The Japanese apricot Prunus mume 'Beni-Chidori' is in full flower. Common plant names can be misleading: Japan's gardens have been borrowing from China for centuries, and the Japanese apricot is actually a native of western China. It has small, brilliant pink flowers, which the normally reliable Bluebell Nursery says are scented, though I've never noticed any perfume from mine. Still, we all differ in our sense of smell, so I'll only start worrying if I stop being able to detect things I used to be able to smell. Apparently that can be an advance indicator that your brain is deteriorating. What a cheerful prospect.
This is my second specimen. The first was bought as a delightful mop headed mini-standard, and I intended it to live in a pot near a camellia of a similar, somewhat lighter shade of pink that is also in flower now. But most of its branches died back one winter, a mystery explained when I read a comment in a book by Stephen Lacey that it was not the most reliably hardy tree. I'd been wondering if the graft had failed. Then I found some for sale that were just trained as normal trees, and bought one, shoehorning it into a border where there's a gap in winter. In summer the space is taken up with a riot of perennial sweet peas, but fortunately the almond doesn't seem to mind being over-run for a couple of months in July and August. Its own foliage is very dull by then, and seems to attract every sap sucking insect going so that its leaves get distorted and rather horrid, so I'm quite happy for it to be camouflaged, so long as the pea doesn't kill it.
It has not shown any ill effects so far. On the contrary, it has grown quite appreciably. A few random twigs have died back, but overall it looks pretty happy. I must go and cut the dead wood out, and take a deep sniff to see if I can detect this beautiful almond fragrance while I'm at it.
It may be the fate of early flowering plants in domestic gardens run by hard pressed owners with no outside help to preside over scenes of disorder. It would be nice if 'Beni-Chidori' could arise above a tranquil scene of mown grass and neatly trimmed borders, all ready for the year ahead, its little pink flowers speaking to the pink camellia on the far side of the top lawn, and the paler pink of viburnum 'Charles Lamont' down by the ditch. It would be very nice, but instead it gets as a backdrop a lawn scattered with rose branches I've been pruning out, mostly dead, the cut stems of the stooled paulownia, numerous bags of Strulch left in a trail round the edges of the beds ready for me to use, three green plastic buckets, one large black builders bucket, a stepladder, a tub of fish, blood and bone, assorted hand tools and the pole loppers. Likewise in the front garden the dwarf iris have been blooming heroically against a background of fifty glaring white bags of Strulch, and the Henchman which for one reason and another has not been put away since we got it out in September. (I know that was a long time ago, but with the Systems Administrator's frozen shoulder, my sprained wrist and our respective colds, there has never been a good time to move it).
At least we don't open to the public, so there is no looming panic of a deadline date by which we have to be tidy. That would be hell, though some people enjoy it.
Thursday, 5 March 2015
Wednesday, 4 March 2015
feed the bees
It was a little warmer today, and not quite as windy, and I galvanised myself into going to check how the bees were doing with their stores. I was worried about two colonies in particular, that I meant to unite last autumn only I never got round to it until it was too late in the year because I wasn't confident about doing it, given that I'd never managed to see either queen all summer. By then it was too late to feed them sugar syrup either, so they've been living off slabs of fondant (bought at great expense to the management) rested on top of their frames, with a little wooden eke to raise the roof up to make room. I was worried about them last week and felt so ill I decided they'd just have to cope without me for a while longer, but by today I couldn't put it off any longer.
Both were alive and well, or at least there were plenty of bees up in the eke eating the fondant. One colony had quite a lot left, but the other was down to a lump about the size of a generous helping of shortbread so it's a good thing I didn't leave it much longer. I gave them half of my last slab of fondant to be getting on with, keeping the other half for emergencies, and will see how they go. On nice days they must be able to bring some forage in themselves.
I checked the weight of the other hives while I was at it, by hefting at one side of each box and seeing how much effort it took to lift them. All were good and heavy. One had a sole forager bee returning with a load of orange pollen, but there were no visible signs of life from the others, and I could not resist lifting the roofs off very briefly to see if there were any bees in there. I didn't disturb the crown boards that sit over the frames, just peered in through the holes (they have many uses, those holes, feeding, emptying the super above of bees by fitting a one-way bee escape, and reassuring beekeepers by giving a tiny glimpse into the hive). Every box had live bees in it, even the dodgy nuc that did nothing all summer last year. The yellow bees that are normally dopey and sweet natured showed their displeasure at the draught by raising their bottoms towards me and wiggling them. All sorts of chemical signals will have been unleashed, which are wasted on me, but I got the message from their behaviour.
Just because there are some live bees in early March isn't to say that every colony is viable. Some of the queens may have died, and depending on the weather and when I can first open the hives properly, I may or may not discover this in time to do anything about it. But it's not bad going, six out of six (plus the dodgy nuc) making it this far through the winter. I will have to unite those two colonies, though. I don't want as many as six before the swarming season even starts. Don't have time to look after them, don't have enough boxes, don't have outlets for that much honey if I got a crop.
I haven't yet heard from other local beekeepers what the general experience of winter losses has been this year. Last year, all mine came through the winter with one going queenless, but they were obliging about making a new queen from a frame of fresh eggs taken from another hive. The year before that, all survived the winter with one going queenless, but they obviously hadn't read the books and refused to do anything useful with their emergency frame. I think the year before one lot simply died, but overall I haven't done too badly in recent years. Or rather, they haven't done too badly. I feed them and give them a winter varroa treatment and the rest of it is up to them. I overwinter them on mesh floors, and am increasingly convinced that helps. You'd think they might find it too cold, but condensation and damp seem more of a threat in the winter than low temperatures.
Addendum I should have been in London today to see a friend, but when she heard I'd had a cold she told me not to worry if I needed to postpone, and I decided to take her at her word and rearranged for next week. In fact, I did do some gardening as well as check the bees, but the great thing about pootling around at home is that if you get tired you can stop, whereas if you're sixty miles and a train journey away you still have to keep going for hours. I did stop when it began to hail, and by then I was tired and rather clammy.
