the secret's in the soil

I promised to return to the subject of home made compost.  Or threatened, depending on your point of view.  I am very keen on compost myself, wonderful stuff that improves any soil.  My latest cache has gone on to the near rose bed, where I hope it will help turn the solid clay surface into a crumbly tilth.  That's a vain hope, with only one application.  If I kept it up, the top few inches of soil in that bed might be turning into a crumbly tilth at about the point that I'm ready to move into the retirement bungalow, but still the compost will help, along with a top layer of Strulch.  The final dressing of mulch will help suppress the germination of annual weeds, and the layer of compost will make those that do appear much easier to pull out, at least for next season.

Organic material has a wonderful effect on all soils.  I explain this to customers who ask, at the plant centre, and like to feel that some are becoming almost as enthused as I am, although others probably just have nice manners, and privately feel as though they have been waylaid by a horticultural version of the Ancient Mariner.  Humus helps bind the small particles of a clay soil together, making it lighter and fluffier, more aerated, and able to hold water in a form that plants can use.  We think of clay soil as holding water, but in pure clay not all of the water is available for plant growth: some is so tightly bound to the clay particles that plant roots can't prise it free.  In a sandy soil, humus helps create texture, something that looks like structured soil rather than the contents of a child's sandpit.  It helps the soil retain water, full stop.  And it helps it retain nutrients in the top layer, instead of them washing away down into the ground water.

I particularly like home made compost.  I feel it adds life to the soil.  I can't quantify that scientifically, but plant seems livelier in areas that have had the home produced stuff than purchased mushroom compost.  Certainly the domestically produced compost is alive, since the heaps don't reach a high enough temperature to kill seeds or pathogens.  For that reason I am very careful about what goes on them, no weed seeds, and no ripened seed heads of garden plants if I don't want them spreading around the garden.  No weed roots, no visibly diseased leaves.  Suspect onions from the kitchen are even banned from the bin of peelings destined for the compost heap, since I don't want to go introducing white onion rot.  The compost bins are not a receptacle for waste, that goes to the council tip.  They are a factory for making something wonderful.

I have to confess, the home made compost did contain quite few stems that were not fully rotted down when the rest of it was ready to use.  I suppose I should have shredded them, or spent longer chopping them up with secateurs, before adding them to the heap.  Instead, I had to pick them out as I shovelled compost into the wheelbarrow, and chuck them back on the pile to go round again. I'm sure they'll rot eventually.  I heard Monty Don say that box clippings did not rot, and should not be added to the compost heap, but that's impossible.  Everything that was once alive rots on a compost heap, eventually.  Excavating our heaps, I've found no trace of the many stems from the ivy hedges that I've added after cutting them, or any box clippings, except for the most recent ones.  The only failure has been a discarded oven glove, that I put on the heap under the impression that it was cotton, but is obviously some sort of artificial fibre.  Everything else is gradually turning to a lovely, crumbly, dark brown, fluffy pile of goodness.

Alas, though, I am down to the last quarter of a bucket, and I would have spread that out hours ago if it hadn't started to rain.  Next week, or Sunday, or whenever the next dry day is, I'll have to start buying mushroom compost again.  That's a fifteen minute round trip, and the necessity to put rather stinky bags in my car at one pound fifty for every thirty litres.  Home made was nicer, cheaper and more convenient, but it is all gone.  It is amazing how such large piles of stems, leaves, small prunings, old litter from the chicken house, and kitchen peelings, can rot down into such a thin deposit of compost.  I suppose if they did not, civilisation would have disappeared some time ago under a layer of compost a mile deep.

lady of leisure

The post came this morning, bundled up in a rubber band, consisting of an advertising leaflet, a letter clearly addressed to the Systems Administrator, a letter equally clearly addressed to our nearest neighbour, and a third for somebody at the lettuce farm.  I hate it when that happens.  I have visions of my Chelsea tickets, or the SA's Cheltenham badges, or some vital letter containing a medical appointment, or a cheque, being randomly dropped through someone else's letterbox in the broad vicinity, and spending a couple of weeks sitting on their kitchen table until they decide it is too late to take it round now and bin it, or else open it and think they rather fancy attending the Chelsea Flower Show themselves.  I fired off a complaint to the Royal Mail, though goodness knows if that does any good, or will simply alienate the postman, and all our Christmas cards and my next Toast order will fall into a puddle on their way here.

I was going out for the afternoon with a friend who lives up near the Suffolk border, so on the way to pick her up I was able to call at the opticians to have my new glasses adjusted.  The girl said that they were pressing in on one side, and let them out.  I hope that does the trick, since it felt as though they were pressing down on my left ear rather than in.  Each time I have to go back to the opticians takes out a great chunk of the morning, so I don't want to end up making half a dozen return trips while they fiddle with the glasses, but since the glasses don't start hurting until they've been on for a few hours, it is very difficult to tell whether a given intervention has fixed them.

Then I called at the blacksmith en route, as I was, quite literally, passing.  He didn't take a deposit for the plant support I asked him to make, and that was such a long time ago that I began to worry whether he was happy making it, or found my one-off jobs a nuisance, and was hoping that if he didn't take any money and didn't do anything about it, I'd go away.  I e-mailed a couple of weeks ago and got no reply, so looking a human being in the eye seemed the best way of finding out if they were on the case.  It turned out that he was intending to make the plant support, but had had some other jobs in and remembered I'd said it was not urgent.  He was quite right about that, I did, and it's even less urgent now, since I've chopped the plant down.  Any time between now and March would be fine.  He thought he would do it before March.  I was looking on this plant support as a prototype, and thinking that once we'd got a design that worked I could do with a couple more, and it turned out he'd remembered that as well, so I still have a working relationship with the blacksmith.  It's great fun having things made.  Rusted iron seems hideously expensive at the time, but lasts so long that it ends up being much better value than the ready made coated metal supports you can get in garden centres.

The afternoon's expedition was to a charity do.  I don't normally do charity dos, but this was an afternoon of lectures on antiques and textiles, and a cream tea, in aid of a hospice, held in what looked like a very scenic barn.  My friend has been plagued with asthma over the summer, and an entertainment in civilised surroundings that didn't require us to walk very far sounded just the ticket.  Somebody from the hospice made a moving speech about the future good work they hoped to do.  After that someone from the Antiques Roadshow talked about working on the show.  I don't actually watch it, but apparently as well as the eighteen or twenty experts that appear in front of the cameras, the BBC has eighty people labouring behind the scenes.  The cameras cost £1,500 a minute to run, which sounds an enormous amount in the digital age, and made £13,000 a day to run an entire hospice sound positively cheap.  Then a local oriental rug dealer talked about how carpets are made in Iran, and the nomadic tribe that still weave them.  She goes out there to source them, and is far more intrepid than I would be, since while I have always loved the imagery of Persia, modern day Iran sounds a hairy place to visit.  Then we got scones with cream, jam, and a slice of strawberry, and I managed to snaffle a third half of scone, since there seemed to be lots left as we were taking our places for the final lecture, and I hadn't had any lunch.  The last talk was about Thomas Gainsborough, always a sound stand-by for arts events in Suffolk.  Indeed, the music society's annual art lecture this season is on that very subject.  In a fit of brio I bought a small handbag made partly out of kilim, which I had totally not intended to do.  It was all very nice, and it's just as well I don't do it very often.

a day of culture

Today I went to London.  I'd been eyeing up the forecast, and thinking that Wednesday could be a day for an arty excursion, if it turned out wet as expected.  Rain all day is useless for gardening, unless I happen to have something to do in the greenhouse, and I hadn't, and while driving rain and cold can be miserable walking around London, light steady rain is not too bad.  In fact, it is quite atmospheric.

I hadn't decided even when I got on the train whether I was going to the British Museum or the V&A. That's one beauty of solo travel, with nobody to meet and no timetable to keep.  By Chelmsford I'd decided that ancient Colombia and Japanese erotic art won out over pearls, Chinese painting and 1980s club fashion.  This was not so much a cultural judgement as because the V&A is more of a faff to get to from Essex.  And because I was running slightly late and wondered whether I'd get to Kensington in time to fit three exhibitions in comfortably, and when I checked the V&A website last night there were only limited slots available for the pearls, so it might be a good idea to book that before trekking all the way over.

Beyond Eldorado:Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia is the sort of thing that the British Museum does well.  It contains a lot of gold, or rather, mostly gold alloyed with copper.  Also a lot of pottery. A map at the beginning makes sure you know where Colombia is.  You learn that the ancient Colombians valued gold for its beauty and lustre, for catching and evoking the sun, and symbolising the sacred, rather than using it as a method of exchange or store of purely financial value.  It was a shamanistic society.  Dancing, music and mind altering plants were used to bring about altered states of consciousness, along with the glitter of the gold, in what sounded rather like a fifteenth century rainforest equivalent of the 1990s rave scene.  There were gold body ornaments, gold musical instruments, gold pots for storing drugs, and little gold figures, whose function is not honestly known nowadays.  Sitting on a chair was a sign of status, and was held to confer extra spiritual powers.

