couple of self-sown pussy willows I don't want. I'm keeping one, which will be pollarded come winter. All of this chopping and clearing began to let more light into the lower end of the border, which will be all to the good.
The SA is slowly winning the war against the chickens in the dahlia bed. When I began muttering about buying pigeon netting it turned out that we had a lot of netting offcuts in the shed, left over from the fruit cage, and the SA fixed a run of it along the front of the bed. The mesh is black, and while the holes are quite small, a closer mesh than you would need for chickens, it scarcely shows from a distance. This kept them out of the bed entirely for about three chicken exercise sessions, which together with the days when it was raining and they weren't let out at all was long enough for the dahlias to start growing some new leaves and looking much more hopeful and as if I might still get a display this year. This evening the hens broke in at the end by the greenhouse, but the SA drove them off with the hose and shooed them back into their run. Tomorrow we will seal up the little gap between the end of the netting and the wall, where they squeezed through, and next year the netting will go up as soon as the shoots start emerging, and we should have no more nonsense. No previous generation of hens has been so fixated on dahlias, and it may be that by next spring they will have forgotten about them, but I wouldn't count on it.
'Fritz Nobis' tipping out of the way did open up dry shod access to the ailing winter cherry, so I asked the SA if it could come out now instead of waiting until the autumn. I've got plants in the greenhouse waiting to go into that area, including an acer that should make a small and elegant tree, and it would be a pity if three months after planting it came to a premature end because a piece of the cherry got dragged through it by mistake. It is a sad thing to have to cut a tree down that you planted, long before the end of its normal span, but the rising water table was killing the cherry by degrees, so that it looked horrible. Harold Nicolson told Vita Sackville-West that one of the things that made her a great gardener was that she had the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful plants. I don't claim greatness, but if a plant really isn't doing well then there's no point in sentimentally hanging on to it. I can't face trying to dig out the stump of the cherry at this moment, in the summer's heat. I won't plant any other woody thing close to it, and will wait until time and waterlogging have done their work more thoroughly before tackling it.
While I was at it I trimmed some long branches out of the boundary hedge, that were overhanging the border or growing into specimens in the garden. It is a bit early for that sort of thing, as the birds are still nesting, but birds make their nests in the secure insides of shrubs, not the outermost whippy branches that wave in the breeze. The Systems Administrator removed one large branch under instruction with the electric chain saw, since we had it out to do the cherry, and cut down a couple of self-sown pussy willows I don't want. I'm keeping one, which will be pollarded come winter. All of this chopping and clearing began to let more light into the lower end of the border, which will be all to the good.
The SA is slowly winning the war against the chickens in the dahlia bed. When I began muttering about buying pigeon netting it turned out that we had a lot of netting offcuts in the shed, left over from the fruit cage, and the SA fixed a run of it along the front of the bed. The mesh is black, and while the holes are quite small, a closer mesh than you would need for chickens, it scarcely shows from a distance. This kept them out of the bed entirely for about three chicken exercise sessions, which together with the days when it was raining and they weren't let out at all was long enough for the dahlias to start growing some new leaves and looking much more hopeful and as if I might still get a display this year. This evening the hens broke in at the end by the greenhouse, but the SA drove them off with the hose and shooed them back into their run. Tomorrow we will seal up the little gap between the end of the netting and the wall, where they squeezed through, and next year the netting will go up as soon as the shoots start emerging, and we should have no more nonsense. No previous generation of hens has been so fixated on dahlias, and it may be that by next spring they will have forgotten about them, but I wouldn't count on it.
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
yellow rattle
My first job of the day was to sow the yellow rattle seed. The boss had told me to do this at once, and that it wouldn't take in very thick grass, so I should scarify the area. This was tricky in the long grass at the bottom of the back garden, given that we don't generally cut it until September, and I was fairly sure the Systems Administrator wasn't going to want to cut it now given the combination of heat and humidity has the SA wilting like a lettuce left too long out of the fridge.
I went around the edges of the mini meadow, reaching as far in as I could and cutting open patches with shears, then scratching the surface up with a trowel, and sprinkling in a few rattle seeds. After a while I devised the method of using each patch to stand on while I cut another further in, before sowing the seed, to give me access into the middle of the long grass without leaving trampled down tracks. The intermittent bald spots looked odd, but not as bad as if I'd beaten paths into it.
I hadn't grasped until the young gardener said so on Monday that yellow rattle is an annual plant, having imagined that as it lived on the roots of the grass it would be perennial, a patch gradually increasing in width from year to year. Not so, according to the website of the excellent wild seed specialists Emorsgate. A friend used their seeds to establish a perennial meadow in her garden and got very good results. Once I knew that a fresh generation of rattle would need to germinate and grow each year I began to worry that my grass was too tall and rank, and that if I got any plants in the first year from my sown seed, they wouldn't be enough to reduce the vigour of the sward and their seed would fail to grow for the following year. Emorsgate were not entirely reassuring on this point, saying that it would not thrive in all conditions and preferred a fine sward to rank grass. Our grass is pretty rank, on the other hand if it were already fine I wouldn't be so fussed about using a hemi-parasite to weaken it.
Emorsgate and Wikipedia both told me to sow seed in the autumn, for germination and establishment the following spring, whereas the boss was emphatic that it must be done at once. If I'd left it until autumn I could have done it after we'd mown the grass. On the other hand, if it isn't going to germinate until after Christmas it won't mind if we cut the grass above it, apart from the risk that the odd seed might stick to our boots or the tractor tyres and be carried away and wasted.
I'll just have to wait and see what happens. The Systems Adminstrator's brother has sown seed in two successive years as part of a Wealden meadows project, with no success, so I knew that getting it to go was not going to be completely straightforward. Still, learning by doing is part of what gardening is all about.
I went around the edges of the mini meadow, reaching as far in as I could and cutting open patches with shears, then scratching the surface up with a trowel, and sprinkling in a few rattle seeds. After a while I devised the method of using each patch to stand on while I cut another further in, before sowing the seed, to give me access into the middle of the long grass without leaving trampled down tracks. The intermittent bald spots looked odd, but not as bad as if I'd beaten paths into it.
I hadn't grasped until the young gardener said so on Monday that yellow rattle is an annual plant, having imagined that as it lived on the roots of the grass it would be perennial, a patch gradually increasing in width from year to year. Not so, according to the website of the excellent wild seed specialists Emorsgate. A friend used their seeds to establish a perennial meadow in her garden and got very good results. Once I knew that a fresh generation of rattle would need to germinate and grow each year I began to worry that my grass was too tall and rank, and that if I got any plants in the first year from my sown seed, they wouldn't be enough to reduce the vigour of the sward and their seed would fail to grow for the following year. Emorsgate were not entirely reassuring on this point, saying that it would not thrive in all conditions and preferred a fine sward to rank grass. Our grass is pretty rank, on the other hand if it were already fine I wouldn't be so fussed about using a hemi-parasite to weaken it.
Emorsgate and Wikipedia both told me to sow seed in the autumn, for germination and establishment the following spring, whereas the boss was emphatic that it must be done at once. If I'd left it until autumn I could have done it after we'd mown the grass. On the other hand, if it isn't going to germinate until after Christmas it won't mind if we cut the grass above it, apart from the risk that the odd seed might stick to our boots or the tractor tyres and be carried away and wasted.
I'll just have to wait and see what happens. The Systems Adminstrator's brother has sown seed in two successive years as part of a Wealden meadows project, with no success, so I knew that getting it to go was not going to be completely straightforward. Still, learning by doing is part of what gardening is all about.
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
to Romford and back
I have just got back from Romford. The Wives group, or mostly Widows nowadays as Lily told me, were kind and welcoming and enjoyed the woodland talk. I thought it would probably be a fun gig. The A12 behaved impeccably, and I went whistling straight through on the way there and coming home. In fact, the return trip took only just over an hour, which since I stay within the speed limit (better petrol consumption, and my opinion of my driving is about as unfavourable as is Damian Hill's assessment of the average British motorist) shows how close together the two ends of the county actually are. As drives go the A12 is never a pleasant prospect, because accidents are so frequent and the resulting queues so horrendous, but all that I saw today was one car that had been driven half way up the embankment just the far side of the M25. A police car was in attendance, diverting traffic out of the nearside lane, and a distraught young woman was standing on the verge and talking into a mobile phone.
I arrived at the venue with an enormous margin to spare, having allowed for delays, so if only I had a mobile enabled portable device instead of an antique Nokia (it has its advantages, like holding a charge for ages and generally working when required) I could have written my blog entry while sitting in the car park before the talk. But then you would not have heard now nice Lily and the ladies were. I'd taken something to read, in case the traffic was fine and I was early, so I used the time to get to the end of Gunter Grass's autobiography Peeling the Onion, which was serialised (in heavily truncated form) on R4 a while back. I bought it because I'd enjoyed the serialisation, and The Tin Drum, and The Flounder, which is about as much Gunter Grass as I've read, and was surprised to see from the jacket notes that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, not because I didn't think he was a good enough writer, but because some other books I've tried to read by Nobel Prize winners have been quite stonkingly dull.
The ladies this evening seemed genuinely interested in the trees and woods, and said that they appreciated my enthusiasm. People do like other people who wholeheartedly like things, and so I do get told that fairly regularly, though at my last beekeeping talk I began to worry I might be overdoing it after one of the members asked me whether I talked a lot to children, I was so enthusiastic. I don't talk to children at all, or at least, not in groups. I don't have any children, and don't feel I know how to talk to children, and am not CRB checked, and find the whole idea that somebody meeting children once only, in a group setting, under the supervision of teachers, still has to be treated as a potential paedophile abuser deeply depressing, so I'm not going to get CRB checked. If I have to talk to individual children I talk to them like grownups, and that seems to work fine.
I could have written the blog entry before going out, but then I'd have had to come in from the garden even earlier. I felt a pang at having to pack up at quarter past four, alleviated ten minutes later when it began to rain hard enough that I've had been forced inside anyway (though I suppose I could have gone and skulked in the greenhouse, if I hadn't been going out). I am beginning to feel that I have to keep more time clear for gardening, and have just passed on an offer to tack a woodland charity talk on to the back of one somebody else is doing one afternoon about local woodland planting initiatives. The audience would only end up thoroughly confused, and it really didn't seem worthwhile losing half a day's gardening time to give a twenty minute presentation.
I can see that the Systems Administrator is approaching the final pages of To the Baltic with Bob, having previously recorded today's leg of the Tour de France and spent a nice evening watching it while I was out, so I shall now stop writing the blog entry. Good night folks.
I arrived at the venue with an enormous margin to spare, having allowed for delays, so if only I had a mobile enabled portable device instead of an antique Nokia (it has its advantages, like holding a charge for ages and generally working when required) I could have written my blog entry while sitting in the car park before the talk. But then you would not have heard now nice Lily and the ladies were. I'd taken something to read, in case the traffic was fine and I was early, so I used the time to get to the end of Gunter Grass's autobiography Peeling the Onion, which was serialised (in heavily truncated form) on R4 a while back. I bought it because I'd enjoyed the serialisation, and The Tin Drum, and The Flounder, which is about as much Gunter Grass as I've read, and was surprised to see from the jacket notes that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, not because I didn't think he was a good enough writer, but because some other books I've tried to read by Nobel Prize winners have been quite stonkingly dull.
The ladies this evening seemed genuinely interested in the trees and woods, and said that they appreciated my enthusiasm. People do like other people who wholeheartedly like things, and so I do get told that fairly regularly, though at my last beekeeping talk I began to worry I might be overdoing it after one of the members asked me whether I talked a lot to children, I was so enthusiastic. I don't talk to children at all, or at least, not in groups. I don't have any children, and don't feel I know how to talk to children, and am not CRB checked, and find the whole idea that somebody meeting children once only, in a group setting, under the supervision of teachers, still has to be treated as a potential paedophile abuser deeply depressing, so I'm not going to get CRB checked. If I have to talk to individual children I talk to them like grownups, and that seems to work fine.