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
your bees may be recorded for training purposes
I spent this evening at a marathon session of the beekeepers committee, as we tried to decide whether we should or could set up a divisional apiary. Many beekeeping groups have some group bees, hives owned by the association which can be used to provide beginner beekeepers with practical experience of handling and looking after bees. We don't, because for many years we have relied on the member who does training to take beginners to his own apiary, tucked away in a secluded traditional orchard. It's a delightful spot, I got my own first experience of looking inside a colony there. But he can't carry on forever, and when the time comes that he gives up teaching, we'll be stuck. No training infrastructure, no bees for the beginners to practice upon, nothing for them at all.
It isn't a small thing, letting other people go through your bees, let alone novices. It disrupts a colony at the best of times, opening it up, and bees like to be handled gently by people who are not going to squash them by accident. I must admit I wouldn't volunteer to let my bees be used for training purposes. Group bees are the answer, plus then the club is not dependent on the goodwill and continued good health of one person. Members and their bees may come and go, the divisional apiary remains.
In theory, except that when you start to think seriously about setting up some club beehives the list of questions to be answered and problems to be solved is almost endless. Where are you going to put them? The hives need to be secure, not least from theft, but members need access to the site outside normal office hours, at least in the summer, for evening training sessions or to fit care of the bees in with everything else. You need parking for quite a few cars, if ten or twenty beginners are all going to pitch up at once, and a landowner who doesn't mind that number of people coming and going. You need somewhere to store equipment. Somebody has to run the apiary, not in the sense that they have to do all the work themselves, but someone has to understand what needs doing and line up volunteers to do it.
And what sort of hives are you going to have, and how many, and how much will they cost, and how will you pay for them? And if they come flat packed, which is the cheapest way of buying them, who is going to assemble them? Are you going to lend your beginners bee suits, at least at first until they've been up close and personal while some hives were being opened, and discovered whether they actually like it? There is all the ancillary equipment to get from somewhere. If you get a honey crop, after the bees have been messed around with for training purposes, who is going to do all the work of extracting it and where?
The question of providing classroom based theory training seemed quite straightforward in comparison, helped by the fact that we have a teacher on the committee. She'd got lesson by lesson courses worked out in outline for beginners and the next stage on, and as long as she is still involved in the association at the point where training falls back on the committee that will be fine. We'd have to find a room, with parking, but that's a technical detail. But then there are the questions of whether to charge, and how much, and whether to insist that beginners join the association and if so at what point, and how to filter out the unrealistic contingent who are never going to keep bees at an early stage in the process. We don't want to be unfriendly, or put people off, but in the swarming season you need to be able to inspect your bees every seven to ten days. If you like to go away every other weekend, or have people to stay so that you wouldn't have time to look at your bees, then it's not the hobby for you. There is heavy lifting, you will get stung, you need reasonably good close vision, you do not simply pour honey out of the hive and into a jar.
After two hours we'd narrowed things down enough to be ready to send a team for further fact finding and negotiations with one of the potential sites. We'd agreed in principle on charging and membership, and agreed to start making preliminary enquiries about grants. It was probably as much as a roomful of people could be expected to decide in one evening.
It isn't a small thing, letting other people go through your bees, let alone novices. It disrupts a colony at the best of times, opening it up, and bees like to be handled gently by people who are not going to squash them by accident. I must admit I wouldn't volunteer to let my bees be used for training purposes. Group bees are the answer, plus then the club is not dependent on the goodwill and continued good health of one person. Members and their bees may come and go, the divisional apiary remains.
In theory, except that when you start to think seriously about setting up some club beehives the list of questions to be answered and problems to be solved is almost endless. Where are you going to put them? The hives need to be secure, not least from theft, but members need access to the site outside normal office hours, at least in the summer, for evening training sessions or to fit care of the bees in with everything else. You need parking for quite a few cars, if ten or twenty beginners are all going to pitch up at once, and a landowner who doesn't mind that number of people coming and going. You need somewhere to store equipment. Somebody has to run the apiary, not in the sense that they have to do all the work themselves, but someone has to understand what needs doing and line up volunteers to do it.
And what sort of hives are you going to have, and how many, and how much will they cost, and how will you pay for them? And if they come flat packed, which is the cheapest way of buying them, who is going to assemble them? Are you going to lend your beginners bee suits, at least at first until they've been up close and personal while some hives were being opened, and discovered whether they actually like it? There is all the ancillary equipment to get from somewhere. If you get a honey crop, after the bees have been messed around with for training purposes, who is going to do all the work of extracting it and where?
The question of providing classroom based theory training seemed quite straightforward in comparison, helped by the fact that we have a teacher on the committee. She'd got lesson by lesson courses worked out in outline for beginners and the next stage on, and as long as she is still involved in the association at the point where training falls back on the committee that will be fine. We'd have to find a room, with parking, but that's a technical detail. But then there are the questions of whether to charge, and how much, and whether to insist that beginners join the association and if so at what point, and how to filter out the unrealistic contingent who are never going to keep bees at an early stage in the process. We don't want to be unfriendly, or put people off, but in the swarming season you need to be able to inspect your bees every seven to ten days. If you like to go away every other weekend, or have people to stay so that you wouldn't have time to look at your bees, then it's not the hobby for you. There is heavy lifting, you will get stung, you need reasonably good close vision, you do not simply pour honey out of the hive and into a jar.
After two hours we'd narrowed things down enough to be ready to send a team for further fact finding and negotiations with one of the potential sites. We'd agreed in principle on charging and membership, and agreed to start making preliminary enquiries about grants. It was probably as much as a roomful of people could be expected to decide in one evening.
Monday, 2 March 2015
venturing out
I left the property today for the first time in a week. Three times, in fact, since my car was due at the garage, and then we had tickets for the Colchester Mercury in the evening. The car goes to see a Skoda garage outside Clacton, which has to be one of the best places in Britain to put a Skoda dealership. I would hazard a guess that Frinton has one of the highest concentrations of Skoda ownership on the planet.