The objects were beautiful, and not as strange as they might have been, because I had a feeling that the aesthetic had already been mined by Europeans, from early twentieth century sculpture to Alessi designs.  I liked my brief introduction to ancient Colombia.  It isn't a part of the world I know much about, and it doesn't grab my imagination as much the Himalayas, but I was quite happy wandering around the exhibition.

Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art is quite explicit.  And also rather innocent.  Men and women, and some men and men, and two women, are shown having sex.  Plenty of female genitalia are on display, as are lots of erect male members, all portrayed relatively oversized.  You can see why it is not recommended for unsupervised under-sixteens.  And yet it is all portrayed as pleasurable good fun.  Jokey comments run round the edges of the pictures, though as they are in Japanese script, Western visitors have to rely on the summaries on the labels.  There is no violence, except for one picture in the whole show, and the women are enjoying themselves, the scripts say so.  Everybody has pubic hair.  As well as the straightforward erotic art, here are jokes, parodies, rude piss-takes of classical Japanese culture, and political satires.  It is all about as far from the conventions of modern pornography as the Ancient Columbian's shamanic rituals.  The print room of the British Museum does not provide a particularly sympathetic viewing environemtn, and to get the full benefit of shunga, you probably want to enjoy it at home, with somebody you are quite intimate with (or hoping to become so).

After that I weighed up whether I had the stamina for a third exhibition, but it seemed a waste of a day in town and a train fare to go home when it was still only early afternoon.  It had stopped raining, so I walked down to the National Portrait Gallery for Elizabeth and her people.  Queen Elizabeth I was one of my first pin-ups as a child, and the intervening years have not lessened my enthusiasm.  And I know that British portraiture of the age was wooden compared to the glories of Renaissance Europe, but that's not the point.  This exhibition brings together several portraits of the queen herself, along with other notables of her reign, and a few lesser people you aren't expected to have heard of, and a smattering of books and costumes.  I love the clothes (indeed, I'm sure one of the paintings, on loan from the Royal collection, featured in the last show I went to at the Queen's Gallery.  I know I've seen it somewhere recently).  Some of the mini-biographies hint at mini-series begging to be made.  The queen's lady of honour, a beautiful, wary young woman brushing her red-brown hair and dressed in an amazing floral gown, fell pregnant, married her noble suitor without Royal consent, and was briefly imprisoned for her disobedience.  Lord Cecil rode around his garden on a mule for relaxation.

The new varifocals made gallery viewing much easier, although the frames hurt my ear.  This always happens with new glasses.  I'm afraid one ear is higher than the other.

a new vision

I have finally taken a step I've been resisting for a long time.  After juggling old, tried and tested technology for years to solve a common problem, I have embraced a relatively new and high tech solution, and am typing this blog post wearing varifocals.

I didn't want bifocals.  I didn't want a line across my vision.  I was put off by stories from friends, relatives and mere acquaintances who Didn't Get On With Them.  I darkly imagined a stiff neck from having to look up or down in an artificial and arbitrary fashion, headaches, and visual confusion.  As for varifocals, they sounded way too complicated, bifocals on steroids.  For several years I insisted I was happy with two pairs of glasses.  It was very mindful, deciding whether you were seeing or reading, and then concentrating on one or the other.

For many years before that I was fine with just one set of glasses.  The first intimation of difficulties ahead came in my mid forties, when I found I could no longer see to read my London A to Z by the light of a tube platform.  At my next eye test, the optician explained kindly that I would be just about all right with one prescription for now, but that as we aged our lenses became less elastic, and that I was heading towards the point at which I would need reading glasses.  I cracked and ordered some fairly soon after, when I discovered I could not properly see an exhibition of Mughal art, with all its tiny details, in the amount of light which the British Museum judged appropriate for displaying such treasures.

Once that point was reached, I was fine for a couple more years with the reading glasses.  Reading or seeing, mindful all the way.  I gradually started putting the reading glasses on to cook, sitting at the kitchen table cutting up vegetables or apples.  I wore them to inspect the bees, so that I'd be able to see eggs, picking my way happily through the fuzzy view of the garden on the way to the apiary because it was all familiar.  Then it reached the point where I couldn't read through my seeing glasses, and adopted that middle aged trick of peering over the top of them to read menus and maps, or write things down.

My near distance vision went as well, so that I had to bend my face close to the till and credit card machine at work.  At supper I had a choice between wearing my reading glasses, and being able to see the food on my plate clearly, but the Systems Administrator's face only indistinctly, or wearing my seeing glasses, to give me a perfect view of my companion but a fuzzy one of what I was eating. Putting out serving dishes on a crowded table became an exercise in concentration, in case I misjudged the position of my hands and knocked over a glass.  Walking round art galleries, I now habitually carried both pairs of glasses, putting the seeing glasses on when I wanted to step three paces back from the canvas to look at the whole painting, and swapping back to the reading glasses to decipher the caption, or when I came to an etching.

It was getting silly.  Peering over your glasses to read the menu, then being OK for the rest of the meal, is one thing, but needing to change your glasses every other minute is ridiculous.  There had to be a better solution.  After all, the Tate is full of middle aged people who are apparently able to see the exhibits, and are not visibly juggling two sets of glasses simultaneously.  It was time for varifocals.

They are wonderful.  I have been told to get properly used to them, and give it a couple of weeks before driving in them, and to be very careful the first time I do.  I will be extremely careful, but I feel as if I could drive in them already.  Look straight ahead and you are looking through the upper part of the lens, which is calibrated for distance.  Drop your gaze a little, and you see through the middle of the lens, which is set to correct near distance vision.  Bingo, I have just chopped up a saucepan of apples using that bit of the lens, and been able to see what was on my plate at supper. Look down a little further, and you have a reading glasses strength lens.  I am looking through it as I type this.  There are no hard lines between them, the only effect is that if you don't look through the appropriate section, the world appears fuzzy.  Juggling between two sets of glasses and none, the world looked fuzzy quite a lot of the time anyway, so that is no hardship

If you want to glance to the side, you do need to turn your head a little, since peripheral vision through the edges of the lens is not clear, but mine never was anyway, being quite short sighted and astigmatic, so that the outer portions of my glasses have always been distorting (and, until the advent of thin glass technology, protruded beyond the frames, as thick as milk bottles).  I just need to learn to curb the habit of peering over the top of the frames for close work, and remember to drop my gaze because the right prescription is now in front of my face.

Truly, technology is amazing.  That, and the plasticity of the human brain.

country pursuits

The dog was in disgrace this morning, because on Saturday she ate an entire plate of home made chocolate biscuit cake intended for the shoot tea, brought as a hostess present by one of the guests.  They were on a plate in the kitchen, and then they weren't.  Chocolate is not even good for dogs, it disagrees with their livers.  A vet who was staying with the proprietors checked her over on Sunday, and remarked that her eyes and mouth looked fine, and that by rights she ought to be dead.

The owner spent yesterday morning jump judging at some local horsey competition, and regaled us with highlights of the event, which included a broken leg and a broken collar bone.  Two small children both fell off without breaking anything, while the ambulance crew first dropped the stretcher with the broken leg on it, and then couldn't get the stretcher to fit in the ambulance, and the father of the broken collar bone pronounced himself to be still over the limit from the night before, and unable to drive his son to casualty.  It sounded like a field of carnage.

The boss suggested jovially that if the staff couldn't work the car park padlock, perhaps they too had enjoyed a good dinner the night before, and the owner insisted that it was not stiff at all, and she had opened it twice without difficulty.  The manager murmured that the middle wheel was quite difficult to turn, and the owner admitted that you did need to line the dots up very precisely, and promised to swap it for one from a gate on the farm that wasn't opened very often.  The owner is a few years younger than me, but she'll find out soon enough that as you age you lose some of the strength in your fingers, however active you are (and that's if you don't develop arthritis like my co-worker of yesterday).  The existing padlock is stiff.

After that I spent a quiet day, moving the campanulas under cover before they could rot in their pots, and fielding telephone calls.  It would be easier to answer questions about the status of outstanding orders that I haven't been dealing with if my colleagues who do look after customer orders would all follow a common system of paperwork, and leave the details in a folder where I could find them, instead of each following their own secret system and keeping the paperwork in a hidden place, but they don't.