I could have written the blog entry before going out, but then I'd have had to come in from the garden even earlier. I felt a pang at having to pack up at quarter past four, alleviated ten minutes later when it began to rain hard enough that I've had been forced inside anyway (though I suppose I could have gone and skulked in the greenhouse, if I hadn't been going out). I am beginning to feel that I have to keep more time clear for gardening, and have just passed on an offer to tack a woodland charity talk on to the back of one somebody else is doing one afternoon about local woodland planting initiatives. The audience would only end up thoroughly confused, and it really didn't seem worthwhile losing half a day's gardening time to give a twenty minute presentation.
I can see that the Systems Administrator is approaching the final pages of To the Baltic with Bob, having previously recorded today's leg of the Tour de France and spent a nice evening watching it while I was out, so I shall now stop writing the blog entry. Good night folks.
Monday, 2 July 2012
the best establishments
I left home ten minutes early this morning, because there were signs up over the weekend on the route to work warning that this road was going to be closed for resurfacing for two days from 2 July. As I got to the end of the road that was supposed to be shut I was puzzled not to see any Diversion in place, but took my planned detour anyway, and got to work slightly early. The gardener arrived just after me, and looked surprised, though pleased, to be offered a box of eggs. The new little hens are really getting into the swing of laying, though some of their efforts are still quite miniature, and I'm having to cast my net of recipients wider. I'm nervous that too-frequent unsolicited offerings might have the effect of seeming to create an obligation, and I don't want to do that, just to stop the fridge from filling up completely with eggs.
In the car park was a car with Netherlands number plates and a Dutchman, a sales rep from a Boskoop nursery, also bearing gifts, a tin of Van Vliet's Siroopwafelen. He was there to see the manager, and we were a little anxious in case the manager didn't turn up, since the boss is at Hampton Court. The manager when he did arrive was slightly nonplussed to see the Dutchman, who was not due for another two hours, so the visitor had to wait for quarter of an hour until the manager had reconciled one till. It was out by £22.70 of vouchers, which means either that one of us deducted that amount from a voucher that the customer hasn't finished spending, and forgot to make a note of it (quite likely) or that one of us falsely put through a cash sale as a voucher transaction and pocketed the money (not very likely). The manager never said anything more about it, so maybe once he wasn't under the time pressure of having a sales rep waiting he found the thing worked out after all, or maybe he is waiting to ask the other person who was in yesterday whether they did any voucher transactions. I made polite conversation for a moment while the Dutchman was waiting, telling him how much I liked the Netherlands and that I'd been to Boskoop. Afterwards I remembered that Boskoop had the most peculiar pub, where the gender of each of the two loos was indicated by the pants tacked to the doors, but that wouldn't really have been appropriate small talk for a conversation with a stranger at quarter past eight in the morning.
The watering took a long time, again, although not so bad as yesterday, partly because the manager didn't help with any of it in the plant centre because he was taken up with the Dutchman. When that was finished I volunteered myself to tidy up the irises, since nobody seemed inclined to tell me to do anything in particular. Some of the pots had a thick layer of algae on the surface, indicating they'd been around for a while. Algae growing on a pot does tell you something about its age, whereas fast growing weeds like hairy bittercress tell you nothing useful. There is a handy fork that hangs around the greenhouse which I managed to find to use as a dibbling implement. It is hallmarked silver with the family's initials on the handle.
In the afternoon I took a phone call from the owner's son at boarding school, who wanted me to take his bags out of the horsebox, since one of them held his camera and he was afraid it would be stolen. I have absolutely no idea why his luggage was in the horsebox, but removed the bags from it plus a small trunk with his name stencilled on the lid. I don't understand why, if he is at school, his luggage is at home. Still, mine not to reason why. Later on I took a call from a staff member at the boy's school, who wanted to leave a message for the owner, but the message turned out to be another request that she remove his luggage from the horsebox. I said in some confusion that I'd already done that, and could hear the boy being gently scolded for fussing. An Oxford graduate weeding potted iris with a silver fork takes a message from a boarding school to rescue a child's luggage from a horsebox.
The goldfinches never used their nest in the plant centre. I'd been discreetly watching for signs of activity and never seen a single finch, after the week when they built it, and when I had a look in it yesterday it was full of dead leaves, so today I took it carefully out of the standard Eleagnus where they'd built it, and took it home. It is a work of art. It is 8cm wide at its broadest point, narrowing slightly towards the top, and 6cm deep. The hollow inside is 4cm across and 3cm in depth. The nest is made out of fine twigs, moss, quite a lot of horsehair and a piece of green nylon string, white feathers, what looks like a bit of mashed up paper, and white fluffy stuff that could be sheep wool or might be some sort of man-made fibre. I would need a forensic analyst to be sure. Pieces of horsehair up to 15cm long are sticking out, suggesting that maybe horsehair isn't very easy to handle. I have made a place for it on the hall dresser, tucked in among the pottery.
The peahen has started bringing her chick into the plant centre. She would like to come into the shop, which is presumably peafowl heaven, being out of the wind, free of predators and with the possibility of crumbs. The manager shooed them both away from the shop door, but later on my colleague fed them on the doorstep with multi-coloured grains of popping corn from a promotional pack one of our suppliers sent us. The dog has taken to coming to see us as well. Apparently after three weeks of motherhood she is bored of the puppies.
On the way home I forgot all about the resurfacing and just took my normal route, and they haven't started work yet.
In the car park was a car with Netherlands number plates and a Dutchman, a sales rep from a Boskoop nursery, also bearing gifts, a tin of Van Vliet's Siroopwafelen. He was there to see the manager, and we were a little anxious in case the manager didn't turn up, since the boss is at Hampton Court. The manager when he did arrive was slightly nonplussed to see the Dutchman, who was not due for another two hours, so the visitor had to wait for quarter of an hour until the manager had reconciled one till. It was out by £22.70 of vouchers, which means either that one of us deducted that amount from a voucher that the customer hasn't finished spending, and forgot to make a note of it (quite likely) or that one of us falsely put through a cash sale as a voucher transaction and pocketed the money (not very likely). The manager never said anything more about it, so maybe once he wasn't under the time pressure of having a sales rep waiting he found the thing worked out after all, or maybe he is waiting to ask the other person who was in yesterday whether they did any voucher transactions. I made polite conversation for a moment while the Dutchman was waiting, telling him how much I liked the Netherlands and that I'd been to Boskoop. Afterwards I remembered that Boskoop had the most peculiar pub, where the gender of each of the two loos was indicated by the pants tacked to the doors, but that wouldn't really have been appropriate small talk for a conversation with a stranger at quarter past eight in the morning.
The watering took a long time, again, although not so bad as yesterday, partly because the manager didn't help with any of it in the plant centre because he was taken up with the Dutchman. When that was finished I volunteered myself to tidy up the irises, since nobody seemed inclined to tell me to do anything in particular. Some of the pots had a thick layer of algae on the surface, indicating they'd been around for a while. Algae growing on a pot does tell you something about its age, whereas fast growing weeds like hairy bittercress tell you nothing useful. There is a handy fork that hangs around the greenhouse which I managed to find to use as a dibbling implement. It is hallmarked silver with the family's initials on the handle.
In the afternoon I took a phone call from the owner's son at boarding school, who wanted me to take his bags out of the horsebox, since one of them held his camera and he was afraid it would be stolen. I have absolutely no idea why his luggage was in the horsebox, but removed the bags from it plus a small trunk with his name stencilled on the lid. I don't understand why, if he is at school, his luggage is at home. Still, mine not to reason why. Later on I took a call from a staff member at the boy's school, who wanted to leave a message for the owner, but the message turned out to be another request that she remove his luggage from the horsebox. I said in some confusion that I'd already done that, and could hear the boy being gently scolded for fussing. An Oxford graduate weeding potted iris with a silver fork takes a message from a boarding school to rescue a child's luggage from a horsebox.
The goldfinches never used their nest in the plant centre. I'd been discreetly watching for signs of activity and never seen a single finch, after the week when they built it, and when I had a look in it yesterday it was full of dead leaves, so today I took it carefully out of the standard Eleagnus where they'd built it, and took it home. It is a work of art. It is 8cm wide at its broadest point, narrowing slightly towards the top, and 6cm deep. The hollow inside is 4cm across and 3cm in depth. The nest is made out of fine twigs, moss, quite a lot of horsehair and a piece of green nylon string, white feathers, what looks like a bit of mashed up paper, and white fluffy stuff that could be sheep wool or might be some sort of man-made fibre. I would need a forensic analyst to be sure. Pieces of horsehair up to 15cm long are sticking out, suggesting that maybe horsehair isn't very easy to handle. I have made a place for it on the hall dresser, tucked in among the pottery.
The peahen has started bringing her chick into the plant centre. She would like to come into the shop, which is presumably peafowl heaven, being out of the wind, free of predators and with the possibility of crumbs. The manager shooed them both away from the shop door, but later on my colleague fed them on the doorstep with multi-coloured grains of popping corn from a promotional pack one of our suppliers sent us. The dog has taken to coming to see us as well. Apparently after three weeks of motherhood she is bored of the puppies.
On the way home I forgot all about the resurfacing and just took my normal route, and they haven't started work yet.
Sunday, 1 July 2012
the rattle harvest
The watering took ages. Two of us were dragging hoses around the plant centre until nearly half past ten, with the sparky girl who runs the tea room at weekends posted at the gate as a meeter and greeter to warn customers not to fall over them. My other colleague was busy watering over on The Other Side until half past eleven, and got soaked in the process because the hose fitting was leaking. I watered the two sections of shrubs where the automatic irrigation has been broken since the spring which came to four beds, and the front edge of the shade structure where the overheads don't quite reach, and the rhododendrons and azaleas because their dense foliage blocks the overheads from reaching the surface of the compost. I watered the hydrangeas because they are always thirsty, and the assorted shrubs stood on the gravel at the bottom of the plant centre not covered by any automatic system. I watered the display tables along the central aisle, and then started on the herbaceous section, much of which was bone dry so that the pots kept blowing over in the wind and I had to hold the lance with one hand and the pots with the other. My colleague started at the opposite end of the herbaceous tables, and we met at the penstemons, by which time the cuffs of the fleece and shirt on my left arm were sodden.
It was so bad because it had been windy for so long, and made worse by the fact that it was not done properly by hand yesterday. Running the overhead irrigation on the herbaceous tables when it is windy doesn't really do the plants a lot of good, as so much of the water blows away sideways without ever penetrating the compost, and it would have been better if the owner had not told us yesterday to run all the automatic irrigation because there wasn't time to hand water, thus giving the triathlete licence to opt out of any hand watering in the morning. There would have been time with two people doing the herbaceous tables, as we did today. Watering on Sundays is always more thorough than on Saturdays, because my Sunday colleagues take it more seriously.
After that the day seemed to drag a little. I weeded the pots of fruit, which meant that I'd done both of the jobs on the manager's list. I checked for e-mails as instructed by the manager, but there weren't any, and it turned out that the two I'd replied to yesterday, by pressing Reply, composing succinct answers (no, sorry, we don't ship to Germany but in any event we don't have that shrub and can't get it, no, sorry we don't have the dahlia you're looking for, believe it has lost vigour in recent years) and pressing Send, had gone not to the potential customers but back to the Boss's computer. I'm not on Outlook at home, and the manager's two minute training session on how to use the networked system at work must have missed out one or two key features.
The boss told me that today was my chance to harvest yellow rattle seed, since it was ready and he was sending the gardeners in to collect it tomorrow. I duly trotted down the arboretum armed with a piece of paper to wrap it in, in lieu of an envelope, and realised that I didn't actually know what yellow rattle seed looked like, and couldn't even recognise the leaves. I'm so used to seeing the yellow flowers, vaguely dead nettle like, and looking knowledgeable when somebody says That's yellow rattle, that I never looked at the rest of the plant. I collected several stalks bearing bladder-like inflated pods, arranged one below the other down the stem in the same way as rattle flowers are, and hoped that I'd got the right thing. Certainly I couldn't see any other likely looking candidates.