I like my garage. Every so often Which? or one of the national newspapers runs a survey of car repair businesses, and comes out with shock figures on the proportions of garages missing obvious and sometimes dangerous faults, or inventing unnecessary repairs to inflate the bill. Apart from a transmission fault that was covered under warranty and a scheduled belt change after X thousand miles, the only repair my Skoda has ever needed in eight years was one burst gaiter (or something. It might have been a gasket, or a valve) and the bill is always itemised down to the last washer. The latest year of trouble free motoring cost me shy of two hundred pounds, including the MoT.
I did feel a twinge of anxiety as the phone rang mid morning, in case it was the garage calling to say they had found so and so needing attention, but it was simply one of the beekeepers committee wanting to talk about beginners classes and not the garage at all. The Skoda is not so very old, but old enough that I don't take it for granted like I used to that it will sail through services and MoTs. A bit like human contact with the medical profession once you turn fifty, you don't think there's anything wrong but there's always the chance that any doctor, dentist or optician who has examined you may be about to deliver Bad News afterwards.
The evening tickets were to see Monty Don, and were a Christmas present. I like Monty Don a great deal, good writer, thoughtful and engaging TV presenter. I've given up with Gardeners World, too bitty, but his series on world and Italian gardens were both really good. I wasn't at all sure what he'd do on stage for a whole evening, though, and probably wouldn't have thought of booking tickets if I hadn't been offered them. The Systems Administrator gamely agreed to come too, though secretly harbouring dark fears of an entire evening of botanical Latin or worse.
We did not get an evening of plant names. The show was a sell-out and the Mercury was packed with people of a certain age, not all ladies, the grey pound out in force. You have to feel sorry for the Arts Council. They support Colchester's theatre but we do not want to go and see productions of Julius Caesar with all female casts or re-workings of Greek mythology set in Manchester housing estates, we want that nice gardening man off the telly.
Monty got the backdrop of a full set as well as the drop-down screen and table with laptop (Apple) and glass of water I was expecting. We worked out when we got home that was because the Mercury is doing a run of Educating Rita, but as it happens the background of crowded bookshelves, shading into rank untidiness at the edges and decorated with photos of Dickens and TS Eliot were rather atmospheric. There were two halves, and an interval, allowing him a break and the Mercury a chance to sell ice creams, while given the audience demographic quite a few were probably happy of the chance to nip to the loo. In the first half he talked about his formative childhood gardening experiences, how he and his wife were unusual in gardening in their twenties, how this led to his career in garden writing and then TV, and the personal meaning of gardens. In the second half he gave selected highlights from the making of his overseas garden series. He was comical and self-deprecating, laced with a bigger dose of pantomime in terms of funny walks and voices than he does on the BBC, and periodic asides on principles of garden design that were spot on. And he was very, very fluent. He carried two fifty minute spots of what sounded like off-the-cuff thoughts on life and gardening (though they must have been very carefully prepared) with no auto cue, and practically no fluffs. I spotted one verbal slip and one point where he was starting to bog down a little, but it was almost faultless.
So my adoration of Monty Don is intensified. It helps, of course, that he so often says what I already think, that the point of private domestic gardens is mainly the process of gardening rather than the end result, that if you encourage plenty of birds and toads and things you won't be unduly bothered by pests, long grass is good, structure matters as much as colour and in fact more, leaf mould is good but earth is magic.
Sunday, 1 March 2015
a last day off
My cold is gradually on the wane, though in an attempt to prolong its sojourn under our roof it has taken lodging with the Systems Administrator, whom I could hear coughing ominously from the bathroom this morning. I woke with a headache, and lay in bed for half an hour trying to summon the energy to get up while Our Ginger bounced on my chest, before being precipitately deserted at the first hint that the SA might be going downstairs to serve breakfast. Once I'd got up and had some muesli the headache subsided without taking any more aspirin, and I had to admit that things weren't as bad as they had been three days ago, or even yesterday. Not so good I felt like gardening, which was a shame as it was a sunny if windy day and goodness knows there's enough gardening to do. Certainly not so good I felt like trying to understand the spreadsheets of beekeepers' subscription renewals sent hopefully to me by the membership secretary 'for checking'. But as the day wore on I felt less horrible than previously.
Tomorrow life has to start again. My car is booked in for its annual service and MoT, and it would be deeply inconvenient not to get it to the garage, for many reasons and not least to my garage. And it goes on from there. It's supposed to be a busy week, unfortunately. Essential things will get done, one way or another. Some others I may have to postpone or simply miss. It is just as well I'm not a believer in New Year Resolutions or a new perfect life starting on January the first. Today is March the first, and the year so far has been such a scramble of things missed and half done that I'd already be writing the rest of 2015 off as a bad job if I believed that anything that started badly must be irredeemably spoilt.
I have been consoling myself with Claudia Roden's book on Picnics and other outdoor feasts. Early March when you have a cold is not an obvious time for a picnic, but I don't want to have one at this moment, just read about them. She is such an erudite and engaging writer. On one page you'll find an extract from Jane Austen (Mrs Elton and her strawberries) and a few further on be reading a spectator's account of the coronation of George III, or a late Victorian riverside picnic that was greatly enlivened for its unwilling young protagonists after several of their companions ended up in the water. And I have complete faith that the recipes will work when I get round to trying some of them. And not too many are for fish, which I rarely worry about cooking since the SA doesn't eat it. I was stalking the book on Amazon when it became unobtainable other than at great expense, before being reissued to my great joy by Grub Street Press.
That was the problem with Matthew Fort's Sicilian recipes at the end of each chapter, at least half of them seemed to be for tuna, or swordfish, or octopus, or squid. There again, given that he was investigating the food culture of an island, and confessed mid-way through the book that he hates marzipan, he was pretty much bound to end up a bit fish heavy. Luckily I've got another book about Sicilian food, by a baker brought up during times of great economic hardship by some grim nuns, whose recipes are almost entirely for biscuits and cakes, so they average out.
There is a sad article on the Telegraph website by someone claiming that the average person has only six recipe books, and cooks just nine dishes. One of her six was by Gwyneth Paltrow, and I'm sorry but that doesn't count. Several people must have a lot fewer than six, since I've got considerably more. I love reading cookery books. They are great escapism if you aren't feeling well, imagining all those nice things to eat and interesting places they came from, but more than that, they are a window into other worlds. What grows (or grew) there, how much time are (or were) people prepared to devote to cooking, what past waves of invasion and colonisation have left flavours and techniques behind them? Poor societies develop ways of using up stale bread. Cultures where women are confined to the home evolve elaborate little pastries that take forever to shape and mould. Traditional patterns of consumption of different kinds of grain follow climate and topography. One of my particular interests at the moment is the interface between pancakes and griddle breads. How and when does one turn into the other?