Addendum  I am looking forward to Tesco's petrol station targeted advertising with a sort of gruesome fascination.  What sort of ads will the automated face recognition software think I'll be interested in?  Will it identify me as a person of taste and culture, who buys books and classical CDs, visits art galleries and museums, splashes out on the odd garment in one hundred per cent natural fibre from the Toast catalogue, and lavishes money upon my garden as a king upon his mistress (relatively speaking)?  I have a dark suspicion that it'll be ads for hearing aids, and health insurance for the over fifties.

windy Sunday

I came downstairs this morning and switched on the kitchen radio to learn that there is a new kind of wild bee, that lives on ivy.  Not just new to the UK, but newly evolved.  Their ancestors fed on heather, but somewhere along the way the ivy bee switched to ivy.  The adults don't live for very long, coinciding with the autumn flowering of ivy, and they nest in the ground, making burrows that can go down by as much as two feet.  That sounds like a long way, for a small insect.  They are not social animals like honeybees, instead each ivy bee makes its own individual nest, but I think they like to nest near each other.  Some wild bees are semi-social like that, but I'm not one hundred per cent sure about some of the details of the ivy bee, as I had to go outside at one point to let the chickens into their run, after I'd refilled their water, so I missed bits of the programme.

I sent a link to a few friends who are interested in natural history.  Amidst all the people busy tweeting about last night's Strictly or the latest celebrity wardrobe malfunction, you can still find some exchanging wildlife news before seven o'clock on a Sunday morning (I have heard back from one of them who listened on i-Player and pronounced it very interesting, so there).  Here is the link, in case you want to try it for yourself The Living World.

When I got to work I could not open the combination lock on the gate to the car park.  It has five wheels, and the dots have to be exactly lined up on all of them for it to release.  The middle wheel is very stiff, and each time I managed to rotate it at all, it overshot.  My co-worker for the day arrived behind me, and got out of her car to ask whether I was all right?  I replied that I was not, because I couldn't get the sodding dots on the padlock to line up, and she managed to make it work. However, she said that two Sundays ago, when I left early to go to the concert, it had taken her ages in the pouring rain before she managed to close it again on the way home.

I left a note for the boss warning him that it needs a squirt of WD40, as I could barely operate it on a morning when the thermometer was well above freezing, let alone with cold fingers once we had a frost.  Fastening the padlock behind us on the way home is done in our own time as unpaid overtime, by the way, because by then we have filled in our time sheets and clocked off.  I made a mental note that I was not spending more than ten minutes maximum trying to shut their gate, and after that I'd call them and tell them it was still open.

It was still very windy, and some plants were pretty dry.  I stood the roses up, watering the pots that looked as though they needed it as I went along, and before I'd got to the end, the first ones had tipped over again.  Second time round we left them lying down.  There is no point in picking things up for them to fall over repeatedly, even though it sounds catchy and defiant in the Chumbawamba song.  In a plant centre they just get broken.  My colleague got the short straw, as the first hose she tried to use drenched her with water from the end that plumbed into the irrigation system, and the one she switched it for seemed OK at first, then burst just behind the lance, soaking her again.

After that it was a fairly uneventful day.  I'd already done all the jobs on the list the manager left for me, so I helped my colleague clean up some of her designated plants, but I could have done more, if I'd known what I was supposed to do.  It would be far better if the manager left us a plan of how he wanted the tunnels to end up for the winter, with a list of everything to come inside and which area of which tunnel it went in, then we could use our judgement about what looked as though it was sitting too wet, and simply get on with it.

At this time of the year there is a mismatch between our stated hours of work, which end at four, and the closing time of the plant centre, given as dusk.  The owners say they want somebody to stay until half past four, just in case a late customer turns up, but you are not supposed to put 4.30 pm on your time sheet.  Instead you are supposed to come in late, or leave early another time, or take a long lunch.  My colleague asked me whether I was comfortable staying until half past four by myself, since the edict is that only one person is supposed to stay late.  She wasn't, and nor was I, particularly.

Neither of us are nervous characters or unaccustomed to dark nights in the countryside.  Her husband was a gamekeeper, so she has a pretty fair idea of what goes on the country after dark, and our house is far enough away from the neighbours that nobody would hear you scream. However, the plant centre has had three break-ins in the past few months, and there have been other burglaries more recently in the village.  The owners are worried enough about security that they left us instructions to go and set the alarm on the house, after friends they had staying had gone out for the day.  If they are so worried about their house that they want the alarm set in broad daylight, even with all the doors locked, then I don't think it's reasonable to expect a sole member of staff to be alone on the premises as dusk is falling, carrying the day's takings and locking up.

I stayed with my colleague until half past four, when we both left, and put four o'clock on my time sheet, promising to speak to the manager about it in the morning.  I'm happy to be allowed to leave early on Mondays, or arrive late, though that isn't as good because what's the use of an odd half hour at home on a Monday morning when you know you've got to go to work presently?  I'm particularly happy for them to pay me the extra half hour I've worked.  What I am not prepared to do is end up doing a half hour's unpaid overtime, because I an not willing to leave a sixty eight year old woman alone on the premises who doesn't feel safe being left.

the lost cat

The fat indignant tabby was not around when I got up.  This was mildly worrying, since she wasn't in evidence for the latter part of yesterday evening either, and she is normally very keen on breakfast, and not at all enthusiastic about the great outdoors.  She spent most of yesterday morning locked in the laundry, having managed to sneak in and tuck herself down the side of the washing machine, where she lurked with great satisfaction, until it got to lunch time and she wanted to be let out. That is pretty much the fat indignant tabby's idea of a perfect morning, hiding in a warm dark room with no other cats, and then having an excuse to be martyred about being locked in.

I checked the laundry, and downstairs in the garage, but she didn't appear when I opened either door.  I looked on the dining chairs, and the places where she normally sleeps, in case she was having a lie-in, as she sometimes does.  People who write of cat's constantly keen senses and instant alertness have not met our tabby.  I even opened the front door and stood in the drive calling her name, with no result.  I couldn't think of anywhere else we'd been yesterday evening where she could be locked in.

Then as I sat down to breakfast, there were feline wails from the larder.  Larder makes it sound grander than it is.  It is a cupboard in the kitchen, with outside ventilation, where we keep what is called in the grocery trade ambient food.  I opened the door, and out came the fat indignant tabby, who had spent the night nesting in the deep litter of reusable supermarket bags on the floor.  I couldn't see any obvious signs of an accident, but left a note for the Systems Administrator to check.  So much for the risk of food poisoning from my contaminated multi-use bags.  They might also be drenched in cat pee.

Work was rather quiet.  Now that it is November, we don't start until quarter past eight, and finish officially at four.  I meant to ring yesterday to confirm that, but forgot, so had to work it out from my record of last year's chargeable hours, which dropped from 8.25 to 7.00 as of November.  That's compatible with an 8.15 am start and 4.00 pm finish, with three quarters of an hour for breaks.  No afternoon tea in winter.  If we had a staff handbook, as the manager came back from his management training course saying that we should, then the hours of work would be in it.  Since it is now some weeks since the management course and there are no signs of anybody writing one, I assume it won't happen.

My allotted job was to clean up various herbaceous plants in the plant centre and put them under cover in the polytunnel on the far side of the car park in Bed 1 on the left hand side.  Or at least I think it was.  The manager's hand writing is not the clearest.  I went and looked at the tunnel, and wondered which one Bed 1 was.  There were some faded notes of jobs to do written up on the whiteboard over there, but no map showing bed locations.  It sounds ridiculous that after working for the firm for a decade, I still don't know the bed numbering system of the polytunnel, but the tunnel is the manager's domain, aided by his loyal helper, and the woman who works on The Other Side.  I try to have as little to do with it as possible, since experience has taught me that if anyone except those three waters anything, or moves anything, they will be scolded for watering it too much, or at the wrong time, and the thing they moved out for sale will have been deliberately kept back because it was reserved for somebody, or because while it had flowers it had no roots, or it was needed for splitting.  In the end I looked at the map of the irrigation system in the pump house, which had a Bay 1 but not a Bed 1, and took a semi-educated guess.  It was probably wrong.

Although our nominal finishing time is 4.00 pm, the owners like someone to stay until it gets dark. They will not pay for extra time on the timesheets, instead, whoever stays is allowed to come in late another time.  I don't find that a good exchange, myself.  What am I supposed to do with an odd extra half hour in the morning if I leave the house late because I stayed late the night before? It isn't long enough to settle to anything, when you know you have to go to work shortly.  And if I'm not due at work for another week then by then everyone will have forgotten that I stayed late, and just think I'm late to work.  My colleague offered to stay behind tonight, which suited me very well, since apart from anything else I had to get home and clean myself up for the music society fund raising supper.  Another car drove into the car park as I left, but I hope the people knew what they wanted, as it really was about to get dark.

forecasting error

I was not supposed to be at home today, tapping away at my keyboard at ten to three.  It is half term week, and I was booked to go with my mother and nephew to the National Gallery, to visit Facing the Modern: the portrait in Vienna 1900.  My nephew is seven, and keen on art, or rather, keen on traditional painting.  I don't know what his instinctive and untutored seven year old's innocent eye would make of Damian Hirst's perspex box of rotting meat and flies, or even the found industrial assemblages of the late Sir Anthony Caro.