On getting home I looked up yellow rattle seed pods on Google images (where would we be without it) and that was fine. The seed pods look right, and the odd couple of leaves that came with them (narrow, very vaguely reminiscent of Perovskia). The boss said I must sow it at once, though when I queried whether it would wait until Tuesday the answer was yes. Having seen how long it took me to collect as many pods as you can wrap up in one sheet of A4 I now think that the commercial price of ninety-something pounds a kilo quoted by the Systems Administrator's brother sounds very reasonable. It must take an absolute age to harvest a kilo of rattle seed.
It was so bad because it had been windy for so long, and made worse by the fact that it was not done properly by hand yesterday. Running the overhead irrigation on the herbaceous tables when it is windy doesn't really do the plants a lot of good, as so much of the water blows away sideways without ever penetrating the compost, and it would have been better if the owner had not told us yesterday to run all the automatic irrigation because there wasn't time to hand water, thus giving the triathlete licence to opt out of any hand watering in the morning. There would have been time with two people doing the herbaceous tables, as we did today. Watering on Sundays is always more thorough than on Saturdays, because my Sunday colleagues take it more seriously.
After that the day seemed to drag a little. I weeded the pots of fruit, which meant that I'd done both of the jobs on the manager's list. I checked for e-mails as instructed by the manager, but there weren't any, and it turned out that the two I'd replied to yesterday, by pressing Reply, composing succinct answers (no, sorry, we don't ship to Germany but in any event we don't have that shrub and can't get it, no, sorry we don't have the dahlia you're looking for, believe it has lost vigour in recent years) and pressing Send, had gone not to the potential customers but back to the Boss's computer. I'm not on Outlook at home, and the manager's two minute training session on how to use the networked system at work must have missed out one or two key features.
The boss told me that today was my chance to harvest yellow rattle seed, since it was ready and he was sending the gardeners in to collect it tomorrow. I duly trotted down the arboretum armed with a piece of paper to wrap it in, in lieu of an envelope, and realised that I didn't actually know what yellow rattle seed looked like, and couldn't even recognise the leaves. I'm so used to seeing the yellow flowers, vaguely dead nettle like, and looking knowledgeable when somebody says That's yellow rattle, that I never looked at the rest of the plant. I collected several stalks bearing bladder-like inflated pods, arranged one below the other down the stem in the same way as rattle flowers are, and hoped that I'd got the right thing. Certainly I couldn't see any other likely looking candidates.
On getting home I looked up yellow rattle seed pods on Google images (where would we be without it) and that was fine. The seed pods look right, and the odd couple of leaves that came with them (narrow, very vaguely reminiscent of Perovskia). The boss said I must sow it at once, though when I queried whether it would wait until Tuesday the answer was yes. Having seen how long it took me to collect as many pods as you can wrap up in one sheet of A4 I now think that the commercial price of ninety-something pounds a kilo quoted by the Systems Administrator's brother sounds very reasonable. It must take an absolute age to harvest a kilo of rattle seed.
Saturday, 30 June 2012
a drying wind
I set off for work this morning conscious that today was the last day of the six o'clock finish. From July we go back to 5.15pm, and the thought that it was the final ten hour day for this summer cheered me at intervals. I was greeted on arrival by the owner, who informed me that it had been very windy and that everything would be very dry and that we would have to run the overheads even though it was still windy because there wouldn't be time to hand water everything, and that in particular those four trolleys of recently delivered roses were very, very dry and would need lots of water. I concurred, taking this as a ritual display of authority, given that the owner is not usually around first thing on a Saturday, and I work out what needs watering by myself by dint of looking at it.
The watering did take a long time, and I didn't finish dragging hoses about until gone ten. I felt a certain amount of irritation that one of my colleagues, after bustling around standing pots up, programming the automatic system and throwing a few switches, didn't participate in the hand watering that still needed to be done. He is a year or two younger than me, and competes in triathlons in his spare time, so there is no particular reason why he shouldn't heave hoses about and get dribbled on by leaking lances like the rest of us. (However, through the course of the day he finished emptying a full red trolley, and did some hand watering in the last half hour, so doing his share of heavy lifting in the end).
My task was to clean one of the shrub beds, in the course of which I reduced another work shirt to a state where I certainly couldn't serve refreshments wearing it, and it won't do a second day of outdoor work without washing. I got the tail end of Ceanothus through to Clethra back into neat alphabetical order, swept, weeded, dead leaves and twigs removed, and where necessary the pot dressed with a fresh layer of compost. Some of the Cistus were horribly dry and had to be soaked in the water butt, having passed the stage at which spraying water on top of the pots does any good. They are very thirsty plants in pots, which seems curious when they are drought resistant in the ground. The one remaining Chimonanthus praecox was a sorry specimen, its roots having started to rot, and I removed it from sale. My new young colleague said that when he worked at Nottcutts it seemed as though wintersweet always started to go downhill after about two weeks in a pot.
I got home to see the chickens eating grass outside the hen house and not my dahlias, and expressed my delight to the Systems Administrator, who said that the chickens had only abandoned the dahlias after being squirted twice with the hose. While I was watering in the greenhouse they snuck back into the dahlia bed twice more, wriggling through my Barbara Hepworth-like array of interlocking strings like limbo dancers. I threw more water over them from my cans, but am beginning to get rather depressed about the whole thing. They have the entire front garden to range over, so why are they fixated on destroying a dozen plants in the dahlia bed? They don't like eating the bronze leaved varieties, by the way, only the green ones, half of which have been reduced to leafless stumps. When I have finished typing this I am going to start researching pigeon netting.
The watering at home took another hour, though the SA chipped in upon realising that it needed doing. It may not have been that hot today, but sunshine and strong wind are an incredibly drying combination. Some of the small plants in my greenhouse were starting to collapse. If I'd been at home tomorrow I would probably have risked leaving the pots in the Italian garden until the morning, but I'm not.
The watering did take a long time, and I didn't finish dragging hoses about until gone ten. I felt a certain amount of irritation that one of my colleagues, after bustling around standing pots up, programming the automatic system and throwing a few switches, didn't participate in the hand watering that still needed to be done. He is a year or two younger than me, and competes in triathlons in his spare time, so there is no particular reason why he shouldn't heave hoses about and get dribbled on by leaking lances like the rest of us. (However, through the course of the day he finished emptying a full red trolley, and did some hand watering in the last half hour, so doing his share of heavy lifting in the end).
My task was to clean one of the shrub beds, in the course of which I reduced another work shirt to a state where I certainly couldn't serve refreshments wearing it, and it won't do a second day of outdoor work without washing. I got the tail end of Ceanothus through to Clethra back into neat alphabetical order, swept, weeded, dead leaves and twigs removed, and where necessary the pot dressed with a fresh layer of compost. Some of the Cistus were horribly dry and had to be soaked in the water butt, having passed the stage at which spraying water on top of the pots does any good. They are very thirsty plants in pots, which seems curious when they are drought resistant in the ground. The one remaining Chimonanthus praecox was a sorry specimen, its roots having started to rot, and I removed it from sale. My new young colleague said that when he worked at Nottcutts it seemed as though wintersweet always started to go downhill after about two weeks in a pot.
I got home to see the chickens eating grass outside the hen house and not my dahlias, and expressed my delight to the Systems Administrator, who said that the chickens had only abandoned the dahlias after being squirted twice with the hose. While I was watering in the greenhouse they snuck back into the dahlia bed twice more, wriggling through my Barbara Hepworth-like array of interlocking strings like limbo dancers. I threw more water over them from my cans, but am beginning to get rather depressed about the whole thing. They have the entire front garden to range over, so why are they fixated on destroying a dozen plants in the dahlia bed? They don't like eating the bronze leaved varieties, by the way, only the green ones, half of which have been reduced to leafless stumps. When I have finished typing this I am going to start researching pigeon netting.
The watering at home took another hour, though the SA chipped in upon realising that it needed doing. It may not have been that hot today, but sunshine and strong wind are an incredibly drying combination. Some of the small plants in my greenhouse were starting to collapse. If I'd been at home tomorrow I would probably have risked leaving the pots in the Italian garden until the morning, but I'm not.
Friday, 29 June 2012
an embarrassment of riches
I have too many plants in the greenhouse. Some I bought, some I grew. Too many of them need planting out or potting on. I'm potting and planting as fast as I can, but that's not fast enough. In the meantime I'm running out of places to stand the ones I do pot on.
Many of them are intended for particular spots, and the trouble is that their intended destinations are already occupied, either by weeds or by more than I want of some other plant. Today and yesterday I was engaged in a complicated two stage manoeuvre, moving a dwarf iris with blue flowers from the turning circle to the long flowerbed, so that I can plant out a small grove of seed raised Dierama mossii. The Dierama were sitting on the top layer of one of the aluminium racks in the greenhouse until I moved them outside in the spring so that I could use the space on the rack for more recent seedlings, then I had to move them in again because they were getting too wet in their pots outside, and there was nowhere to put them except the floor, so I have to be careful not to step on them. The dwarf iris are heavily infested by a grass with a creeping rootstock, one reason why they have to be lifted, and the gap in the long bed I'm using them to fill had grown a lively crop of weeds which had to be removed, so the whole process is taking a while. To make more space for the Dierama I'll reduce the size of a patch of low growing Artemisia, which has expanded to cover an area of the turning circle about twice the size of my kitchen table, or more Artemisia than anyone could reasonably want. I'm going to have to buy a bulk bag of gravel to mulch the areas where the iris and Artemisia were and spread that out. All in all it will come to well over a day's work, at the end of which I'll have space to plant out eight or ten of the pots languishing in the greenhouse.
I tried giving a Dierama and a variegated pelargonium to a friend who is a keen and able gardener, but as she gave me a Jacaranda seedling in return it's only a net reduction of one pot, and the Jacaranda will need potting on into quite a large pot in time, and to be overwintered under frost free glass. If we lived on a road I could try selling the spares at the front gate. I ought really to market the more unusual ones on e-Bay, but haven't got round to it yet. When I think of the hassle of packaging live plants, and the cost of postage, it all seems like hard work. I gave the boss a spare Puya venusta, a tender rosette forming plant with evil inward pointing spines designed to trap sheep. It lives in a pot outside the office door in the summer, and comes into the office for the winter, and the gardener was made to pot it on which can't have been a pleasant experience, so it is looking bigger and better than my remaining Puya. However it did not seem to occur to the boss to ask if I had any more of those at home, and offer to buy them for stock in the plant centre.
Sometimes it's difficult to resist propagating. Those little shoots that some Hemerocallis form on their flower stems, for example. If you carefully pull them away, or cut them off with a small section of stem, and pot them up, they usually root. Who can resist free Hemerocallis? The manager gave me a basal piece that a customer had broken off a chrysanthemum, which already had the beginnings of roots. You would need a heart of stone not to put it in compost and give it some water. I now have a free chrysanthemum, though I can't remember what colour it is. I've got a bowl of seed from Anemone pavonina sitting on the hall table, picked from my own plant in the gravel. This year has not been great seed collecting weather, with the rain, and the last time I sowed A. pavonina seed it went mouldy, but I'd love to have more of them and know exactly where they'd go, in the gravel with the others.
While I have too many plants unplanted I should stop buying any more, and I partly do, but if something turns up that I know is rarely available and that I want for the garden, it seems foolish to let it pass by. I bought an Erythrina christa-galli on that basis recently, which has gone in at the base of a west facing wall. It was only about the third time we've had it in stock in nine years. We only had Paeonia rockii the once, so I'm very glad I snapped that up when I saw it.
I suppose I will just have to keep planting and potting as fast as I can, or become more ruthless and creative in my methods, and when invited out to supper start turning up at people's houses with a sheep-eating tender bromeliad from Latin America as a hostess present, instead of a bunch of flowers.