Tomorrow life has to start again. My car is booked in for its annual service and MoT, and it would be deeply inconvenient not to get it to the garage, for many reasons and not least to my garage. And it goes on from there. It's supposed to be a busy week, unfortunately. Essential things will get done, one way or another. Some others I may have to postpone or simply miss. It is just as well I'm not a believer in New Year Resolutions or a new perfect life starting on January the first. Today is March the first, and the year so far has been such a scramble of things missed and half done that I'd already be writing the rest of 2015 off as a bad job if I believed that anything that started badly must be irredeemably spoilt.
I have been consoling myself with Claudia Roden's book on Picnics and other outdoor feasts. Early March when you have a cold is not an obvious time for a picnic, but I don't want to have one at this moment, just read about them. She is such an erudite and engaging writer. On one page you'll find an extract from Jane Austen (Mrs Elton and her strawberries) and a few further on be reading a spectator's account of the coronation of George III, or a late Victorian riverside picnic that was greatly enlivened for its unwilling young protagonists after several of their companions ended up in the water. And I have complete faith that the recipes will work when I get round to trying some of them. And not too many are for fish, which I rarely worry about cooking since the SA doesn't eat it. I was stalking the book on Amazon when it became unobtainable other than at great expense, before being reissued to my great joy by Grub Street Press.
That was the problem with Matthew Fort's Sicilian recipes at the end of each chapter, at least half of them seemed to be for tuna, or swordfish, or octopus, or squid. There again, given that he was investigating the food culture of an island, and confessed mid-way through the book that he hates marzipan, he was pretty much bound to end up a bit fish heavy. Luckily I've got another book about Sicilian food, by a baker brought up during times of great economic hardship by some grim nuns, whose recipes are almost entirely for biscuits and cakes, so they average out.
There is a sad article on the Telegraph website by someone claiming that the average person has only six recipe books, and cooks just nine dishes. One of her six was by Gwyneth Paltrow, and I'm sorry but that doesn't count. Several people must have a lot fewer than six, since I've got considerably more. I love reading cookery books. They are great escapism if you aren't feeling well, imagining all those nice things to eat and interesting places they came from, but more than that, they are a window into other worlds. What grows (or grew) there, how much time are (or were) people prepared to devote to cooking, what past waves of invasion and colonisation have left flavours and techniques behind them? Poor societies develop ways of using up stale bread. Cultures where women are confined to the home evolve elaborate little pastries that take forever to shape and mould. Traditional patterns of consumption of different kinds of grain follow climate and topography. One of my particular interests at the moment is the interface between pancakes and griddle breads. How and when does one turn into the other?
Saturday, 28 February 2015
another quiet day
And another day of sitting close to the Aga and not doing much. At least I don't have to go to work. It would be awkward to ring your employers and announce that you weren't going to work because you had a cold, on the other hand a day standing in the plant centre with this cold (or either of the last two) would have left me with pneumonia, and probably post-viral fatigue syndrome to boot. And infected the entire workforce, given the system of shared telephones and radios. And as for doing teas... At least my nose isn't running as much today. Unfortunately the headache is still with me, kept at a low background level only by regular doses of aspirin and carbohydrate. It's a shame that I ate all the cake. I am sure fruit cake is good for colds, all that vitamin C in the fruit.
I have been rereading Matthew Fort's Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons in a desultory sort of way. It's an account of his travels around Sicily on a Vespa in search of authentic regional food. Cookery travel is a marvellous genre for when you don't feel well (unless you feel sick, in which case I suppose it might not be a good idea). There's no plot to keep up with, and the descriptions of delicious food and picturesque scenery are comforting. Ignore the cover blurb comparing him to a cross between Elizabeth David and Jack Kerouac, for he is far sweeter natured than the latter and infinitely more riddled with self-doubt than the former. Though I am a big fan of Elizabeth D. (couldn't stand Kerouac, irritating man).
I was taken by his description of the gigantic broad beans of central Sicily, fava larga di Leonforte, containing a massive 27 per cent protein, and a staple up until the second world war. By the time he wrote his book a few years back they were endangered, and they still are, as far as I can discover from the internet. Alas, no UK seed merchant seems to offer them. Of course, it might be that beans from central Sicily wouldn't grow too well here, but I wouldn't mind giving it a try. Given I have natives of Australia and South Africa scattered around the garden and doing pretty well, beans from Sicily seem worth a try. Have the dried beans sold as ingredients been subjected to any more treatments than the simple drying out a seed merchant would do? I don't know, but if I ever saw a packet of dried giant beans in a deli it would be worth buying them and experimentally sowing a few.
I have been rereading Matthew Fort's Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons in a desultory sort of way. It's an account of his travels around Sicily on a Vespa in search of authentic regional food. Cookery travel is a marvellous genre for when you don't feel well (unless you feel sick, in which case I suppose it might not be a good idea). There's no plot to keep up with, and the descriptions of delicious food and picturesque scenery are comforting. Ignore the cover blurb comparing him to a cross between Elizabeth David and Jack Kerouac, for he is far sweeter natured than the latter and infinitely more riddled with self-doubt than the former. Though I am a big fan of Elizabeth D. (couldn't stand Kerouac, irritating man).
I was taken by his description of the gigantic broad beans of central Sicily, fava larga di Leonforte, containing a massive 27 per cent protein, and a staple up until the second world war. By the time he wrote his book a few years back they were endangered, and they still are, as far as I can discover from the internet. Alas, no UK seed merchant seems to offer them. Of course, it might be that beans from central Sicily wouldn't grow too well here, but I wouldn't mind giving it a try. Given I have natives of Australia and South Africa scattered around the garden and doing pretty well, beans from Sicily seem worth a try. Have the dried beans sold as ingredients been subjected to any more treatments than the simple drying out a seed merchant would do? I don't know, but if I ever saw a packet of dried giant beans in a deli it would be worth buying them and experimentally sowing a few.