However, by yesterday the London forecast for Friday was heavy rain, with a yellow warning of severe weather, and my mother rang up expressing a strong personal preference for not getting soaked.  Whether to postpone was really up to her and my nephew.  For myself, I can cope in London in the rain, but I didn't want to be responsible for a draggled old age pensioner and a drenched seven year old.  She decided to reschedule.

By this morning, the forecast was for light rain in north Essex, and light showers in London, though rather confusingly with a yellow rain warning still in force for both.  I headed out into the garden, thinking I'd get something done before the rain started.  By mid morning the forecast was for no rain at all.  At lunchtime it started to rain.  I know the Met Office warned us correctly about Monday's big storm, and well done them, but their efforts in the past twenty four hours have not been helpful.  I suppose they have some excuse, in that the Systems Administrator looked at the rain radar, and there has been heavy rain to the north and south of us, just not here (or in London). If I'd been in Southend, or thirty miles west of London, I'd have been soaked, but the clouds broke up or dissipated before reaching this corner of the southeast.

Unexpected free mornings to work on the garden are a delicious bonus.  The garden is never as well-tended as I'd like, not as weed-free, or expertly pruned at the appropriate time, or staked where needed.  I didn't do vegetables again this year.  But it is not bad, and the answer to people who say that they don't know how I do it is that I put the hours in.  And I know it is horribly mean of me, and I don't deserve to have any friends, to feel a twinge of regret at the opportunity cost, when I arrange to meet people on what turns out to be the one dry day of the week, but it's a big project and it needs time.

The SA is very good about things like holding lunch until two o'clock, if I'm working outside and rain is approaching, so that I can make the most of the last hour until the showers arrive, but in general you can't call people up and ask whether they are free for coffee now, at this minute, because rain has stopped play and you've got time.  Or at least, you could, but what happens when they say they are busy right now, but are free next Tuesday?  It would be gratingly rude to say that it might not be raining on Tuesday, so you'd rather not commit.

Since it was still drizzling after lunch, I nipped up the road to the Chatto Gardens, to buy a couple of plants I noticed when I was there for coffee.  One was the lovely old chrysanthemum variety 'Emperor of China', which has large, very double flowers of soft pink.  Some of the outer petals are quilled, and it looks just like a chrysanthemum from a Chinese painting.  I did have it at one time, but I'm not sure if a tall and straggly chrysanthemum that's been rather overgrown by other things is that, or something else, and for four pounds twenty I thought I'd take out an insurance policy and buy another while I saw it.  There are lots of nice fat shoots showing across the width of the pot, and in the spring, if I remember, I should be able to chisel a couple off and make more plants.  My other purchase was a late flowering umbellifer with extremely finely divided leaves that we saw at Trentham Park during our holiday, covered in foraging insects, which one of the gardeners kindly identified for me as Selinum wallichianum.  The name fitted the descriptions in the books, and I'm going to try one and see how it does.  If it is happy it might set seed next year, or I could lash out and buy a couple more.

falling behind

It was not forecast to rain this morning, but it did.  I was slightly suspicious that when Our Ginger came and hung around the kitchen while I was eating my breakfast, his fur was lightly beaded with moisture, and by the time I'd finished mixing the next lot of meringues, and churned the ice cream, and blind baked a pastry case for the flan at lunchtime, it was raining properly.

I went and stared at it through the sitting room window, and fulminated at the Systems Administrator that it was not supposed to rain, and it was a swiz.  Why couldn't it have rained yesterday, when I was meeting friends for coffee, and been lovely today like it was yesterday?  The SA showed me the rain radar, and said without rancour that it was probably going to rain until lunchtime.

After a while I thought that I had better stop behaving like a teenager grumbling that life was, like, so totally unfair, and go and find something useful to do, so I got on with updating my spreadsheet of plants in the garden.  I keep a journal of what I've been doing, and what I've planted, then periodically transfer the planting details of what and where to a spreadsheet, so that when I'm staring at a chrysanthemum and trying to remember what it's called, I can look up 'chrysanthemum' on the computer rather than trawling through over twenty years' worth of handwritten notes.

It's a good system, in theory.  In practice, I sometimes forget to write up the book, and am left consulting my diary, and scrolling through old blog entries, trying to remember what I was doing last Tuesday and whether I was even gardening at all.  I would never advise anybody to rely on my evidence of what I did last week in a criminal trial, and I should take it very badly if I changed my mind about where I'd been and it was held against me.  Either I have a particularly feeble episodic memory, or we should be equally suspicious of everybody's testament about their whereabouts or activities on a particular date, if it's longer ago than about yesterday morning.

I also tend to let the spreadsheet get out of date.  Data entry is not very interesting, as a method of spending spare evenings and wet afternoons.  I was shocked, even so, to find that I last updated it in 2009.  It matters because sometimes, when I am considering trying to grow something, it is useful to be able to see whether I've tried it before.  It is slightly depressing, updating the computer record, because it forces me to recognise how many plants have died over the years.  Although, after two decades, not all of the losses are my fault.  Some things simply died of old age.  The two cold winters of 2010-11 and 2011-12 were massively damaging, in terms of plants that were killed outright at the time, and other things I fear lost to the surge of nature trying to reclaim the meadow, as I was left with numerous gaps around the garden, corpses to remove, and a general sense of fighting on too many fronts at once.  Although the winter of 2012-13 went on for a long time, by then most of the tender things that were going to die had already done so, and I hadn't wasted my time replacing them like I did in 2011.

By the afternoon it had stopped raining, so I went and weeded the gravel, as being a job I could do without surrounding shrubs and taller herbaceous plants dumping water down my back while I worked.  Later on I went and investigated the compost heap, and discovered a rich seam of compost ready to use in the bottom of the third bin.  Compost is wonderful stuff.  You haven't heard the last of that.

the year of the meringue

The kitchen is turning into a meringue factory.  On Saturday it is the annual fund raising supper of the music society.  It is also a day when I'm working, so when we were discussing the menu I announced that I was not prepared to take a day off to do any last minute cooking, but was willing to make meringues, as they could be done in advance.  My offer was accepted, which as far as I'm concerned was a plus.  Last year I had to take two dozen portions of chicken casserole, and the one before I was asked to contribute vast quantities of apple crumble.  Neither transport easily in the car, and it was a relief in the year of the chicken when the rest of the weekend passed without news of a mass outbreak of food poisoning in the village.

The organisers have come round this year to my reservations about assorted amateur cooks running up huge vats of main courses in their own homes, which may or may not fit in their domestic fridge, then transporting them in their cars, which certainly lack chiller capabilities, before they are reheated on the gas burner in the village hall.  Instead they have outsourced the main course, leaving the committee to do the starting nibbles and the puddings.  As a matter of interest, if you buy in a main course from a caterer cold, and reheat it yourself, you don't pay VAT on it.  If you have it delivered already heated, you do.  Isn't the UK tax system wonderful?

The secretary was rather vague when asked how many meringues she wanted, saying only that we were catering for sixty people, but not all of them would want meringues.  That doesn't narrow things down very much.  Somebody else is making chocolate brownies, so who knows how many will want meringues?  Half?  Three quarters?  Only a quarter?  And will they want one meringue or two?  I always imagine them coming in pairs, squidged together with cream, though I am sure that on Saturday people will be left to add their own cream.  The right answer seems to be somewhere between thirty and ninety, which is quite a range of uncertainty.

I don't mind the supper concert, but if I hadn't agreed to be on the committee I wouldn't go.  It isn't really my sort of thing, sitting in the hall of a village where I don't live, with people I don't necessarily know, while local amateur musicians perform their stuff.  At least by now my fellow committee members have given up trying to persuade me that the Systems Administrator would like to go.  Apart from the amusement of imagining that, as in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, fiction and reality had blurred, and that one was actually living in a sequence from Lucky Jim, the prospect of spending an evening making polite conversation with village worthies while listening to madrigals is the sort of thing to make the SA's blood run cold.  The committee members don't even get to do the full whack of sitting down, because we are running about serving the main course and clearing plates.

I made meringues last night, and another set are in the cool oven of the Aga as I type.  Tomorrow I'll do some straight after breakfast, then probably a second lot at lunchtime and a third in the evening, unless when I do the maths again I think that two more batches should be sufficient. When you make that many meringues, you end up with a lot of egg yolks, so I have offered to make cheese straws as well.  There are already some egg yolks in the freezer, and a pan of golden syrup flavoured custard cooling in the fridge, en route to being ice cream, and tomorrow's lunch will be a bacon flan, which will use a couple more.