Many of them are intended for particular spots, and the trouble is that their intended destinations are already occupied, either by weeds or by more than I want of some other plant. Today and yesterday I was engaged in a complicated two stage manoeuvre, moving a dwarf iris with blue flowers from the turning circle to the long flowerbed, so that I can plant out a small grove of seed raised Dierama mossii. The Dierama were sitting on the top layer of one of the aluminium racks in the greenhouse until I moved them outside in the spring so that I could use the space on the rack for more recent seedlings, then I had to move them in again because they were getting too wet in their pots outside, and there was nowhere to put them except the floor, so I have to be careful not to step on them. The dwarf iris are heavily infested by a grass with a creeping rootstock, one reason why they have to be lifted, and the gap in the long bed I'm using them to fill had grown a lively crop of weeds which had to be removed, so the whole process is taking a while. To make more space for the Dierama I'll reduce the size of a patch of low growing Artemisia, which has expanded to cover an area of the turning circle about twice the size of my kitchen table, or more Artemisia than anyone could reasonably want. I'm going to have to buy a bulk bag of gravel to mulch the areas where the iris and Artemisia were and spread that out. All in all it will come to well over a day's work, at the end of which I'll have space to plant out eight or ten of the pots languishing in the greenhouse.
I tried giving a Dierama and a variegated pelargonium to a friend who is a keen and able gardener, but as she gave me a Jacaranda seedling in return it's only a net reduction of one pot, and the Jacaranda will need potting on into quite a large pot in time, and to be overwintered under frost free glass. If we lived on a road I could try selling the spares at the front gate. I ought really to market the more unusual ones on e-Bay, but haven't got round to it yet. When I think of the hassle of packaging live plants, and the cost of postage, it all seems like hard work. I gave the boss a spare Puya venusta, a tender rosette forming plant with evil inward pointing spines designed to trap sheep. It lives in a pot outside the office door in the summer, and comes into the office for the winter, and the gardener was made to pot it on which can't have been a pleasant experience, so it is looking bigger and better than my remaining Puya. However it did not seem to occur to the boss to ask if I had any more of those at home, and offer to buy them for stock in the plant centre.
Sometimes it's difficult to resist propagating. Those little shoots that some Hemerocallis form on their flower stems, for example. If you carefully pull them away, or cut them off with a small section of stem, and pot them up, they usually root. Who can resist free Hemerocallis? The manager gave me a basal piece that a customer had broken off a chrysanthemum, which already had the beginnings of roots. You would need a heart of stone not to put it in compost and give it some water. I now have a free chrysanthemum, though I can't remember what colour it is. I've got a bowl of seed from Anemone pavonina sitting on the hall table, picked from my own plant in the gravel. This year has not been great seed collecting weather, with the rain, and the last time I sowed A. pavonina seed it went mouldy, but I'd love to have more of them and know exactly where they'd go, in the gravel with the others.
While I have too many plants unplanted I should stop buying any more, and I partly do, but if something turns up that I know is rarely available and that I want for the garden, it seems foolish to let it pass by. I bought an Erythrina christa-galli on that basis recently, which has gone in at the base of a west facing wall. It was only about the third time we've had it in stock in nine years. We only had Paeonia rockii the once, so I'm very glad I snapped that up when I saw it.
I suppose I will just have to keep planting and potting as fast as I can, or become more ruthless and creative in my methods, and when invited out to supper start turning up at people's houses with a sheep-eating tender bromeliad from Latin America as a hostess present, instead of a bunch of flowers.
Thursday, 28 June 2012
the colour yellow
The evening primroses that have seeded themselves from plants I grew from seed picked on Dunwich Beach are opening their cheerful yellow flowers from long buds with a hint of apricot at the base. Looking round the garden I realise how much yellow there is throughout the year.
There are some customers at the plant centre where I work who tell me with an air of pride, as if I should admire them for their good taste, that they have no yellow in their garden. No primroses or daffodils? That's not a particular marker of good taste in most people's books. At the moment, besides the evening primroses, we have tall pale yellow verbascums with soft grey leaves, much beloved of mullein moth, and a few deep yellow ones from the Cotswolds series. In the herb bed the flat discs of tiny parley flowers are showing yellow, and in the back garden the soft brownish yellow flowers of the golden oat Stipa gigantea hover over the island bed. Before the evening primroses we had the starry yellow flower spikes of Asphodeline lutea, which self seeds with great glee in the gravel.
The new foliage of box has a yellowish tinge. Prostrate junipers, so useful for filling in awkward corners and covering slopes, were chosen partly for their sulphur yellow tones, and the obliging Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' does what it says on the tin. A Thuja occidentalis 'Rheingold' planted as a corner feature in the island bed about fifteen years ago has finally reached its desired size, so much so that for the first time ever this year I trimmed it lightly. That is a strong, bronze, old gold sort of yellow. A prostrate yellow yew does a useful job covering the base of the slope outside the conservatory, taking over where the juniper leaves off, and I enjoy the sight of the dark red flowers of the texensis clematis 'Gravetye Beauty' sprawling over it later in the year. The small scots pine in the long bed that is a sober shade of grey at the moment will flush a warm soft gold come the cold weather.
The pineapple broom is full out now with its fine, clean yellow flowers that smell of pineapples (what else), and it will be followed by the yellow pea flowers of airy Genista aetnensis. A yellow flowered Halimium with nice dark green evergreen foliage has made a dense dome in the gravel, surviving the harsh winters without turning a hair and flowering profusely. The brownish yellow bobbles of Phlomis russeliana and clearer yellow flowers of Phlomis fruticosa are pleasant enough, and the plants will cope with horribly dry conditions. I don't even mind the little yellow flowers of Santolina, though I grow it for the grey foliage rather than the flowers.
Several of the roses are yellow, mostly David Austin varieties in the old rose style, some with a strong tinge of apricot. In the rose bank I have the lovely muddled yellow and pink flowers of the rambler 'Phyllis Bide', which unusually for a rambler is a repeat flowerer, plus the stout modern climber 'Leverkusen', said by Peter Beales to be a good doer, and which is doing very well with me. Up in the meadow a very early flowering species rose with tiny ferny leaves has little yellow flowers like primroses, and I'm trying to get the rugosa hybrid 'Agnes' going, though I think it is too shady where I have put her.
The heads of Euphorbia characias are fading and I must cut them down sometime soon, being careful not to get the sap on my arms. We are warned nowadays that an ever increasing number of species and varieties could irritate the skin (hyacinth bulbs, the leaves of Aconitum), but the milky sap of euphorbias really does. They coincided with the tulips, looking very zingy together, and the tulip display was jazzed up by the inclusion of yellow and orange with the red and purple.
The dangling soft yellow flowers of the Corylopsis were extremely tasteful, as were the yellow Hamamelis, and so will be the yellow Banksia rose I'm trying to grow up the hazel tree behind the Hamamelis, if it ever gets going. I should think the Dicentra scandens counts as tasteful as well: at any rate it is rarified. The pale yellow scabious flowers of Cephalaria gigantea, carried a good metre above the clump of basal foliage, are pretty refined, as are the dainty yellow trumpets of Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus and the taller H. 'Marion Vaughn'. My yellow flowered hellebore hybrids would not disgrace the most elegant garden, yellow hellebores scoring far higher in the garden snobbery stakes than the more usual muddy pinks. The pale yellow perennial foxgloves are rather smart too.
In the long grass coltsfoot is making free. OK, it is a weed, but it is a graceful weed and good for insects. Even the oxeye daisies have yellow centres. I'm planning to extend the range of yellow weeds in the long grass by adding toadflax, come the autumn, and have some nice little plants coming along in the greenhouse.
And yes, there are assorted yellow flowered daisies up in the meadow that flower at various points during the summer, and no, they are not refined plants, and some are a harsh shade of yellow, but they blend cheerfully with the other things up there. The ochre yellow flowers of a tall yarrow are not the most refined things either, but Achillea taygeta grows in such dry conditions that you forgive it a lot, if you have a dry garden.
I like yellow, and I have lots of it. In the garden, that is. Most yellow clothes make me look as though I had jaundice.
There are some customers at the plant centre where I work who tell me with an air of pride, as if I should admire them for their good taste, that they have no yellow in their garden. No primroses or daffodils? That's not a particular marker of good taste in most people's books. At the moment, besides the evening primroses, we have tall pale yellow verbascums with soft grey leaves, much beloved of mullein moth, and a few deep yellow ones from the Cotswolds series. In the herb bed the flat discs of tiny parley flowers are showing yellow, and in the back garden the soft brownish yellow flowers of the golden oat Stipa gigantea hover over the island bed. Before the evening primroses we had the starry yellow flower spikes of Asphodeline lutea, which self seeds with great glee in the gravel.
The new foliage of box has a yellowish tinge. Prostrate junipers, so useful for filling in awkward corners and covering slopes, were chosen partly for their sulphur yellow tones, and the obliging Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' does what it says on the tin. A Thuja occidentalis 'Rheingold' planted as a corner feature in the island bed about fifteen years ago has finally reached its desired size, so much so that for the first time ever this year I trimmed it lightly. That is a strong, bronze, old gold sort of yellow. A prostrate yellow yew does a useful job covering the base of the slope outside the conservatory, taking over where the juniper leaves off, and I enjoy the sight of the dark red flowers of the texensis clematis 'Gravetye Beauty' sprawling over it later in the year. The small scots pine in the long bed that is a sober shade of grey at the moment will flush a warm soft gold come the cold weather.
The pineapple broom is full out now with its fine, clean yellow flowers that smell of pineapples (what else), and it will be followed by the yellow pea flowers of airy Genista aetnensis. A yellow flowered Halimium with nice dark green evergreen foliage has made a dense dome in the gravel, surviving the harsh winters without turning a hair and flowering profusely. The brownish yellow bobbles of Phlomis russeliana and clearer yellow flowers of Phlomis fruticosa are pleasant enough, and the plants will cope with horribly dry conditions. I don't even mind the little yellow flowers of Santolina, though I grow it for the grey foliage rather than the flowers.
Several of the roses are yellow, mostly David Austin varieties in the old rose style, some with a strong tinge of apricot. In the rose bank I have the lovely muddled yellow and pink flowers of the rambler 'Phyllis Bide', which unusually for a rambler is a repeat flowerer, plus the stout modern climber 'Leverkusen', said by Peter Beales to be a good doer, and which is doing very well with me. Up in the meadow a very early flowering species rose with tiny ferny leaves has little yellow flowers like primroses, and I'm trying to get the rugosa hybrid 'Agnes' going, though I think it is too shady where I have put her.
The heads of Euphorbia characias are fading and I must cut them down sometime soon, being careful not to get the sap on my arms. We are warned nowadays that an ever increasing number of species and varieties could irritate the skin (hyacinth bulbs, the leaves of Aconitum), but the milky sap of euphorbias really does. They coincided with the tulips, looking very zingy together, and the tulip display was jazzed up by the inclusion of yellow and orange with the red and purple.
The dangling soft yellow flowers of the Corylopsis were extremely tasteful, as were the yellow Hamamelis, and so will be the yellow Banksia rose I'm trying to grow up the hazel tree behind the Hamamelis, if it ever gets going. I should think the Dicentra scandens counts as tasteful as well: at any rate it is rarified. The pale yellow scabious flowers of Cephalaria gigantea, carried a good metre above the clump of basal foliage, are pretty refined, as are the dainty yellow trumpets of Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus and the taller H. 'Marion Vaughn'. My yellow flowered hellebore hybrids would not disgrace the most elegant garden, yellow hellebores scoring far higher in the garden snobbery stakes than the more usual muddy pinks. The pale yellow perennial foxgloves are rather smart too.
In the long grass coltsfoot is making free. OK, it is a weed, but it is a graceful weed and good for insects. Even the oxeye daisies have yellow centres. I'm planning to extend the range of yellow weeds in the long grass by adding toadflax, come the autumn, and have some nice little plants coming along in the greenhouse.