Friday, 27 February 2015
another day done gone
There's not much more to be said, what with the cold. I have a nagging headache that seems impervious to aspirin, a cough that brings up vile tasting phlegm (though according to something I heard on Radio 4 bringing up phlegm when you cough is good, it's the stuff that sits in your lungs until they become infected that does the damage), and the attention span of a gnat. The Systems Administrator is sympathetic as I waste another day of my life, while keeping a safe distance, which is entirely understandable. I asked whether I had a husky sexy voice like Sigourney Weaver in the Kermode and Mayo's Film Review Programme interview, or just sounded disgusting, but it's the latter. Looking on the bright side, the SA didn't think I had pneumonia either. My nose isn't running quite as much as yesterday, for which I am grateful as the skin is peeling off around my nostrils as it is.
That's probably more than you wanted to know, but I can't think of anything else to write about. Enjoy your weekend.
That's probably more than you wanted to know, but I can't think of anything else to write about. Enjoy your weekend.
Thursday, 26 February 2015
anatomy of a cold
It has been said that love and a cold cannot be hid, and it's no good denying it, I have another cold. Not flu, just a cold. Which is to say, a nose that drips like a tap with occasional bouts of gushing and sneezing fits, a slightly swollen neck, sore muscles and a general feeling of befuddlement. I can eat, indeed cake seems one of life's few consolations. I don't have a temperature. Just a cold and a foul temper surrounded by a miasma of tissues. I was afraid earlier I was running out of tissues, but to my great relief found a double pack of Waitrose ultra soft ones in the study, and blessed the Systems Administrator for stocking up during my last cold.
I realised all was not entirely well driving back from the Plant Heritage lecture on Saturday, as I began to feel very slightly clammy with the merest hint of a sore throat, and caught a whiff of that unwholesome sweaty smell that people with colds have. I trundled through Sunday muttering darkly that I was going down with something again, and by Monday had a headache.
I steeled myself to go to a meal in a local Italian with friends on Monday night, since we'd already had one drop-out and to leave the last two in the lurch seemed too mean. Besides, I was the organiser. I washed my hands before going, tried not to touch anything except my own glass and cutlery (though I failed with the shared bottle of water) and fended off one of my companions when she tried to give me a goodnight hug. On Tuesday I woke feeling bunged up, but decided after breakfast to see how it went in the garden, and found I was OK cutting brambles once I was up and moving. I'd been planning to go to a natural history lecture in the evening, though, and gave that a miss. Lucky I had intimations the cold would get worse before it got better and didn't call a friend to ask her to come along as originally planned.
By yesterday the cold was in full, disgusting flow, and gardening or doing anything useful was out of the question, and it's the same today. It is intensely frustrating, as buds are swelling and bulbs pushing through the earth, and every day the time left to do all sorts of necessary garden tasks diminishes. Meanwhile the garden is littered with the debris of half completed projects, equipment not put away, Strulch still sitting in the drive, piles of plant debris. It detracts from the overall appearance at a time of year when I've gone to quite a lot of trouble to have some planting interest, what with the dwarf iris and snowdrops, the daphnes, winter flowering viburnum and Japanese paper bush, and the coloured stems (which will need pruning very soon).
I am baffled. It can't be a general immune deficiency, since everything else is working fine. I am forever picking up small scratches and puncture wounds from gardening and they almost always heal quickly, no septic cuts or cellulitis. Apart from needing treatment for a couple of scratched eyes I've only been once to the doctor to get antibiotics for a thorn in my knuckles that I didn't like the look of, and that must have been eight or ten years ago. I have suffered from one urinary tract infection in my entire adult life, while the last time my stomach was badly upset was pre 1996 (from food poisoning after lunch at the Savoy). I can't think when I last ran a temperature. It only seems to be when it comes to the common cold that my immune system throws up its hands and says Sorry Gov, nothing to do with me.
At least I was OK last week, when I was due to do my pond lecture. It would have been a shame to miss that when I'd put a lot of work into preparing it, besides leaving the garden club in the lurch. And it would have been a pity to miss my hair appointment in my hairdresser's first week of trading, since she's bound to be anxious about whether her venture will work out. And I was OK for the trip to London. Again, it would have been a nuisance trying to reschedule that, since the exhibitions end fairly soon and the person I went with works full time and can't take days off just like that. And this week I didn't have so much planned, though I'll miss tonight's monthly beekeeping meeting as well as Tuesday's stag beetles. But I was aiming to get all sorts of things done at home.
Non-fatal, infectious, ubiquitous, the common cold has got it sussed. And it is a damn nuisance.
I realised all was not entirely well driving back from the Plant Heritage lecture on Saturday, as I began to feel very slightly clammy with the merest hint of a sore throat, and caught a whiff of that unwholesome sweaty smell that people with colds have. I trundled through Sunday muttering darkly that I was going down with something again, and by Monday had a headache.
I steeled myself to go to a meal in a local Italian with friends on Monday night, since we'd already had one drop-out and to leave the last two in the lurch seemed too mean. Besides, I was the organiser. I washed my hands before going, tried not to touch anything except my own glass and cutlery (though I failed with the shared bottle of water) and fended off one of my companions when she tried to give me a goodnight hug. On Tuesday I woke feeling bunged up, but decided after breakfast to see how it went in the garden, and found I was OK cutting brambles once I was up and moving. I'd been planning to go to a natural history lecture in the evening, though, and gave that a miss. Lucky I had intimations the cold would get worse before it got better and didn't call a friend to ask her to come along as originally planned.
By yesterday the cold was in full, disgusting flow, and gardening or doing anything useful was out of the question, and it's the same today. It is intensely frustrating, as buds are swelling and bulbs pushing through the earth, and every day the time left to do all sorts of necessary garden tasks diminishes. Meanwhile the garden is littered with the debris of half completed projects, equipment not put away, Strulch still sitting in the drive, piles of plant debris. It detracts from the overall appearance at a time of year when I've gone to quite a lot of trouble to have some planting interest, what with the dwarf iris and snowdrops, the daphnes, winter flowering viburnum and Japanese paper bush, and the coloured stems (which will need pruning very soon).