I was worried that I didn't have enough large tupperware storage boxes, but Tesco didn't have any big ones, and then in a fit of inspiration I thought that if I run out of conventional containers I can use a honey bucket.  It might confuse my fellow caterers briefly and not in a good way, given my horticultural background, since they do look a lot like those white plastic tubs you can buy pelleted chicken manure in, but they are made of food grade plastic, and are airtight.

Probably after all this there will be boxes of meringues left over, but I'm sure my colleagues will eat them.  I'm not buying them cream, though.

falling birches

We had a proper look around the garden and in the wood today, as the wind had dropped.  Yesterday afternoon was still wild enough to put us off investigating potentially unsafe trees up close and personal.  The willow that's collapsed along the back of the ditch is not as bad as I'd feared.  The main weight of the trunk is lying along the line of the boundary, so it can let itself down further if it needs to over the coming months without any risk of it falling into the border. The side branches overhanging the bed need trimming back to let more light in, as does the hazel it has slid into, but we'll do that once the leaves are off.  I wanted to reduce the hazel (or, more accurately, to persuade the Systems Administrator to reduce it) anyway, because that corner of the garden is getting too dark.

The birch in the wood has failed more dramatically than I realised yesterday.  It was growing as a multi-stem, with two main trunks diverging at ground level.  That's an unusual method of cultivation in woodland, although it has been in vogue among garden designers in recent years. One trunk was dying back before the storm, and when we had a couple of arborists in a couple of years ago to do some coppicing on behalf of the Essex Wildlife Trust, they took the dead top out of it while they were there, on safety grounds.  Yesterday's storm, however, caused the base of the birch to split in two.  The dying trunk has fallen one way, towards the garden, but the other half, that was looking reasonably healthy, has fallen backwards into the wood, and is rather precariously wedged against a younger birch and an alder.  The root plate has split and lifted, and the tree is a goner.

It is both sad and not sad.  It was a handsome tree, and supported a bracket fungus that an ecologist from the wildlife trust said was interesting, when he visited more than a decade ago.  On the other hand, birch is not the longest lived species, and it had probably reached its natural span. It will provide an impressive amount of firewood, once we've worked out how to extract it, and its demise lets a useful amount of extra light into what had become an overly gloomy corner of the garden.  So often I have read, in accounts of the great storm of 1987 and other tree-related catastrophes, that after the shock of losing a familiar landmark plant, one realises how dark the garden had got, and how the growing conditions will be improved by letting more light in.

Driving through Old Heath in Colchester this morning, I saw a wind thrown mature birch in a front garden resting on somebody's house.  The root plate was huge, and Old Heath lived up to its name, as underneath was bright orange with sand.  The tree looked healthy, and I suppose an unlucky, especially strong gust must have just caught it and bang, over it went.  It's a tribute to the build quality of the house that it didn't go through the roof.  Having a collapsed birch tree in a wood really seems quite a minor problem in comparison, though I'm afraid our's will do more damage as it comes the rest of the way down, which it must at some stage.

I had a terrible, heretical idea, as I looked at the amount of space opened up where the birch used to be.  I said to the Systems Administrator that I'd had a wicked thought, to which the SA replied that I was thinking of planting non-native species.  Got it in one.  The gap is right next to the garden, and it is very tempting to have a magnolia or two.  The soil is pretty wet, so I'd have to choose carefully, but I could just imagine looking out of the garden and over the rabbit fence, straight into the great goblet flowers of a magnolia.

The UK has a terribly limited native flora, compared to most other countries.  This is down to our particular geological history, and yes, it is true that native plants tend to be the best for wildlife.  However, as more and more plant diseases seem to arrive every year, I'm beginning to think that it wouldn't hurt to hedge our bets and plant a wider range of species, to increase the chances of something surviving in any given situation.  Besides, I like magnolias.

after the storm

The power has just come back on, so I am going to post quickly, before it can go off again.  I should have been at work, but after watching the wind strengthen steadily between seven this morning and half past, when I needed to leave the house, and having heard on the radio that the storm was due to hit London at seven, I thought I'd delay going in until the worst was past.  According to the weather forecast, the storm was due to move out over the North Sea by mid-morning, although that's bad luck for the poor old Dutch, as it will be even bigger by the time it hits land again.

Nobody answered when I rang in to work to say I'd be late.  It occurred to me that of course if all the staff were delayed then there were no servants to answer the phone, but since the answering machine didn't kick in either I guessed they had no electricity as well.  I eventually got through to the owner, who sounded harried, as well she might be, and said there was no point in driving in the worse of it, and later would be fine.  They had a power cut.

With no lights in the shop, the till running off a generator, and little prospect of customers, there was not even a great deal of point in going in, but I thought I should show willing, once the worst of the wind had dropped, since there was going to be an awful lot of picking up and sweeping up to do in the plant centre.  By quarter past ten the wind had dropped back to a normal late autumn stiff breeze with strong gusts, and I packed up my lunch and left for Suffolk.

I didn't get very far.  As I reached the first bend in the road I found it blocked by a large weeping willow that had collapsed out of a neighbour's garden.  Reversing back to the farm entrance, and heading off the other way round the block, I found the alternative route blocked by a fallen holm oak.  That run of trees has been dodgy for a while: one came down last winter, in much less wind that this storm, sending us on a five mile detour to get home when we were almost in sight of the farm.

After I'd gone home, and rung work again to say that I wouldn't be in at all because both roads were blocked, the Systems Administrator pointed out that I could have trespassed along the track across the farm.  The farmer almost certainly wouldn't object, partly because he is a very decent bloke, and because it might encourage us to start objecting to his activities, like lorries on Sunday mornings, and industrial scale complexes of polytunnels.  I had totally forgotten the farm track, but the postman obviously hadn't, because soon after that today's post arrived.

A quick survey of the garden and wood suggests that the damage is not too bad.  The new piece of acrylic popped out of the roof of my greenhouse, but fortunately without snapping, so it can be reinstalled tomorrow when the weather's calmer.  More annoyingly, two more panes of glass have started sliding out, and one has snapped midway under its own weight, so we'll have to buy another piece of acrylic, which is another sixty quid down the drain.  The SA checked that the lower edges of all the glass panes in the greenhouse roof were fastened after the first one slid out, but the storm must have broken or dislodged some of the original fastenings.  As I've said before, it is quite an old greenhouse.

We haven't lost any trees in the garden or down the edge of the wood, that we can see.  A dying silver birch in the wood has come down, but that's fine, as it was going to drop at some point, and now it has done it at a time when nobody was underneath.  My Robinia hispida is smashed up, but that's not surprising, as they are terribly brittle shrubs, and it will regrow.  The only really tricky thing is that one of the willows on the boundary has sagged forward so that it is hanging over the ditch bed, partly resting on a large hazel.  That can't be left as it is, because it is unsafe, and if it comes down in a rush it is going to land on some nice shrubs underneath.  The SA thinks we will be able to tackle it from the side, using the Henchman platform.  I'm not convinced that is going to be high enough, on the other hand renting a cherry picker would cost a fortune, and create a terrible mess in the ditch bed getting it in place.

The wider news is that a double decker bus blew over in Hadleigh, five or six miles up the road from where I work, at around eight this morning just as I was scheduled to arrive at work.  Some of the rides on Clacton Pier have collapsed, and Tendring Council has run out of chain saws.  I'm not counting on our roads being cleared any time soon.  Lucky there's the farm track.

the gathering storm

So, there is going to be a great storm.  Or maybe not.  Our neighbours must be feeling pleased that they had the huge Lombardy poplar near their house reduced by a third last Friday, and not booked in for next Tuesday.  We had a letter from UK Power Networks warning us of a planned power cut in our area on Wednesday 6th November, to allow them to trim trees near power lines.  Pity they couldn't have done that a couple of weeks ago as well.  If cardunculus fails to post tomorrow, it's a fair bet we've lost our power.  The Systems Administrator has charged the back-up dongle, so we should have internet access, but the battery on this laptop won't hold its charge for the time it takes to reply to an e-mail.

The forecast for Essex isn't as bad as it is for the west country, and Kent, but we have prepared more carefully than we normally do for run-of-the-mill autumn gales.  The steamer chairs and barbecue on the veranda are roped to the railings, to stop them blowing through the window, and the chairs from the lower deck have been tucked in the lee of the 'Tai Haku' and a large rose bush, well away from the conservatory windows.  The metal table from the Italian garden is now upside down on the lawn, below the daffodil bank, so that it can't fall over and shouldn't blow anywhere, and the metal chairs are leaning folded up against the daffodil bank.