And yes, there are assorted yellow flowered daisies up in the meadow that flower at various points during the summer, and no, they are not refined plants, and some are a harsh shade of yellow, but they blend cheerfully with the other things up there. The ochre yellow flowers of a tall yarrow are not the most refined things either, but Achillea taygeta grows in such dry conditions that you forgive it a lot, if you have a dry garden.
I like yellow, and I have lots of it. In the garden, that is. Most yellow clothes make me look as though I had jaundice.
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
hot and bothered
I've just done an afternoon woodland charity talk in Colchester. Some talks feel like a breeze from beginning to end, and some feel like hard work. Today fell into the latter category. It wasn't the organiser's fault that it was a very humid day, and by the time I reached the hall, admittedly having run some other errands first, I was extremely hot. I can hold the person who booked me responsible for her instructions on how to find the hall, as she told me there was car parking next to the church down a narrow lane but omitted to mention that from the street you can't really see the church at all, at least while concentrating on negotiating the many traffic lights and kamikaze pedestrians in that part of town. After I'd overshot the turning once without ever seeing it I decided I'd better park and find the place on foot, then move the car, so had to go round the one way system and fork out 90p for half an hour's parking, and then go round the one way system again once I'd found where I was supposed to be going. You could see the car park I had been in from the window of the room where the meeting was held, but there was no access from the church hall to the public car park.
When the speaker who is giving up their free time to entertain and educate your group appears at the venue dripping with sweat it would be considerate to find them a glass of water while they set up their equipment, instead of leaving them to ask for it when they've finished. And the person who booked me hadn't asked whether I would be using slides, not a problem as I take all my own equipment, except that it was one of those meetings where the members sit around little tables, not in rows facing the front. The tables had been set up without leaving any room for me or the screen and projector stand, and some of the old ladies were rather grumbly about having to get up so that the organiser could move the ones nearest the front. And they had glasses of water.
The building was also being used for musical grade exams, so through the doors which were left open to let the air circulate you could hear on the one hand a series of piano scales and tremulous woodwind, and on the other the noise of Colchester's traffic. I realised I was going to have to crank up the volume, while occasionally anxious looking parents and miserable small children peered in through the door.
The organiser suggested that they have the speaker and then the notices, and two people said they had quick notices. One of them was brief, while the other took a long time to tell the assembled members a great many details about a series of concerts that she was not arranging trips to, with full explanations of why she couldn't attend each event. Then I was introduced to begin the talk, and the occupants of one of the little tables continued chatting happily while I stood at the front waiting for them to stop. I said I'd be coming on to the slides after we'd looked at some pieces of tree, and it would be helpful if people could close the curtains at that point, whereupon someone leaped up and closed the curtains immediately.
Once I began the talk most of them did look happy, apart from one old lady who immediately went to sleep and stayed that way until I'd finished and it was time for tea and biscuits. I'd been told to take half an hour, when the talk normally lasts forty five minutes (or an hour for specialist wildlife groups) so it felt rather like a mad canter editing it down as I went along. Somebody made a nice speech afterwards thanking me, and the organiser told me with some incredulity that most of them had really enjoyed that, much more than she was expecting. Nobody dared ask questions in front of the group, though a few came up to chat over tea. I got quite a posh biscuit.
It was a friendship group for the bereaved, so my presence there was part of my contribution to the Big Society. Sometimes it feels like rather hard work. Next week I have a wives group in Romford. Lily who booked me told me over the phone that she was over eighty, and not so sharp as she used to be, but it'll almost certainly be fine. They are always a sparky crowd in Romford.
When the speaker who is giving up their free time to entertain and educate your group appears at the venue dripping with sweat it would be considerate to find them a glass of water while they set up their equipment, instead of leaving them to ask for it when they've finished. And the person who booked me hadn't asked whether I would be using slides, not a problem as I take all my own equipment, except that it was one of those meetings where the members sit around little tables, not in rows facing the front. The tables had been set up without leaving any room for me or the screen and projector stand, and some of the old ladies were rather grumbly about having to get up so that the organiser could move the ones nearest the front. And they had glasses of water.
The building was also being used for musical grade exams, so through the doors which were left open to let the air circulate you could hear on the one hand a series of piano scales and tremulous woodwind, and on the other the noise of Colchester's traffic. I realised I was going to have to crank up the volume, while occasionally anxious looking parents and miserable small children peered in through the door.
The organiser suggested that they have the speaker and then the notices, and two people said they had quick notices. One of them was brief, while the other took a long time to tell the assembled members a great many details about a series of concerts that she was not arranging trips to, with full explanations of why she couldn't attend each event. Then I was introduced to begin the talk, and the occupants of one of the little tables continued chatting happily while I stood at the front waiting for them to stop. I said I'd be coming on to the slides after we'd looked at some pieces of tree, and it would be helpful if people could close the curtains at that point, whereupon someone leaped up and closed the curtains immediately.
Once I began the talk most of them did look happy, apart from one old lady who immediately went to sleep and stayed that way until I'd finished and it was time for tea and biscuits. I'd been told to take half an hour, when the talk normally lasts forty five minutes (or an hour for specialist wildlife groups) so it felt rather like a mad canter editing it down as I went along. Somebody made a nice speech afterwards thanking me, and the organiser told me with some incredulity that most of them had really enjoyed that, much more than she was expecting. Nobody dared ask questions in front of the group, though a few came up to chat over tea. I got quite a posh biscuit.
It was a friendship group for the bereaved, so my presence there was part of my contribution to the Big Society. Sometimes it feels like rather hard work. Next week I have a wives group in Romford. Lily who booked me told me over the phone that she was over eighty, and not so sharp as she used to be, but it'll almost certainly be fine. They are always a sparky crowd in Romford.
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
barely connected
We barely have broadband. If the rest of this post doesn't appear, that's why it's not there.
Addendum Right, that's posted. Now to flesh out the narrative, if the connection holds up. I tried to post in the early evening, before going out, and found I didn't have the internet. It's lucky that I'd made a note at lunchtime when the broadband was still working of where I was going, and what time I had to be there. I tried again when I got back and still couldn't get a connection. Finally, at gone 10.0pm, I can plug myself in to the world wide web. Did I mention that BT broadband wasn't very good round here?
I was going on a walk around a local nature reserve and adjacent Woodland Trust site, led by somebody from the Essex Wildlife Trust, which I got invited on by someone I met at the woodland volunteers conference last month. I'd never visited either site, and thought it would be interesting to see them, and nice to meet some other people actively involved in woodland conservation and creation, as a change from talking about it.
The Essex Wildlife Trust reserve occupies former gravel workings near Clacton on Sea. Most of the trees and plants on the reserve arrived by themselves after extraction ceased, though the warden has planted a few things, such as buckthorn which is the food plant of some butterfly, and a white flowered thing called corky fruited water dropwort seems to have come in on their grass cutting machinery, since it wasn't originally found in these parts and now grows all over the place on their reserves. There are good views across the Holland Brook, which was an inlet of the North Sea until it was dammed in the early eighteenth century.
The Woodland Trust area was planted seventeen year ago by a local group, several of whose founder members were there this evening. They clubbed together to buy a field that wasn't being used for much, planted it up in association with the Trust, and eventually made it over to the Trust so that its long term management would be secured. After seventeen years the new area looks like a proper wood, and it must be gratifying for the people who made it happen to see it now. In fact quite a few of the planted trees died, and the site has continued to develop into broadleaf woodland by natural regeneration, but they had the idea and got the ball rolling.
Lawyers did not emerge from the tour particularly well, having apparently created great difficulties about the Essex Wildlife Trust managing the Woodland Trust part by mutual agreement, as they fussed about the boundaries, and an EWT attempt to buy a further tract of land for which they had funding had shipwrecked on the rock of lawyers jibbing at uncertainly over the access rights. I gathered that the process of the local group handing their project over to a national charity had not been entirely smooth, the original owners sometimes feeling that the Trust weren't doing enough with the site. I didn't get to hear the other side of the story, though I did have some difficulties convincing some of the locals that I was strictly a volunteer and didn't know anything about it. I guess the Trust's idea of how the new wood should be managed may have been less intensive than some of its progenitors had imagined.
Anyway, it was very pleasant, and we saw a barn owl box that had been inhabited this year by various birds but not barn owls, and a tawny box that did have tawnies in it (so we were told. Never look into a box you think might contain tawny owls. Apart from the fact that you are not supposed to disturb them, they will attack your face and they go for the eyes).
Addendum Right, that's posted. Now to flesh out the narrative, if the connection holds up. I tried to post in the early evening, before going out, and found I didn't have the internet. It's lucky that I'd made a note at lunchtime when the broadband was still working of where I was going, and what time I had to be there. I tried again when I got back and still couldn't get a connection. Finally, at gone 10.0pm, I can plug myself in to the world wide web. Did I mention that BT broadband wasn't very good round here?
I was going on a walk around a local nature reserve and adjacent Woodland Trust site, led by somebody from the Essex Wildlife Trust, which I got invited on by someone I met at the woodland volunteers conference last month. I'd never visited either site, and thought it would be interesting to see them, and nice to meet some other people actively involved in woodland conservation and creation, as a change from talking about it.
The Essex Wildlife Trust reserve occupies former gravel workings near Clacton on Sea. Most of the trees and plants on the reserve arrived by themselves after extraction ceased, though the warden has planted a few things, such as buckthorn which is the food plant of some butterfly, and a white flowered thing called corky fruited water dropwort seems to have come in on their grass cutting machinery, since it wasn't originally found in these parts and now grows all over the place on their reserves. There are good views across the Holland Brook, which was an inlet of the North Sea until it was dammed in the early eighteenth century.
The Woodland Trust area was planted seventeen year ago by a local group, several of whose founder members were there this evening. They clubbed together to buy a field that wasn't being used for much, planted it up in association with the Trust, and eventually made it over to the Trust so that its long term management would be secured. After seventeen years the new area looks like a proper wood, and it must be gratifying for the people who made it happen to see it now. In fact quite a few of the planted trees died, and the site has continued to develop into broadleaf woodland by natural regeneration, but they had the idea and got the ball rolling.
Lawyers did not emerge from the tour particularly well, having apparently created great difficulties about the Essex Wildlife Trust managing the Woodland Trust part by mutual agreement, as they fussed about the boundaries, and an EWT attempt to buy a further tract of land for which they had funding had shipwrecked on the rock of lawyers jibbing at uncertainly over the access rights. I gathered that the process of the local group handing their project over to a national charity had not been entirely smooth, the original owners sometimes feeling that the Trust weren't doing enough with the site. I didn't get to hear the other side of the story, though I did have some difficulties convincing some of the locals that I was strictly a volunteer and didn't know anything about it. I guess the Trust's idea of how the new wood should be managed may have been less intensive than some of its progenitors had imagined.
Anyway, it was very pleasant, and we saw a barn owl box that had been inhabited this year by various birds but not barn owls, and a tawny box that did have tawnies in it (so we were told. Never look into a box you think might contain tawny owls. Apart from the fact that you are not supposed to disturb them, they will attack your face and they go for the eyes).
Monday, 25 June 2012
a lucky escape
One of the hens nearly went on her holidays last night. The Systems Administrator nipped out before we went to bed, to check that they really were locked in their house, and not just shut in their run. And didn't reappear. Minutes passed, and I thought that it didn't take that long to close the hen house door, so went out to investigate, and found the SA wandering about with a torch. One of the hens had managed to avoid going back into the run with the others after chicken exercise time, and had been sitting outside the pop hole to the run when the SA went out. At the sight of a human she disappeared into the herb bed. We looked for her for a while, but searching for a chicken that doesn't want to be found in a large and overgrown garden is a fairly hopeless endeavour even in broad daylight, let alone in the dark. We agreed that she'd have to take her chances, which weren't too bad in that the last time we had the motion camera set up on the chicken house we didn't see a fox over the entire week. The SA grumbled savagely that this hen was always awkward about going back in, and we went to bed, leaving the run open.