I am baffled. It can't be a general immune deficiency, since everything else is working fine. I am forever picking up small scratches and puncture wounds from gardening and they almost always heal quickly, no septic cuts or cellulitis. Apart from needing treatment for a couple of scratched eyes I've only been once to the doctor to get antibiotics for a thorn in my knuckles that I didn't like the look of, and that must have been eight or ten years ago. I have suffered from one urinary tract infection in my entire adult life, while the last time my stomach was badly upset was pre 1996 (from food poisoning after lunch at the Savoy). I can't think when I last ran a temperature. It only seems to be when it comes to the common cold that my immune system throws up its hands and says Sorry Gov, nothing to do with me.
At least I was OK last week, when I was due to do my pond lecture. It would have been a shame to miss that when I'd put a lot of work into preparing it, besides leaving the garden club in the lurch. And it would have been a pity to miss my hair appointment in my hairdresser's first week of trading, since she's bound to be anxious about whether her venture will work out. And I was OK for the trip to London. Again, it would have been a nuisance trying to reschedule that, since the exhibitions end fairly soon and the person I went with works full time and can't take days off just like that. And this week I didn't have so much planned, though I'll miss tonight's monthly beekeeping meeting as well as Tuesday's stag beetles. But I was aiming to get all sorts of things done at home.
Non-fatal, infectious, ubiquitous, the common cold has got it sussed. And it is a damn nuisance.
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
visit from an engineer
As promised, BT came to mend our broadband connection on Wednesday. It's good for businesses to keep their promises, less impressive that in an era where ministers make speeches about the importance of rolling out ultra fast rural broadband, the monopoly infrastructure supplier is happy to leave customers without any internet connectivity at all for four days after the line fault was reported. Lucky we have not one but two back-up 3 Mobile dongles. Lucky for us, that is. I don't suppose BT cares one way or the other.
A BT Openworld van drew up outside the kitchen while I was still eating my porridge, and an engineer appeared at the door saying I had a fault with my telephone? He didn't offer any form of identification or fault report number, but on the basis that we had reported a fault and the chances of a fraudster turning up at that moment in a proper BT badged van were slim, I let him in to look at the modem. If I'd know someone was coming round maybe I'd have cleared the boxes of beehive parts out of the hall and run the vacuum cleaner over the worst of the cat fluff.
It's a nice question of etiquette whether to hover over a stranger who arrives at your house unannounced but sort of expected. You don't want to look as though you don't trust them not to fiddle with your stuff, let alone nick something, but on the other hand you wouldn't normally leave an unknown person unsupervised in a room containing a lot of electronics and financial papers lying about. I decided that human decency required I take him at face value, and retreated to the kitchen to eat my porridge. He stuck his head round the door in a few minutes to check that I wouldn't be going anywhere in the next couple of hours, as he'd put a pinger on the line and it told him that the fault was seventeen hundred and something metres away, so he needed to go and look for it, then come back to collect the test device.
He returned less than two hours later, saying it had taken him a little while to work out where the wires went, and the fault when he'd found it was an odd one. Somebody had cut the wire. I queried this, and he elaborated. Someone doing other work had disconnected our line and left it, presumably not knowing what it did. A BT Openworld someone? He shrugged. They used a lot of contractors, he said. I digested this. Someone, presumably an engineer either directly employed by our broadband provider or subcontracted by them, had randomly decided to disconnect our broadband one Friday and just leave it. What does this do, then? Dunno, never mind. I suggested, gently since it was not this engineer's fault, that it might be worthwhile mentioning this to management, who would presumably have records of who was working in the area last Friday, since it was not very good to leave customers without a service they were paying for for four days, and having to pay extra for a replacement service from a different provider. An engineer deliberately disconnecting our line was rather different to, say, a tree branch rubbing on it and damaging it.
He agreed. He seemed a perfectly nice man, but I don't suppose he'll take it any further. It's a pretty rubbish way to run a business, though. We aren't happy customers, and BT have had the expense of sending an engineer plus van to fix something that apparently they caused in the first place.
Years ago there was a proposal to introduce fast wireless broadband in the area. The intended mast would have had a clear line of sight to our house, and we liked the sound of it. BT invested just enough in increasing the speed of the local internet service to kill the wireless project, but no more. Even now we can't reliably live stream from the BBC iplayer without multiple distracting thirty second pauses. And we are not in the wilds of the Welsh borders, but one of the most populous counties in England, less than seventy miles from the centre of London as the crow flies. Fast rural broadband would be very nice. Merely adequate commuter belt broadband would be even better.
A BT Openworld van drew up outside the kitchen while I was still eating my porridge, and an engineer appeared at the door saying I had a fault with my telephone? He didn't offer any form of identification or fault report number, but on the basis that we had reported a fault and the chances of a fraudster turning up at that moment in a proper BT badged van were slim, I let him in to look at the modem. If I'd know someone was coming round maybe I'd have cleared the boxes of beehive parts out of the hall and run the vacuum cleaner over the worst of the cat fluff.
It's a nice question of etiquette whether to hover over a stranger who arrives at your house unannounced but sort of expected. You don't want to look as though you don't trust them not to fiddle with your stuff, let alone nick something, but on the other hand you wouldn't normally leave an unknown person unsupervised in a room containing a lot of electronics and financial papers lying about. I decided that human decency required I take him at face value, and retreated to the kitchen to eat my porridge. He stuck his head round the door in a few minutes to check that I wouldn't be going anywhere in the next couple of hours, as he'd put a pinger on the line and it told him that the fault was seventeen hundred and something metres away, so he needed to go and look for it, then come back to collect the test device.