I've taken my row of terracotta pots of succulents off the top of the wall by the patio, so that they can't blow off and smash themselves on the paving slabs, and cut the blue glass baubles down from the 'Red Sentinel' to prevent them thrashing around in the wind until the metal loops for hanging them up give way.  The last of the pots from the Italian garden are now tucked up inside the greenhouse, a job which should have been done weeks ago anyway.  The pineapple sage, which I have been muttering at fiercely for failing to produce any spikes of bright red flowers, is finally in bud.  Reading the label I see that its flowering period is given as 'throughout the winter' so that has gone to live in the conservatory.  I think it needs a bigger pot.

The conservatory doors are shut, as are the greenhouse doors and vents, and the velux roof window in the bathroom.  None of the vehicles are parked under trees.  We have several pints of milk, plenty of loo roll, and a whole slab of cat food.  A torch.  Candles.

And that's it.  It's difficult to know what else to do.  I spent a long time looking out of the bathroom window this morning, hoping that none of my trees would blow down or lose major limbs.  By late lunchtime the barometer was falling fast, and the cats were hunched and nervous in their baskets (apart from the fat indignant tabby, who was soundly asleep in my wooden trug with an attitude of confident relaxation).  Can cats tell when worse weather is on the way, or were we projecting our own concerns on to them?

I hope we don't lose too much felt off the shed roofs, it is such a performance replacing it.  I hope the house roof stays on, though it did in 1987.  I hope that not too many plants get badly broken, and that the ornaments scattered around the garden survive unscathed.  I hope (and believe) that the chicken's house is heavy enough, and sheltered enough by our house, to stay put.

Probably after all this build up it will just be a bit windy, here in north Essex.  The general weather forecast doesn't look too bad.  The shipping forecast for sea area Thames, on the other hand, is for severe gale 9 to violent storm 11 for a time, perhaps hurricane force 12 later.  We'll see.

the joy of wax

I have just spent a very pleasant day padding around somebody's garage, and standing about in their front drive.  Never let it be said that I do not know how to have a good time on my days off.

The reason was that it was the beekeepers' Wax Day, and the padding and standing was all in the cause of making hand-dipped beeswax candles, plus gossiping and drinking coffee.  Messing around with melted beeswax, unless you are going to do it in a sealed room, is a game for early spring or late autumn, when there won't be too many bees flying.  Choose a nice warm day in summer and you will have a room full of bees come to investigate the smell.  The reason for using a garage is that most people don't want to host a roomful of guests, some not personally known to them, dripping melted wax on the floor and furniture, and treading little shavings of it into the carpets.

Beeswax is messy.  Molten, it smells divine, and pure beeswax candles are a joy to burn, but melted wax is not something to treat lightly.  I heard one grandmother today warn her small granddaughter that if she spilt wax down her clothes, it would be there forever, and a piece of advice I cherish from Matthew Parris (back in the days before The Times disappeared behind a paywall) was never to melt wax in a saucepan which you ever wish to use for anything else.

The beekeepers have a fine array of wax melting and moulding kit, built up over many years.  We have a couple of thermostat controlled water baths holding cylinders that can be filled with molten wax, for dipping candles, another water bath for melting the wax in the first place, a narrow rectangular tank for dipping sheet wax, a mangle for embossing wax sheets with a honeycomb pattern, and a large collection of moulds.  At Wax Day you can make dipped candles, rolled candles, moulded candles and decorations.  You can rub the high spots with gold dust, if you so wish, to bring out the pattern.  You pay for candle wicks by length, and finished products by weight, and it will cost you virtually nothing over the bulk price of the wicks and the wax.  And your own labour, which is substantial.

I wanted one inch diameter candles to burn in our iron candlesticks, so stuck to dipped candles.  You must decide the diameter of the finished product before you start, and choose your wick accordingly.  There's no point in dipping a candle two inches thick if the wick is only for a one inch candle, and vice versa.  You dip the wick once, then leave it to cool completely.  This is important, since if the core stays warm, there is a risk that later in the dipping process, as it gets heavier, the rest of the candle will slide off the wick under its own weight.  If you don't want to stand about holding your candle for the duration, you can attach a small bulldog clip to the wick and hang it from a nail conveniently provided for that purpose.

Once the wick is cool you can start dipping, leaving the wax to cool and harden between goes, and moving the candle in and out of the wax bath pretty smartly, otherwise you will melt off as much wax as you put on. This is where the standing about comes in, waiting for your candles to harden enough for you to dip them again.   After a couple of dips you need to give the wick a good pull from both ends to straighten it, and if you are aiming for a really straight candle, you periodically roll it between two sheets of glass.  If you want the sort of mirror smooth finish that will win you prizes at the annual show, you clean the glass first with white spirit, to remove the smears of wax left by other candles.

I soon began to realise that I was doing something wrong, because my candles were growing so slowly compared to everybody else's.  People who had started after me soon had candles that were twice the diameter, and I was dipping assiduously.  At one point I was going so slowly I began to have visions of having to take them home at less than the full inch diameter, and bring them back to finish at the next wax day.  Eventually I decided the problem was that I was being a little too eager, and not letting them cool enough between dips, perhaps because I was hanging them from nails on a plank inside the garage, rather than outside where the wind helped chill them.  As the dipping frenzy began to subside, I was able to find a set of nails outside, and the candles began to grow fatter at a faster rate, but I stuck with the initial six and didn't go round again like some did.

I was very idle when it came to all that rolling under glass, because there was a queue for the glass most of the time, and cleaning smears of wax off sheets of glass with white spirit looked a great deal too much like hard work.  My candles would not win any prizes in the show, but there again, I'm not planning to enter them.  They should burn beautifully, though the organiser has warned me that if I use them earlier than Christmas I'll do well to put them in the freezer first.  Apparently freshly made ones burn down in no time at all.

out to lunch

We went up to Aldeburgh today, to take my cousin out to lunch.  He is not strictly my cousin, but my father's cousin, but 'cousin' is less of a mouthful than 'first cousin once removed'.  He is eighty-five, was widowed in April, and is in extremely good nick, apart from the fact that he needs a new hip. Two years ago he was striding along Aldeburgh beach and leading parties of geologists from the University of the Third Age to look at rock formations in Yorkshire, then wear and tear caught up with his hip, and now he can barely make it half way up the high street.

He was booked in to have the operation in August, then the anaesthetist demanded another battery of tests before taking responsibility for an eighty-five year old, and he lost his place in the queue. Having passed the tests, he is now back on for the middle of next month, subject to passing the pre med that he passed before in August.  The appointment has just come through, so we didn't know that when we booked the lunch.  Timing isn't ideal.  My cousin has no children, and this time round one close friend who would have helped out while he was convalescing will be twelve thousand miles away, visiting her daughter in New Zealand.

It isn't at all convenient, waiting to have your hip replaced.  Apart from the pain, and the limited mobility and loss of independence, you have to put your life on hold, hoping to get The Call.  Had my cousin been to any concerts at this year's Aldeburgh Festival, I asked.  No, because there was no point in buying tickets to things.  Although you could look on having some concert tickets as a powerful magic to ensure you got a fresh appointment (as a strict rationalist I am not superstitious, but I have noticed how since investing in a very warm, very long, thick winter coat because my purple velvet one after six years was going bald, we have had an abnormally warm autumn).

My cousin is due to give a presentation to his geology group on Monday week, and was dismayed that it had taken him two solid days to produce the first three Powerpoint slides on his new computer, and one of those wasn't right.  My cousin had to replace his old desktop when it broke down, and so has been upgraded to Windows 8.  From what I've gathered, not liking Windows 8 one tiny bit has nothing to do with being eighty-five, and everything to do with it being Windows 8.  I haven't heard anyone have a single good thing to say about it.  Mind you, that has been true for every new version of Windows I can remember.  It is fortunate for my cousin that the Systems Administrator was there to help, sounding very confident and e-mailing the images home to work on there.  I said as much, as we walked back to the car, and the SA admitted to currently having no idea at all what to do, but hoping it would all be clear once on a familiar machine with the full suite of programmes, instead of the dreaded Windows 8.

The SA did indeed work it out when we got home.  That shows what you can achieve through a judicious mixture of bullshit and self-restraint.  The SA didn't have a pudding.  I did, to keep my cousin company, as well as fish and chips, and coffee, which came with an enormous shortbread biscuit, and am still so stuffed my brain is barely in gear.  Blame any typos in this post on the sticky toffee pudding.

calm before the storm

I started listening to Radio 4's In Our Time, as I pottered about the kitchen.  This week was on the history of the Corn Laws, which in theory I should like to know about, but I found the programme format distracting, not for the first time, as Sir Melvyn gave each guest a go, prompting and summarising between speakers.  I think I'd find it easier if one historian who knew their stuff simply spent half an hour explaining the Corn Laws.  I was also confused by the fact that one of the experts was named as Boyd Hilton.  What, I wondered, was Mark Kermode's stand-in on his film review programme doing on a history panel discussing nineteenth century domestic politics, or rather, what was a professor and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge doing moonlighting as a film reviewer?  I had to look it up on Google, and found that of course they are two different people, even though Boyd Hilton is not the most common name.  It's not as if they were both called John Smith.  I am not terribly good at names, when they belong to people rather than plants.  It took me quite a long time to work out that John Williams the composer of film scores, and John Williams the classical guitarist, were not one and the same, and I have given up trying to tell the difference between Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie.