I went out this morning as soon as I got up and there she was, lurking among the undergrowth nearby rather than in the run, and extremely damp and pathetic. She is an odd-looking hen, having developed a strange random clump of feathers on one side of her neck, and as such is my least favourite, which does make me reflect uncomfortably on the visceral nature of negative responses to handicap. I regard myself as a civilised social liberal, treating people with facial disfigurements or missing limbs or digits with the same consideration that I myself wish to be treated. At an intellectual level I believe that such things are not important. And yet, faced with a mildly deformed animal, I don't like it as much as the others. But she did look very frightened and unhappy, and I did feel sorry for her. With any luck it will teach her to flock better with the other chickens, but I'm not holding my breath.
At work somebody had placed a football at the base of the statue by a local sculptor of an etiolated man staring skywards, which has been at the back of the plant centre for the past couple of weeks (conveniently hiding a manhole cover in the lawn). That was a really good piece of conceptual art. (Last night the SA went out to get Chinese takeaways to eat with our film, and came back reporting that the entire village was very quiet. I asked why that was, and was told it was because of the football on the TV. I said, oh, who was playing, and the SA snorted and said that I really was qualified to be a High Court judge. On learning that it was England-Italy I said that that was it, then, Italy were going to win. The SA said that England might make it through this round but I said that Italy would win, because they play very pretty flowing football. The Today programme this morning devoted ten entire minutes to developing the same thesis, Italy having won. I once read a survey of how different economic pundits' predictions had turned out, and the answer was that all economic predictions were rubbish, but those by experts marginally worse than would be expected by chance. This was said to be because the experts got bogged down in details and emotionally tied to their own theories. I know practically nothing about football, just enough to know that England aren't very good at it, and I'm completely indifferent to who wins or loses, which is probably a good basis on which to be a pundit.)
The owner was out for the day. As ten o'clock approached I asked the manager what we were going to do about the tea room, and putting the cakes out, and so on, and he said Good point and washed his hands and started searching for plates, and discovered that the plastic covers were still wet from being washed last night. The trouble is, the tea room is very much the owner's project, and the manager is mainly interested in plants, and doesn't feel any 'ownership' of the tea room at all. My colleague and the manager had to make the tea and dispense cake, since after I'd got compost all over the front of my shirt cleaning up some very weedy pots of Rhodotypos scandens I put my foot down and said that I simply could not go into the kitchen of a commercial catering operation in those clothes.
The door at the back of the shop wouldn't open and close automatically at first, and we were beginning to imagine the boss's reaction if we had to tell him that the door, which was mended at enormous expense less than a couple of months ago, had broken again. Then the manager tried switching it off and switching it on again and that fixed it.
I went out this morning as soon as I got up and there she was, lurking among the undergrowth nearby rather than in the run, and extremely damp and pathetic. She is an odd-looking hen, having developed a strange random clump of feathers on one side of her neck, and as such is my least favourite, which does make me reflect uncomfortably on the visceral nature of negative responses to handicap. I regard myself as a civilised social liberal, treating people with facial disfigurements or missing limbs or digits with the same consideration that I myself wish to be treated. At an intellectual level I believe that such things are not important. And yet, faced with a mildly deformed animal, I don't like it as much as the others. But she did look very frightened and unhappy, and I did feel sorry for her. With any luck it will teach her to flock better with the other chickens, but I'm not holding my breath.
At work somebody had placed a football at the base of the statue by a local sculptor of an etiolated man staring skywards, which has been at the back of the plant centre for the past couple of weeks (conveniently hiding a manhole cover in the lawn). That was a really good piece of conceptual art. (Last night the SA went out to get Chinese takeaways to eat with our film, and came back reporting that the entire village was very quiet. I asked why that was, and was told it was because of the football on the TV. I said, oh, who was playing, and the SA snorted and said that I really was qualified to be a High Court judge. On learning that it was England-Italy I said that that was it, then, Italy were going to win. The SA said that England might make it through this round but I said that Italy would win, because they play very pretty flowing football. The Today programme this morning devoted ten entire minutes to developing the same thesis, Italy having won. I once read a survey of how different economic pundits' predictions had turned out, and the answer was that all economic predictions were rubbish, but those by experts marginally worse than would be expected by chance. This was said to be because the experts got bogged down in details and emotionally tied to their own theories. I know practically nothing about football, just enough to know that England aren't very good at it, and I'm completely indifferent to who wins or loses, which is probably a good basis on which to be a pundit.)
The owner was out for the day. As ten o'clock approached I asked the manager what we were going to do about the tea room, and putting the cakes out, and so on, and he said Good point and washed his hands and started searching for plates, and discovered that the plastic covers were still wet from being washed last night. The trouble is, the tea room is very much the owner's project, and the manager is mainly interested in plants, and doesn't feel any 'ownership' of the tea room at all. My colleague and the manager had to make the tea and dispense cake, since after I'd got compost all over the front of my shirt cleaning up some very weedy pots of Rhodotypos scandens I put my foot down and said that I simply could not go into the kitchen of a commercial catering operation in those clothes.
The door at the back of the shop wouldn't open and close automatically at first, and we were beginning to imagine the boss's reaction if we had to tell him that the door, which was mended at enormous expense less than a couple of months ago, had broken again. Then the manager tried switching it off and switching it on again and that fixed it.
Sunday, 24 June 2012
midsummer day and it's windy
Today is Midsummer Day. I found it difficult to get very excited about that, given that it was the summer solstice three days ago. I don't know which is the key event to celebrate, but it can't be both. It was blowing half a gale, and cold enough when I went out after breakfast that I needed my fleece, and my fleece hat. That's pathetic, for midsummer. I derived some consolation from the thought that at least I was not in the middle of a fortnight's sailing holiday and stuck in some small coastal town, where we had looked at the only museum and there was nothing left to do except lie in a bunk drinking tea and eating custard creams, waiting for the depressing moment when the Systems Administrator decreed that as it had dropped back to Force 5, gusting 6, we'd be OK to scuttle downwind to the next port for a change of museums.
The SA put the trellis back up. This was not very convenient given the strength of the wind, on the other hand it was not at all convenient trying to squeeze in and out of the greenhouse door with the trellis lying in front of it, and the SA wanted to get the job done in the morning to allow for an afternoon devoted to watching the Grand Prix and the cricket. A rope around one of the uprights allowed us to haul it back to the vertical, and the SA clamped it to one of the new posts, mounted this time in a Metpost, bolted it fast with bracing sections of extra timber, and then fastened the other end. That had to be a bodge, because the second Metpost had hit concrete and gone in at an angle. The SA was rather apologetic that the repairs were not very elegant, but they solved the immediate problem of access to the greenhouse, so I wasn't grumbling. I can always wrap rope around the lower sections or something if it looks too awful, when the plants have died down. Apart from having to buy the Metposts, all the rest of the repairs were done using odd bits of timber from stock.
I planted out my new Hemerocallis 'Whichford'. Some of the existing varieties in the borders have scarcely flowered at all, due to infestation by a gall midge that attacks the flower buds. According to the RHS advice on the subject there is no proven chemical treatment available to amateur gardeners, and the only solution is to pick off the affected flowers to reduce the population in subsequent years, or grow resistant varieties, those that flower later when the midge has done its stuff for the year. I'm happy to see that 'Whichford' is on the list, but that doesn't help me with the plants I've already got. Hemerocallis leaves aren't honestly all that exciting, and if some of my present clumps are never going to produce more than two flowers then they might as well go to the tip, sad as that would be. But maybe a chemical treatment will be identified. I did try Provado a couple of years ago, but it didn't seem to make any difference.
The technique of planting Allium among Japanese anemones has worked, at least for year one. The anemone foliage has not grown too tall yet, so that the purple balls of the Allium flowers sit above it, while their tatty leaves are hidden. For the experiment to be a total success the bulbs have to be able to build enough strength to flower again next year, which won't happen if they resent having their leaves shaded. Still, so far, so good. I read the idea in a book by Graham Stuart Thomas, so it ought to work.
Just down the hill from this charming mixture the large shrub rose 'Fritz Nobis' has blown over. I did not mean to grow 'Fritz Nobis', which makes a big plant, with a once only display of double pink flowers followed by a good crop of red hips. I'd ordered 'Fimbriata' from Peter Beales, which is a tiny, dainty thing with fringed edges to its petals. Somebody couldn't have been concentrating on what they were doing, and sent me the wrong one. I suppose the names are very vaguely similar. The stems of 'Fritz Nobis' have formed a great round woody ball at ground level, which has swivelled visibly in the soil, allowing the entire shrub to tip forwards. I asked the SA if it would be possible to prep some Y shaped supports, and then come and pull on a rope next week while I crawled around under Fritz, equipped with goggles and heavy gauntlets, and attempted to heave the whole thing up again and prop it. I would rather do that on a dry day when the ample foliage is not going to dump vast quantities of water on me, on the other hand it can't wait long, since it is lying on top of a small conifer that I'm rather fond of, and that has taken a lot of years to reach its present diminutive stature (it is a Tsuga canadensis 'Jeddeloh', and it has made a little round bush with a depression in the middle of it, like a birds nest, which is what it is supposed to do).
The novelty rose 'Hot Chocolate' in the front garden has come out while the leaves of the Berberis 'Orange Rocket' are still orange, and the effect is as lively as I hoped it would be. I did remove the flowering stalks of some self sown Stachys lanata, that were shading out the stems of the roses, and a giant biennial self sown yellow Verbascum that was growing into one side of the Berberis. You have to be vigilant, combining herbaceous plants with dwarf or recently planted shrubs, or the shrubs can be overwhelmed or spoiled.
The SA put the trellis back up. This was not very convenient given the strength of the wind, on the other hand it was not at all convenient trying to squeeze in and out of the greenhouse door with the trellis lying in front of it, and the SA wanted to get the job done in the morning to allow for an afternoon devoted to watching the Grand Prix and the cricket. A rope around one of the uprights allowed us to haul it back to the vertical, and the SA clamped it to one of the new posts, mounted this time in a Metpost, bolted it fast with bracing sections of extra timber, and then fastened the other end. That had to be a bodge, because the second Metpost had hit concrete and gone in at an angle. The SA was rather apologetic that the repairs were not very elegant, but they solved the immediate problem of access to the greenhouse, so I wasn't grumbling. I can always wrap rope around the lower sections or something if it looks too awful, when the plants have died down. Apart from having to buy the Metposts, all the rest of the repairs were done using odd bits of timber from stock.
I planted out my new Hemerocallis 'Whichford'. Some of the existing varieties in the borders have scarcely flowered at all, due to infestation by a gall midge that attacks the flower buds. According to the RHS advice on the subject there is no proven chemical treatment available to amateur gardeners, and the only solution is to pick off the affected flowers to reduce the population in subsequent years, or grow resistant varieties, those that flower later when the midge has done its stuff for the year. I'm happy to see that 'Whichford' is on the list, but that doesn't help me with the plants I've already got. Hemerocallis leaves aren't honestly all that exciting, and if some of my present clumps are never going to produce more than two flowers then they might as well go to the tip, sad as that would be. But maybe a chemical treatment will be identified. I did try Provado a couple of years ago, but it didn't seem to make any difference.
The technique of planting Allium among Japanese anemones has worked, at least for year one. The anemone foliage has not grown too tall yet, so that the purple balls of the Allium flowers sit above it, while their tatty leaves are hidden. For the experiment to be a total success the bulbs have to be able to build enough strength to flower again next year, which won't happen if they resent having their leaves shaded. Still, so far, so good. I read the idea in a book by Graham Stuart Thomas, so it ought to work.