He returned less than two hours later, saying it had taken him a little while to work out where the wires went, and the fault when he'd found it was an odd one. Somebody had cut the wire. I queried this, and he elaborated. Someone doing other work had disconnected our line and left it, presumably not knowing what it did. A BT Openworld someone? He shrugged. They used a lot of contractors, he said. I digested this. Someone, presumably an engineer either directly employed by our broadband provider or subcontracted by them, had randomly decided to disconnect our broadband one Friday and just leave it. What does this do, then? Dunno, never mind. I suggested, gently since it was not this engineer's fault, that it might be worthwhile mentioning this to management, who would presumably have records of who was working in the area last Friday, since it was not very good to leave customers without a service they were paying for for four days, and having to pay extra for a replacement service from a different provider. An engineer deliberately disconnecting our line was rather different to, say, a tree branch rubbing on it and damaging it.
He agreed. He seemed a perfectly nice man, but I don't suppose he'll take it any further. It's a pretty rubbish way to run a business, though. We aren't happy customers, and BT have had the expense of sending an engineer plus van to fix something that apparently they caused in the first place.
Years ago there was a proposal to introduce fast wireless broadband in the area. The intended mast would have had a clear line of sight to our house, and we liked the sound of it. BT invested just enough in increasing the speed of the local internet service to kill the wireless project, but no more. Even now we can't reliably live stream from the BBC iplayer without multiple distracting thirty second pauses. And we are not in the wilds of the Welsh borders, but one of the most populous counties in England, less than seventy miles from the centre of London as the crow flies. Fast rural broadband would be very nice. Merely adequate commuter belt broadband would be even better.
Tuesday, 24 February 2015
delayed gratification
My bargain flat pack beehives finally arrived today. I bought them as seconds in a sale, trusting that the Systems Administrator would be able to coax them into shape even if they weren't as perfect as firsts. That was in early January, and the suppliers warned on their website that due to the popularity of their sale delivery might be three weeks. When after a month I'd heard nothing I rang them, and spoke to a very nice woman who patently knew nothing about my beehives, and didn't seem to have access to a computer that could have told her when they were due to arrive, but assured me that so long as I had a customer order number the matter was in hand. I decided to leave it another month before enquiring again with more urgency, and lo, yesterday I got an email to say they had been despatched.
It was by sheer chance that I happened to have come in from the garden for a coffee at the point when the FedEx driver rang. He couldn't find the house. That's no great surprise. Drivers who haven't been here before can almost never find the house. I told him where we were, and looking out over the field could see his van heading in the right direction. I sat down again to finish my coffee, and after a while thought he should have arrived by now, so got up again to look where he'd got to and saw the van heading back in the wrong direction. Confusion briefly reigned, as we both tried to ring each other, then there was another delay as having reached the final turning he couldn't believe he had to turn right yet again. I could see the top of the van bobbing back and forth above the line of the hedge. Finally he made it, declaring cheerfully that he would never have found the place. I don't know which part of the instructions Turn right at the lettuce farm car park is so difficult, but it is.
Buying a self assembly beehive in January is a curiously unrewarding retail experience. True, there is the knowledge that you've saved quite a lot of money, and that come the swarming season at least you will have enough boxes to put the bees in. But there is no immediate thrill of acquisition. Nothing arrives for six weeks, for starters, and when it does you have to build it before you can do anything with it, and even then you don't need to use it for another month or two. The nearest comparable experience is probably buying bulbs, where you make your choice in June, the box doesn't arrive until autumn, you don't plant tulips until November and you don't get any flowers until the following year. Though at least with bulbs the website or catalogue has nice colour pictures of what you can expect (if the mice and rabbits don't eat them). There is nothing beautiful or picturesque about a commercial brood box and roof to stir the imagination.
Addendum I was reflecting after my last London concert how strange it was that musicians still play from paper scores whose pages need turning. I'm not alone in my surprise, since the Independent has an article about a pianist who has taken to playing from scores loaded on to his iPad. He turns the electronic pages using a Bluetooth switch activated with his foot, but there are apps that will follow the performance and move on to the next page automatically. The trick with the iPad is apparently to make sure the battery is fully charged, kill all other apps, and disable the wifi so that it can't start trying to do updates or anything else in mid performance.
It was by sheer chance that I happened to have come in from the garden for a coffee at the point when the FedEx driver rang. He couldn't find the house. That's no great surprise. Drivers who haven't been here before can almost never find the house. I told him where we were, and looking out over the field could see his van heading in the right direction. I sat down again to finish my coffee, and after a while thought he should have arrived by now, so got up again to look where he'd got to and saw the van heading back in the wrong direction. Confusion briefly reigned, as we both tried to ring each other, then there was another delay as having reached the final turning he couldn't believe he had to turn right yet again. I could see the top of the van bobbing back and forth above the line of the hedge. Finally he made it, declaring cheerfully that he would never have found the place. I don't know which part of the instructions Turn right at the lettuce farm car park is so difficult, but it is.
Buying a self assembly beehive in January is a curiously unrewarding retail experience. True, there is the knowledge that you've saved quite a lot of money, and that come the swarming season at least you will have enough boxes to put the bees in. But there is no immediate thrill of acquisition. Nothing arrives for six weeks, for starters, and when it does you have to build it before you can do anything with it, and even then you don't need to use it for another month or two. The nearest comparable experience is probably buying bulbs, where you make your choice in June, the box doesn't arrive until autumn, you don't plant tulips until November and you don't get any flowers until the following year. Though at least with bulbs the website or catalogue has nice colour pictures of what you can expect (if the mice and rabbits don't eat them). There is nothing beautiful or picturesque about a commercial brood box and roof to stir the imagination.
Addendum I was reflecting after my last London concert how strange it was that musicians still play from paper scores whose pages need turning. I'm not alone in my surprise, since the Independent has an article about a pianist who has taken to playing from scores loaded on to his iPad. He turns the electronic pages using a Bluetooth switch activated with his foot, but there are apps that will follow the performance and move on to the next page automatically. The trick with the iPad is apparently to make sure the battery is fully charged, kill all other apps, and disable the wifi so that it can't start trying to do updates or anything else in mid performance.
Monday, 23 February 2015
some live and some die
There are a lot of brambles growing in the meadow down the side of the wood, probably more than I let myself realise. The high tide mark at which attempts at gardening largely stop, other than mowing the grass once in a while, ebbs and flows closer to the house and further away, depending on the weather, how energetic I'm feeling, and what else I'm trying to do. The past two or three years have seen a lot of catch-up required in the main garden, to make good the losses of two very cold winters (by recent standards) and one insanely wet one, and I've retrenched in the meadow, scarcely touching it.