Outside, it was the calm before the storm.  My Peter Nyssen bulbs finally arrived yesterday, after some nagging on my part.  Maybe they never send domestic orders out until the fourth week of October, but given that I placed the order on 13th June, as soon as their website was accepting orders for autumn planting, I thought they might have managed to get it to me sooner than now, and had a dark suspicion that the systems problems which led to the start of live on-line ordering being deferred several times might have spilled over into their fulfilment operations as well. However, when I checked the contents of the box, everything I'd asked (and paid) for was there, and none of the bulbs were mouldy or soft, as far as I could see.  The daffodils should ideally have been planted early last month, but they'll survive.

Part of the order was 250 Crocus tommasinianus 'Whitewell Purple', to bulk up the display in the bottom lawn, and I spent a happy hour crawling around planting them.  C. tommasinianus flower earlier than the big Dutch crocus beloved of municipal naturalisation schemes on roundabouts, and do well in grass.  I lost most of the Crocus chrysanthus planted in the borders to marauding mice, or voles, or something that dug them up and ate the bulbs, tossing the foliage contemptuously aside, and I have a theory that crocus bulbs scattered through grass are less likely to be eaten wholesale. Pheasants do eat the petals, though.

Despite having whinged a great deal about the bulb order being so late, I left potting the rest of it for a wet day.  We seem set to get several of those very soon, though some may be so windy that I might feel uncomfortable working in the greenhouse.  It is getting on a bit, that greenhouse, and if it finally blows down in a gale I should prefer not to be inside when it happens.

Instead, I went on chopping down the stems of spent herbaceous plants, and pulling up weeds.  The compost plus Strulch treatment makes such a difference, I must try not to leave any bare earth this winter.  Far fewer weeds germinate into the covered areas than the naked soil, and when they do get a hold they pull out much more easily.  The leafy material I've carted away is piled up in great tottering heaps in the three end compost bins, though it will squash down quickly enough.

Addendum  The David Nicholls reviewing the best task lamps in the Guardian is not the same David Nicholls that wrote the novel, adapted into the film in which Anne Hathaway was ridiculed for her accent, One Day.  Just thought you'd like to be clear on that.  I haven't read the book.  I was thinking about it, then read a massive plot spoiler that was dropped tangentially into an article on the Wall Street Journal website.

the October checklist

There are still jobs to be done to keep the garden ticking over, according to Dan Pearson in the Guardian.  I don't know about ticking over.  I'm at full clatter, in the race against time to get as much as possible cut down (once it's finished flowering), weeded, mulched, Strulched, tied in, pruned (assuming you can prune it at this time of the year) and generally tidied before it starts raining heavily, blowing a gale, freezing, or snowing.

The asters have suddenly finished.  When I gave my talk on autumn colour, only eight days ago, the island bed was a mass of pink and dark red, with flashes of blue.  I made a mental note to get some more A. lateriflorus and A. ericoides and more 'Little Carlow', to introduce some variety into the sea of solid, medium sized pink flowers, and picked stems with gratitude to illustrate the talk, since we'd pretty much sold out at work.  A week later the flower heads have faded, and the stems are going on the compost heap.  I feel mean not leaving them for the birds, but there are plenty of seed heads elsewhere in the garden, I don't want them seeding (more pink) and there won't be time to do all the clearing away in March, so I'll have to forego the full new perennial planting experience of brown and sere stems throughout the winter.  I want that bed dusted with fish, blood and bone, and the Strulch topped up, before Christmas.  Ideally before mid-November.

I'm taking the tops out of the buddleias below the veranda.  There are two, of the same variety, which is good from a design point of view, given the size of the border, but a waste from a plant collecting perspective, since I could have had two different ones.  The first one blew out of the ground not long after planting, and I sighed about the expense and frustration of gardening and bought a replacement, then the original plant regenerated from the roots.  Buddleia can be prone to wind damage, and in an exposed garden it's not a bad idea to reduce the top hamper in the autumn, leaving the final pruning until late winter in case it's a cold one.

The two ends of the slab path have finally met up, after having a pile of slabs lurking in the back of the border for about two years, and my method of estimating the quantity of slabs I'd need by pacing it out has worked, since there are exactly the right number.  Of course, I could always have cheated by budging them up a bit or spacing them out, but then the middle section of the path wouldn't have matched the two ends.  I haven't finished levelling the soil for each one, just put some of them down at this stage, but at least the route is now clear.

The perennial sunflower, Helianthus salicifolius, which is supposed to provide foliage interest late in the year, has flopped over disastrously.  It makes very tall, unbranched stems, with narrow leaves like a willow (the clue's in the name), which look splendid in photographs of Great Dixter. The smallish yellow flowers are an irrelevance, the leaves are the thing, except that Christopher Lloyd's plants grew more or less upright.  I am puzzled why mine have flopped so much.  Lack of light?  They are tucked into a patch with shrub roses around them, and the house shades them for the first part of the day, but wouldn't they go upwards between the roses in search of light, rather than giving up and lying down?

I may have just answered my own question by googling them, and coming up with a page on the Missouri Botanical Garden site, which says that if grown in part shade they will be taller, and may require support.  Oh dear, next year I need to stake them.  I am not very good at staking.  It tends to be just one step too many, on the always very long list of things to do (come to think of it, I don't think there is any month when my garden is ticking over.  There are periods when the weather, or illness, stops play, but then I'm grinding my teeth in frustration at not being able to do anything, unless I'm very ill indeed.)

Meanwhile, it is still so warm that the Systems Administrator is able to let the chickens out for a run in the afternoons, and sit outside with them to scare the foxes away.  They enjoy coming out so much, it's a sad moment when it gets too cold to commit to supervising them.  Sad for the SA, too, who enjoys an excuse to sit in the porch reading, or playing a fiendishly complicated military strategy game set in the Vietnam war (or Candy Crush).  The hen that was moulting has sprouted a new set of feathers remarkably quickly, going from practically oven ready to fully feathered in only a few days.  Well, her tail is still on the small side, but at least she's waterproof.

weeds, paths and etymology in a mixed border

It was a grey, blustery morning when I woke up, promising rain later.  I know I wrote recently that I'd read somewhere that you should never start a novel with the weather, but the weather outlook is extremely important to how you plan your day, when you're a keen gardener.  And anyway, I can't remember who said it, and they were wrong, since Jane Eyre starts with rain, and Bleak House with implacable November weather, mud and drizzle.  Peter Ackroyd's theory is that damp pervades our national character.  And this is a blog, not a novel.

It was not actually raining, or at least not very much, so I collected up the bags of weedy waste scattered across the top lawn, that marked the point at which work interrupted my last gardening session, emptied the big bucket of prunings left over from last time into the trailer, and resumed my progress through the top rose bed.

There is too much Campanula lactiflora.  What started off as one or two small purchased plants of 'Loddon Anna' has seeded itself joyously about, and some of the self-sown plants are threatening to overwhelm the smaller roses, or blocking the route of a planned maintenance path.  Campanula lactiflora is a big old thing.  It can reach 1.5 metres on our miserable soil, so on good loam and in a higher rainfall area I should think it would get larger still.  'Loddon Anna' is pale pink, while some of her offspring are light blue, a drawback of self-seeding.  All are pretty, but you can have too much of a good thing.  The roots of Campanula lactiflora are thick, tough, deep, difficult to dig out, but then break when levered with a border fork, so established plants are not easy to remove.

The planned path is merely a line of slabs, laid straight on to the soil.  In the 1950s this was considered a reasonable method of proceeding, and Margery Fish wrote about it enthusiastically in one of her books.  I rather think she even cast her own slabs, Geoff Hamilton style.  By the time I went to Writtle it was deeply frowned upon.  Paths were supposed to be properly laid on rubble and sand or cement, and bunging a few slabs down on the ground was not the done thing.  However, I only want my path to indicate a way through the back of the bed.  As much as anything, it is intended to act as an aide memoire, and prevent me from planting anything large across the line of it, in a moment of absent mindedness when I forget there is supposed to be a path, and see only a tempting, unexploited planting space.  And I agree with Margery Fish, that the beauty of loose slabs in a bed is that you can move them to reroute the path, as things grow, or die.