Just down the hill from this charming mixture the large shrub rose 'Fritz Nobis' has blown over. I did not mean to grow 'Fritz Nobis', which makes a big plant, with a once only display of double pink flowers followed by a good crop of red hips. I'd ordered 'Fimbriata' from Peter Beales, which is a tiny, dainty thing with fringed edges to its petals. Somebody couldn't have been concentrating on what they were doing, and sent me the wrong one. I suppose the names are very vaguely similar. The stems of 'Fritz Nobis' have formed a great round woody ball at ground level, which has swivelled visibly in the soil, allowing the entire shrub to tip forwards. I asked the SA if it would be possible to prep some Y shaped supports, and then come and pull on a rope next week while I crawled around under Fritz, equipped with goggles and heavy gauntlets, and attempted to heave the whole thing up again and prop it. I would rather do that on a dry day when the ample foliage is not going to dump vast quantities of water on me, on the other hand it can't wait long, since it is lying on top of a small conifer that I'm rather fond of, and that has taken a lot of years to reach its present diminutive stature (it is a Tsuga canadensis 'Jeddeloh', and it has made a little round bush with a depression in the middle of it, like a birds nest, which is what it is supposed to do).
The novelty rose 'Hot Chocolate' in the front garden has come out while the leaves of the Berberis 'Orange Rocket' are still orange, and the effect is as lively as I hoped it would be. I did remove the flowering stalks of some self sown Stachys lanata, that were shading out the stems of the roses, and a giant biennial self sown yellow Verbascum that was growing into one side of the Berberis. You have to be vigilant, combining herbaceous plants with dwarf or recently planted shrubs, or the shrubs can be overwhelmed or spoiled.
Saturday, 23 June 2012
who knows where the time goes
Today ended up as a bonus full day in the garden. I'd made a slightly provisional arrangement to visit some elderly cousins up in Suffolk, and take them to a nearby garden that was open today under the Yellow Book scheme, but I hadn't had any reply to my gentle e-mail enquiry yesterday sounding them out about whether or not they would like to go, and when I rang this morning it was clear that my cousin had completely forgotten about it and was already very busy. So with mutual expressions of goodwill we didn't go, and suddenly I had the rest of the day to get on with weeding and planting things out of the greenhouse.
In theory I have allotted myself three days a week to work on the garden, since I average out at two days a week at the plant centre. That gives me two days off a week to do everything else, just like normal people with full time jobs. In practice it never works like that. There are so many things to fit into the two days that they invariably spill over into the gardening time. There are my friends and relations, for a start. Then there are the talks, for the woodland charity, and some on my own account about gardening and beekeeping. There are art galleries and museums to visit, and open gardens, and occasionally it's nice to go for a walk. There are the bees to be looked after, the chickens to be mucked out, and sometimes the cats need to go to the vet. There is the mundane business of housework, and haircuts, and trips to the dentist. There are the Pilates lessons and exercises, without which my back would seize up. And there are emergencies, like falling trees or the car breaking down.
I can't really grumble about it all, since to friends who still have to work full time, working part time seems an unimaginable luxury. I don't know how they fit all the non-work things into their two days, though of course part of the answer is that they don't do some of them. The talks, for a start. If I still had a proper job I wouldn't have time to do volunteer talks, which would be a shame, though of course I wouldn't be in a position where I needed to do them to keep my CV looking vaguely interesting and my presentation skills up to date. And people with proper jobs generally have a cleaner. We don't, partly because we couldn't afford one, but also because the whole idea of having to tidy up before the cleaner comes, and your things being moved anyway so that you can't find them afterwards, is abhorrent. Even when we both had real jobs we didn't have a cleaner, after one unsuccessful experiment in about 1988.
My determination to keep time free for the garden does mean that other activities get ruthlessly pared back. It's one reason why I buy most of my clothes by mail order, since a mooch round the shops isn't a pleasure, but a waste of good gardening time. I try to fit in a regular haircut before, as PG Woodhouse memorably put it, my head looks like a chrysanthemum, but that's it. Going defiantly and naturally grey is partly a feminist statement, but largely because there is no way I'm spending hours in the salon having my hair coloured. A pamper day sounds to me not like a treat, but a completely pointless use of hours that could have been put to much more interesting and productive ends. If I'm not in the garden I'd rather be in the National Portrait Gallery than Champneys. Friends and visitors know that our house totters along just on the untidy side of downright insanitary, and that's after we've made a special effort to clean it for them. I could dust the mantelpiece or I could plant out the horned poppies that are still sitting in the greenhouse. There's no contest, most of the time.
(It should be noted as a matter of record that the Systems Administrator today did the vacuuming and washed the kitchen floor, and that I am very, very grateful, since the amount of cat fluff was getting so bad that even I minded. When you sit down to lunch and realise that there is cat fur stuck to your hands, which you have washed, and the edge of your plate, and the butter knife, it is time to Do Something.)
Sometimes things have to go by the board that would have been nice. I ended up missing the RA exhibition of Zoffany portraits, which I'd have rather liked to see, and I'm about to miss a Garden Museum exhibition about the history of garden visiting that shuts tomorrow, because there just wasn't a spare day to get to London. That was worse when I worked full time, and I missed all sorts of things I wish I'd seen.
The garden could really do with three days a week. In fact, it could do with twice that, but three days would be good. Of course I could not have a garden, or at least not one so large and so complicated, but you see I really like the garden. It suffers, compared to a paid job, because employers take a dim view if you bunk off to do other things, but there is no external pressure to stop me taking time off from gardening, only my own force of will.
In theory I have allotted myself three days a week to work on the garden, since I average out at two days a week at the plant centre. That gives me two days off a week to do everything else, just like normal people with full time jobs. In practice it never works like that. There are so many things to fit into the two days that they invariably spill over into the gardening time. There are my friends and relations, for a start. Then there are the talks, for the woodland charity, and some on my own account about gardening and beekeeping. There are art galleries and museums to visit, and open gardens, and occasionally it's nice to go for a walk. There are the bees to be looked after, the chickens to be mucked out, and sometimes the cats need to go to the vet. There is the mundane business of housework, and haircuts, and trips to the dentist. There are the Pilates lessons and exercises, without which my back would seize up. And there are emergencies, like falling trees or the car breaking down.
I can't really grumble about it all, since to friends who still have to work full time, working part time seems an unimaginable luxury. I don't know how they fit all the non-work things into their two days, though of course part of the answer is that they don't do some of them. The talks, for a start. If I still had a proper job I wouldn't have time to do volunteer talks, which would be a shame, though of course I wouldn't be in a position where I needed to do them to keep my CV looking vaguely interesting and my presentation skills up to date. And people with proper jobs generally have a cleaner. We don't, partly because we couldn't afford one, but also because the whole idea of having to tidy up before the cleaner comes, and your things being moved anyway so that you can't find them afterwards, is abhorrent. Even when we both had real jobs we didn't have a cleaner, after one unsuccessful experiment in about 1988.
My determination to keep time free for the garden does mean that other activities get ruthlessly pared back. It's one reason why I buy most of my clothes by mail order, since a mooch round the shops isn't a pleasure, but a waste of good gardening time. I try to fit in a regular haircut before, as PG Woodhouse memorably put it, my head looks like a chrysanthemum, but that's it. Going defiantly and naturally grey is partly a feminist statement, but largely because there is no way I'm spending hours in the salon having my hair coloured. A pamper day sounds to me not like a treat, but a completely pointless use of hours that could have been put to much more interesting and productive ends. If I'm not in the garden I'd rather be in the National Portrait Gallery than Champneys. Friends and visitors know that our house totters along just on the untidy side of downright insanitary, and that's after we've made a special effort to clean it for them. I could dust the mantelpiece or I could plant out the horned poppies that are still sitting in the greenhouse. There's no contest, most of the time.
(It should be noted as a matter of record that the Systems Administrator today did the vacuuming and washed the kitchen floor, and that I am very, very grateful, since the amount of cat fluff was getting so bad that even I minded. When you sit down to lunch and realise that there is cat fur stuck to your hands, which you have washed, and the edge of your plate, and the butter knife, it is time to Do Something.)
Sometimes things have to go by the board that would have been nice. I ended up missing the RA exhibition of Zoffany portraits, which I'd have rather liked to see, and I'm about to miss a Garden Museum exhibition about the history of garden visiting that shuts tomorrow, because there just wasn't a spare day to get to London. That was worse when I worked full time, and I missed all sorts of things I wish I'd seen.
The garden could really do with three days a week. In fact, it could do with twice that, but three days would be good. Of course I could not have a garden, or at least not one so large and so complicated, but you see I really like the garden. It suffers, compared to a paid job, because employers take a dim view if you bunk off to do other things, but there is no external pressure to stop me taking time off from gardening, only my own force of will.
Friday, 22 June 2012
dodging the showers
As the showers passed through today I felt like one of the little people in a weather house, coming out when the sun shone and scuttling back inside again when it rained (and for the greatest assemblage of kitsch I've seen for a long time have a look at the assembled images of weather houses on Google).
We went to collect another load of poplar logs, which had already lost moisture and were noticeably lighter than when the tree was first sectioned. So much for the theory that they have to be seasoned under cover. The last few wouldn't go on the truck, so it will take one more trip, but we've got most of it away. The remaining lumps in the spinney mainly consist of branch junctions, which are larger than the round sections of trunk, and heavy to lift, but won't split with the maul and hammer. They'll have to be lugged on to the truck, and cut up at the System Administrator's leisure with the chainsaw.
I pulled up weeds that had sprung up in the middle of the long bed in the front garden where I dug out a failing Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' (too dry) some months ago, and have not yet replanted the space, and stuck in some Cleome raised from seed. They've been sitting in their pots in the greenhouse for a long time, and lay down flat as soon as they were planted because it was so windy, so goodness knows if they'll come to anything. Unfortunately there was no net contribution to my aim of clearing out the greenhouse, as while I was there I potted up some tiny self-sown Alchemilla mollis seedlings, which I want to try as ground cover in the back garden where it is damper. The long bed is far too dry, but Alchemilla is a tough plant, which given less than ideal conditions of drought doesn't rapidly die out, but lives on in a shrivelled state of distress, looking miserable. I removed most of the old, woody clumps last winter, but would like the free new plants to try again elsewhere in the garden.
Then, between showers, I turned my attention to the gravel at the entrance, which is once again laced with tufts and intertwining roots of creeping sorrel. I have eight young Gazania plants to go in there, raised from seed and grown on in 9cm pots. Plants of that size retail at £3.50 or £3.75 at the plant centre, and having a tray of them ready to go out makes raising plants from seed feel like a worthwhile exercise (though not as much as the things that you can't easily buy. I get a real buzz from my seed raised Dicentra scandens, which I haven't seen offered as a growing plant, though I expect I could track it down by mail order if I didn't already have one). A couple of gazanias have survived the past three winters, so lived through months of almost constant freezing conditions and those two nights when the thermometer plummeted to minus 13 C, and are just coming into flower. It shows that they are almost hardy, given sharp drainage. If I kept growing new plants from seed, and hanging on to the ones that survive outside, and then started harvesting seed from those, I ought to be able to develop a winter hardy strain, if I felt like it (I don't).
The SA had a bonfire, hose laid out ready to hand as a precaution, and managed to get rid of quite a lot of the great pile of poplar brash and accumulated prunings. The wet weather has produced a prodigious volume of summer growth, some in places where it stops us moving around the garden or is threatening to overwhelm other plants. I had to cut quantities of hazel shoots back that were growing out into the crowns of my collection of potted witch hazel, since I don't know how much shading Hamamelis will take, and I didn't want to leave it and then discover that the back half of the witch hazels had died out. Some shrubs won't put up with other plants growing on top of them. Roses hate it, and branches engulfed by dense rival vegetation quickly die. I lost a large part of a 'Gruss an Aachen' which resented the evergreen embrace of an encroaching Cistus. Exochorda macrantha 'The Bride' behaves in the same way. The witch hazels were still leafy when I freed them, so that was fine.
We went to collect another load of poplar logs, which had already lost moisture and were noticeably lighter than when the tree was first sectioned. So much for the theory that they have to be seasoned under cover. The last few wouldn't go on the truck, so it will take one more trip, but we've got most of it away. The remaining lumps in the spinney mainly consist of branch junctions, which are larger than the round sections of trunk, and heavy to lift, but won't split with the maul and hammer. They'll have to be lugged on to the truck, and cut up at the System Administrator's leisure with the chainsaw.