The Ceanothus x delilianus 'Gloire de Versailles' is flowering prolifically.  I don't remember it normally doing this well in the autumn.  Indeed, I don't remember it usually flowering this much at all.  I have just checked in Graham Stuart Thomas' Ornamental Shrubs, Climbers and Bamboos, and it is supposed to flower from summer into autumn, so something about the conditions this year must have suited it, and it is performing closer to its potential than it sometimes does.  The powder blue flowers are individually small, held in fluffy-looking clusters.

As I wrote that, I realised that while the phrase 'powder blue' to me clearly denotes a particular pale, greyish blue, I had not idea where the term came from.  It certainly doesn't describe any kind of powder with which I am personally familiar.  Google has not been as helpful on this question as it often is, and I haven't found an online dictionary to give me a definitive answer.  Quite a few entries say that it derives from the colour of smalt, powdered cobalt which was used in ceramics and glass making to colour objects blue, but other entries describe smalt as being darker blue and purplish, and say that the phrase 'powder blue' can refer either to smalt colour, or to a paler, greyer blue.  According to Wikipedia, the first recorded use to mean pale blue was in 1774.

Anyway, the flowers of 'Gloire de Versailles' are extremely pretty, and I was pleased to see them.  I fear my shrub is too much shaded by the surrounding roses, and the house which keeps the sun off the entire bed for the first part of the day.  Maybe if it saw more sun it would flower this generously with more regularity.  On the other hand, many writers say that ceanothus are particularly vulnerable to wind rock, and that the damage caused to their roots by the top growth rocking in the wind can kill the plant.  Certainly, they are a treacherous group of shrubs for dying suddenly and for no apparent cause, often just as they have grown to fill the space or do the job they were intended for.  I grow comparatively few, having been caught out by random ceanothus suicides enough times for one gardening lifetime, and at least 'Gloire de Versailles' is well sheltered where it is, and has not died yet.

By half past twelve the slight rain had morphed into fairly heavy rain, which it was impossible to ignore.  I packed up my tools, and went inside to cook some of this year's apples, prior to freezing. The Systems Administrator stared in horrified fascination at my mud-encrusted trousers, and remarked that I smelt a bit ripe, and had better get changed before the double glazing salesman came round to quote for the windows.  We have given up with the local merchant, who was so miserably ill-informed about the building regulations concerning replacement windows and would only give us a five year guarantee, and decided to go with the market leaders.  It will cost twice as much, but is guaranteed for life, underpinned by an industry bond.

the birds

The peahen and her chick are determined to come into the shop.  They made it in several times over the weekend, the mother being large enough to trigger the motion sensor that opens the sliding doors.  I don't think peafowl are the world's brightest birds, but they are not completely stupid, and have worked out that it is warmer, drier and a lot less windy inside the shop than outside in the plant centre, and that there might be cake crumbs.

I shooed them away from the doors several times, but went into the shop at one point to find the gardener and the manager advancing purposefully on a wicker basket full of cut-price strimmer lines.  The gardener reached behind it, and scooped up the peachick, which shrieked in furious protest.  Remarking that he ought to wring its neck, he deposited it outside the back door.  Later on, while I was on the telephone to a charming and rather grand woman from Kensington, discussing her Drimys lanceolata, which had been accidentally over-watered in its pot, the mother and baby were back again.  Entering the shop from the far end, they meandered in stately fashion until they stood in front of the cafe counter, at which point the mother deposited a neat blob of excrement.  I did not think I could remonstrate with the peafowl, or call for help over the radio, while being polite to a Kensington grandee, so sidled towards the back door, which mercifully opened.  The pea family stalked out, and once I'd finished my phone call I went to get some paper towels to clean up the blob.

After they gave up with the shop, they hung around outside our staff room for a bit.  I suspect the young gardener of feeding them.  The hens seem keen to get in as well, since the young gardener joined the staff.

Calling the peachick a baby makes it sound very sweet and tiny.  It is quite sweet, but although it sticks close to its mother at all times, it is by now the size of a small to medium chicken.  A little patch of peacock blue feathers is just starting to show on the back of its neck.  The peacock appeared briefly in the plant centre, but he has nothing to do with the care of his developing offspring, preferring to hang around with the guinea fowl.

A van load of rare magnolias and other desirable plants arrived from a nursery in Devon, but I didn't get to help unload them because I was minding the shop.  Then the van wouldn't start, and the nurseryman had to wait in our car park until the AA turned up.  That's probably all his profit on the magnolias, gone on the next garage bill.  It's a desperate way to make a living, propagating rare plants.  The expected delivery of reconstituted stone urns never came at all, because their lorry broke down before getting as far as us.

start of the concert season

I arrived at work to find a peeved note from the owner in the ice cream tub where we keep keys, and put notes, saying that both tills had been wrong yesterday, and that there was no excuse, when we were not busy.  The note didn't really make it clear what was wrong with the tills.  One error involved a regular customer, that I hadn't served, and it sounded as though he might have asked to be invoiced, after his plants had been rung through the till, and as though my co-worker might have failed to clear them off the till again (using the Extra Discount button).  The owner claimed not to have understood the messages I left in both tills, warning her that to make up change for a twenty pound note on one of them I'd had to take a ten pound note from the other, but I thought that was about as clear as you could possibly make it.  One till was known to be ten pounds up and the other ten pounds down.  If there was an additional discrepancy of £6.95 then that was an entirely separate issue.  I don't think I made any mistakes on the till yesterday, but I can't be certain.

It is a fallacy to believe that, because the takings are modest, your staff are necessarily having a stress-free day in which errors need not occur.  With only two sales staff on duty, plus the tea shop girl who can operate the till at a pinch and tell customers where the loo is, but not where plants are, and who does not answer the phone, it doesn't take much to have the pair of them jumping through hoops and quite up to making till errors.  A couple of people waiting to pay while your colleague is occupied helping someone else find the magnolias, and a phone ringing loudly in your pocket with nobody free to answer it, and the staff are busy, at least for that ten minute period.

As I'd come to the end of the manager's list of my designated jobs, and finished someone else's for good measure, that left me with the generic instruction to sweep through the shrub beds.  Clearing up fallen leaves at this time of year feels futile to the point of being Sisyphan, when there are still so many more to fall, and I couldn't see the point of lifting shrubs off the shrub beds, cleaning the beds, and lifting them back on again, if those same shrubs were going to be moved next week anyway to be put under cover in one of the tunnels.  Why lift anything three times in seven days when you only need lift it once?  But I did sweep up leaves and scrape green lichen and moss off the beds we'd recently cleared, to make them look tidy, and then cleaned through the Salix, since they were dreadfully messy and I knew that most of them would be staying outside for the winter.

It was the first of the music society's concerts at four.  I was keen to make it, since I have a season ticket so have in a sense already paid to go, and because it was a string quartet.  I love string quartets.  My fantasy music society programme would alternate between string quartets, and some combination of cello and piano.  No wind trios, no classical guitar, no up-and-coming sopranos, definitely no brass ensembles.  It was a nuisance that this concert, and the next one, fell on my working Sundays, so that I was going to have to leave work early.  Significantly early, in fact.  It won't be so bad once the clocks change.  I asked the owner a couple of weeks back if that would be OK, choosing my moment when I was in her good books after doing the wildlife talks, and she said yes.  I left a note reminding her in the ice cream tub last night, but then came the till errors, and I was no longer in favour, so there was no reply, and by mid afternoon the family had gone out.

I was worried about leaving my colleague, and the tea shop girl, to cope for the final hour and a bit if we were busy, and I was concerned about leaving my colleague to lock up alone, given the recent burglaries in the village.  However, by half past three most of the remaining customers were pensioners drinking tea, and it didn't look as though we were about to be inundated by a late rush, and my colleague said that she would not be locking up alone because she would have the tea shop girl.  So I went.  They were starting with Haydn, and I really didn't want to miss that.  I love Papa Haydn.

It was a very, very good concert, and the church was gratifyingly full.  The only slight musical glitch was that the second violin was ill in hospital, which was obviously worse for her than for us, and while the emergency substitute came from another quartet of equal standing (or roughly equal.  I must ask my more musically sophisticated committee members whether she was appearing above or below her usual level), they had to drop the programmed second half Beethoven in favour of Dvorak. The Dvorak was beautiful, and probably pleased a friend who is not such a Papa Haydn enthusiast and prefers something more romantic, but Haydn and then Mozart don't really set you up in the right mood to appreciate a second half of Slavic music laced with American folk motifs.

The slight sartorial hitch was that I forgot to chuck a clean sweater and pair of shoes in the car, and had to spend the interval trying to look as though it was perfectly normal to attend a recital covered in compost and green slime and wearing wellington boots.