I pulled up weeds that had sprung up in the middle of the long bed in the front garden where I dug out a failing Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' (too dry) some months ago, and have not yet replanted the space, and stuck in some Cleome raised from seed. They've been sitting in their pots in the greenhouse for a long time, and lay down flat as soon as they were planted because it was so windy, so goodness knows if they'll come to anything. Unfortunately there was no net contribution to my aim of clearing out the greenhouse, as while I was there I potted up some tiny self-sown Alchemilla mollis seedlings, which I want to try as ground cover in the back garden where it is damper. The long bed is far too dry, but Alchemilla is a tough plant, which given less than ideal conditions of drought doesn't rapidly die out, but lives on in a shrivelled state of distress, looking miserable. I removed most of the old, woody clumps last winter, but would like the free new plants to try again elsewhere in the garden.
Then, between showers, I turned my attention to the gravel at the entrance, which is once again laced with tufts and intertwining roots of creeping sorrel. I have eight young Gazania plants to go in there, raised from seed and grown on in 9cm pots. Plants of that size retail at £3.50 or £3.75 at the plant centre, and having a tray of them ready to go out makes raising plants from seed feel like a worthwhile exercise (though not as much as the things that you can't easily buy. I get a real buzz from my seed raised Dicentra scandens, which I haven't seen offered as a growing plant, though I expect I could track it down by mail order if I didn't already have one). A couple of gazanias have survived the past three winters, so lived through months of almost constant freezing conditions and those two nights when the thermometer plummeted to minus 13 C, and are just coming into flower. It shows that they are almost hardy, given sharp drainage. If I kept growing new plants from seed, and hanging on to the ones that survive outside, and then started harvesting seed from those, I ought to be able to develop a winter hardy strain, if I felt like it (I don't).
The SA had a bonfire, hose laid out ready to hand as a precaution, and managed to get rid of quite a lot of the great pile of poplar brash and accumulated prunings. The wet weather has produced a prodigious volume of summer growth, some in places where it stops us moving around the garden or is threatening to overwhelm other plants. I had to cut quantities of hazel shoots back that were growing out into the crowns of my collection of potted witch hazel, since I don't know how much shading Hamamelis will take, and I didn't want to leave it and then discover that the back half of the witch hazels had died out. Some shrubs won't put up with other plants growing on top of them. Roses hate it, and branches engulfed by dense rival vegetation quickly die. I lost a large part of a 'Gruss an Aachen' which resented the evergreen embrace of an encroaching Cistus. Exochorda macrantha 'The Bride' behaves in the same way. The witch hazels were still leafy when I freed them, so that was fine.
Thursday, 21 June 2012
between showers
When I woke up this morning I could hear the rain drumming on the roof. On the Today programme they were saying something about the summer solstice, which experts have decided was not so big a deal for our pagan forbears as the winter solstice. How they can tell after all this time I have no idea, but if the weather in those days was like it is now then I'm not surprised. Ah, an English summer.
The rain passed by mid-morning. Our rain gauge must have been under-reading, since the display said we'd had only 1.4mm and I could tell from the weight of some pots that were dry last night that we'd had more than that. The Systems Administrator went to investigate the problem, and said that a large plant was partially blocking the funnel. There is an apparently reliable station at Epping whose readings the SA follows, so I suppose we're now faced with the choice of keeping our records as they are, knowing that last night's rainfall measurement was wrong, and doctoring them using a best guess based on the Epping site (6mm, which sounds much more plausible).
I planted out the last tulips from pots into the dahlia bed, and started mulching it with Strulch and tying heavy twine between the coloured posts. The trouble is the chickens, which love scratching around in there, and have eaten some plants almost to stumps, while others are half a metre high and forming flower buds. It is irritating of them to fixate on the dahlia bed, when they have the whole of the front garden to play in, but they do. I suggested that if I got a water pistol the SA could stand guard over the dahlia bed during chicken exercise time, but the SA seems to think that this would not be so good as sitting in a deckchair listening to cricket on the radio, or podcasts of The Bugle or Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Friday afternoon film review. So I am trying string, again, although determined chickens can be very expert limbo dancers. I threatened to go and blast them with the hose if they went on eating the dahlias, and the SA said I was being cruel to them.
Then it began to rain again, and I potted things on in the greenhouse, though what I really need to do is plant things out, because the greenhouse is full to bursting, so that I have to be very careful walking from one end to the other, and there is nowhere to put anything down. At the moment it is difficult even to get in there, since the trellis that I built myself, very slowly and laboriously, to help screen the view of the end of the greenhouse from the rest of the front garden (I told you we had some fundamental design problems in the front), blew over in the gale a week ago. This is an inconvenient time of the year for it to do so, since the honeysuckle that by now more or less covers the trellis is in full bloom, and looking rather lovely, and the climbing rose 'Chevy Chase' is just making soft new growth as well as opening its little red flowers. I would rather the trellis had stayed where it was, just at the moment. The uprights, that I cadged off the boss a few years ago when we were demolishing a pergola in the plant centre, have rotted through at the base. The SA has bought a couple of Metposts, and mending the trellis has been added to the long list of things to do. In the meantime the honeysuckle dumps water over me each time I squeeze into the greenhouse, if it's been raining.
The big tabby appeared at lunchtime for his supplementary feeding, and would not eat his helping of ordinary cat food. I thought it was because he wanted an expensive pouch, but when the SA moved his dish from its usual place in the hall to its Special Lunch place next to the dustbin in the kitchen the cat ate the normal tinned food with relish. He is a quick learner, for an animal that generally gives the appearance of being rather absent minded and quite dim, and very set in his ways once he has learnt something. The SA says he has OCD.
The rain passed by mid-morning. Our rain gauge must have been under-reading, since the display said we'd had only 1.4mm and I could tell from the weight of some pots that were dry last night that we'd had more than that. The Systems Administrator went to investigate the problem, and said that a large plant was partially blocking the funnel. There is an apparently reliable station at Epping whose readings the SA follows, so I suppose we're now faced with the choice of keeping our records as they are, knowing that last night's rainfall measurement was wrong, and doctoring them using a best guess based on the Epping site (6mm, which sounds much more plausible).
I planted out the last tulips from pots into the dahlia bed, and started mulching it with Strulch and tying heavy twine between the coloured posts. The trouble is the chickens, which love scratching around in there, and have eaten some plants almost to stumps, while others are half a metre high and forming flower buds. It is irritating of them to fixate on the dahlia bed, when they have the whole of the front garden to play in, but they do. I suggested that if I got a water pistol the SA could stand guard over the dahlia bed during chicken exercise time, but the SA seems to think that this would not be so good as sitting in a deckchair listening to cricket on the radio, or podcasts of The Bugle or Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Friday afternoon film review. So I am trying string, again, although determined chickens can be very expert limbo dancers. I threatened to go and blast them with the hose if they went on eating the dahlias, and the SA said I was being cruel to them.
Then it began to rain again, and I potted things on in the greenhouse, though what I really need to do is plant things out, because the greenhouse is full to bursting, so that I have to be very careful walking from one end to the other, and there is nowhere to put anything down. At the moment it is difficult even to get in there, since the trellis that I built myself, very slowly and laboriously, to help screen the view of the end of the greenhouse from the rest of the front garden (I told you we had some fundamental design problems in the front), blew over in the gale a week ago. This is an inconvenient time of the year for it to do so, since the honeysuckle that by now more or less covers the trellis is in full bloom, and looking rather lovely, and the climbing rose 'Chevy Chase' is just making soft new growth as well as opening its little red flowers. I would rather the trellis had stayed where it was, just at the moment. The uprights, that I cadged off the boss a few years ago when we were demolishing a pergola in the plant centre, have rotted through at the base. The SA has bought a couple of Metposts, and mending the trellis has been added to the long list of things to do. In the meantime the honeysuckle dumps water over me each time I squeeze into the greenhouse, if it's been raining.
The big tabby appeared at lunchtime for his supplementary feeding, and would not eat his helping of ordinary cat food. I thought it was because he wanted an expensive pouch, but when the SA moved his dish from its usual place in the hall to its Special Lunch place next to the dustbin in the kitchen the cat ate the normal tinned food with relish. He is a quick learner, for an animal that generally gives the appearance of being rather absent minded and quite dim, and very set in his ways once he has learnt something. The SA says he has OCD.
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
talking tonight
This is a real flying post. I am going out in fourteen minutes to do a talk on gardening for bees to a garden club outside Sudbury. It was booked back in January, which is quite short notice by garden club standards, and they were originally trying to get me for a date later in the year which I couldn't do, then I ended up filling in for a cancellation. I was getting slightly concerned when by yesterday I hadn't heard from them to confirm that the talk was on. I had the e-mails, but a series of six month old e-mails isn't the same as an actual conversation near the time with a live person. I rang the bookings secretary and got her voicemail, so left a message.
I rang again this morning at ten past nine when I still hadn't heard anything, but got the answerphone once more. I tried looking the club up on the net to see if they had a website and published their programme, but they didn't seem to. In a fit of inspiration I rang a friend who I thought belonged to that society, to see if she had a list of events and if so was I on it, but she was out. I decided to assume that it was on and went to collect the plants, hoping I wasn't on a wild goose chase.
On the way to the plant centre I stopped at a friend's house, to sort out some beekeeping business, and she told me a not entirely reassuring story about how a chap talking to her garden club about fuchsias had turned up at another club where he thought he was booked, only to find a second speaker already there and setting up. He claims to have sat at the back and enjoyed the talk, which if true was commendably stoic of him. By the time I'd got all the plants and bits and pieces stowed in the car I was going to be late for lunch, so I rang home to warn the Systems Administrator, who told me that my garden club lady had rung, having just got back from holiday, and the talk was on. Once I knew that I wasn't wasting my time en route to making myself look ridiculous I began to look forward to the talk.
My friend had e-mailed back to say that no, she wasn't a member of that society, and wishing me luck. I expect it will be fine, though actually gardening for bees is the most technically difficult talk I do, because of the stretches when I'm not talking about the plants in front of me, so have no props to remind me what I'm supposed to be talking about. And now I must go, hoping that there aren't any huge traffic jams on the Sudbury road, or gridlock around Colchester north railway station. I could update the post when I get back, telling you how it went, but I probably won't. I don't suppose the uncertainty is going to keep anyone up all night.
I rang again this morning at ten past nine when I still hadn't heard anything, but got the answerphone once more. I tried looking the club up on the net to see if they had a website and published their programme, but they didn't seem to. In a fit of inspiration I rang a friend who I thought belonged to that society, to see if she had a list of events and if so was I on it, but she was out. I decided to assume that it was on and went to collect the plants, hoping I wasn't on a wild goose chase.
On the way to the plant centre I stopped at a friend's house, to sort out some beekeeping business, and she told me a not entirely reassuring story about how a chap talking to her garden club about fuchsias had turned up at another club where he thought he was booked, only to find a second speaker already there and setting up. He claims to have sat at the back and enjoyed the talk, which if true was commendably stoic of him. By the time I'd got all the plants and bits and pieces stowed in the car I was going to be late for lunch, so I rang home to warn the Systems Administrator, who told me that my garden club lady had rung, having just got back from holiday, and the talk was on. Once I knew that I wasn't wasting my time en route to making myself look ridiculous I began to look forward to the talk.
My friend had e-mailed back to say that no, she wasn't a member of that society, and wishing me luck. I expect it will be fine, though actually gardening for bees is the most technically difficult talk I do, because of the stretches when I'm not talking about the plants in front of me, so have no props to remind me what I'm supposed to be talking about. And now I must go, hoping that there aren't any huge traffic jams on the Sudbury road, or gridlock around Colchester north railway station. I could update the post when I get back, telling you how it went, but I probably won't. I don't suppose the uncertainty is going to keep anyone up all night.
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