It's not all bad news. Some shrubs have finally got their roots down and made generous growth in the past couple of seasons, various hollies that were sad and wispy specimens for years shooting up and plumping out. The circle of yew trees is more than head height, though in bad need of shaping and de-brambling, a couple of berberis are doing well, and some of the roses, while a Hypericum 'Hidcote' that went in as a wee and weedy plant is now large, round and fat.
But against this there have been losses, and there'll be more unless I get the brambles out. They have just reached that stage where a loose tangle of exploratory branches is about to turn into an impenetrable thicket. Bracken is invading from the wood as well, which is equally smothering, and a nuisance since it has running roots. At least with brambles you can take a pickaxe to the core, if they're too well established to pull out, but there's nothing to do about bracken except pull it and pull it again.
The looming deadline is down to the bird nesting season. I've got a couple of weeks, maybe three in the less densely infested areas, to chop down the top growth before the birds start building, and work has to stop until the autumn. And by then I'm not averse to leaving things until I'm sure I won't disturb a wasp nest, for my own sake rather than that of the wasps. I can work on digging out the roots at my leisure (chance would be a fine thing), or rather do as much as I can when I have time until the ground gets too hard, if it's a dry summer. But clearing the thickets can't go on much longer.
I keep coming upon the long and shiny shoots of a rambling rose. It is supposed to be 'Ethel', a cheerful pink double I saw and fell for at East Ruston Old Vicarage, but until I see it flower I won't know if it is 'Ethel' or her rootstock. She wasn't looking well the last time I saw her. She is meant to be climbing up a fallen but still growing oak tree, but doesn't seem to think much of that, preferring to make a break out towards the sunlit central patch of grass. I am leaving chopping the rose shoots until I arrive at the root, and see quite what's going on. Perhaps I can poke some of the long shoots into the tree. I've got an 'Albertine' on its own roots languishing in the greenhouse, that was a present from a friend and I'm not entirely sure what to do with. I'm not sure that 'Ethel' and 'Albertine' would make a happy combination, or if the strong pink of 'Ethel' would overshadow the other. But the long shoots may not be 'Ethel' anyway.
It's not all bad news. Some shrubs have finally got their roots down and made generous growth in the past couple of seasons, various hollies that were sad and wispy specimens for years shooting up and plumping out. The circle of yew trees is more than head height, though in bad need of shaping and de-brambling, a couple of berberis are doing well, and some of the roses, while a Hypericum 'Hidcote' that went in as a wee and weedy plant is now large, round and fat.
But against this there have been losses, and there'll be more unless I get the brambles out. They have just reached that stage where a loose tangle of exploratory branches is about to turn into an impenetrable thicket. Bracken is invading from the wood as well, which is equally smothering, and a nuisance since it has running roots. At least with brambles you can take a pickaxe to the core, if they're too well established to pull out, but there's nothing to do about bracken except pull it and pull it again.
The looming deadline is down to the bird nesting season. I've got a couple of weeks, maybe three in the less densely infested areas, to chop down the top growth before the birds start building, and work has to stop until the autumn. And by then I'm not averse to leaving things until I'm sure I won't disturb a wasp nest, for my own sake rather than that of the wasps. I can work on digging out the roots at my leisure (chance would be a fine thing), or rather do as much as I can when I have time until the ground gets too hard, if it's a dry summer. But clearing the thickets can't go on much longer.
I keep coming upon the long and shiny shoots of a rambling rose. It is supposed to be 'Ethel', a cheerful pink double I saw and fell for at East Ruston Old Vicarage, but until I see it flower I won't know if it is 'Ethel' or her rootstock. She wasn't looking well the last time I saw her. She is meant to be climbing up a fallen but still growing oak tree, but doesn't seem to think much of that, preferring to make a break out towards the sunlit central patch of grass. I am leaving chopping the rose shoots until I arrive at the root, and see quite what's going on. Perhaps I can poke some of the long shoots into the tree. I've got an 'Albertine' on its own roots languishing in the greenhouse, that was a present from a friend and I'm not entirely sure what to do with. I'm not sure that 'Ethel' and 'Albertine' would make a happy combination, or if the strong pink of 'Ethel' would overshadow the other. But the long shoots may not be 'Ethel' anyway.
Sunday, 22 February 2015
overgrown hedges, brambles, saplings, and fallen trees
Vast quantities of material have come off the hedge along the side of the meadow. The Systems Administrator had a go at some of the taller bits this morning with the pole saw, and spent a couple of hours feeding the thinner branches through the shredder, and the meadow is still covered with piles of pieces of hedge, the more solid to be separated out between shredding and firewood, the twiggiest and prickliest to go straight to the bonfire heap.
We had the best of the sunshine in the morning, but it never got terribly warm, so I took advantage of the fact that the bees weren't flying to cut back the brambles encroaching on the beehives. By lunchtime I had quite a tidy looking apiary. I hope they aren't too confused when they next come out and find their surroundings drastically altered. I cut a number of seedling trees down while I was at it, that had managed to gain a foothold in the rough grass, or keep their heads above the brambles. The most common species was ash, but alder was running it a close second even though the meadow is not especially damp. I have let some alders grow up at the far end where we could do with something to screen an especially large telegraph pole, and not all the Italian alders I planted years ago survived. Italian alder, Alnus cordata, is recommended in books as a screening tree, fast growing, glossy leaved and tolerant of poor soil, but I'm perfectly happy with native alder, Alnus glutinosa, if that's what wants to grow there.
I found healthy patches of bluebells under the brambles. The books say that the native wild bluebell is a poor coloniser, spreading only slowly into new areas, but we have odd ones popping up all around the garden. Mind you, I think I've read in one book that alder scarcely manages to spread by seed, and that's clearly not the case here.
Half hidden under the wreckage of an ivy covered mature ash that toppled into the garden but still has enough roots in the ground to keep growing I found a young Azara microphylla, a small leaved, evergreen, shade tolerant and slightly tender tree, which has vanilla scented flowers in late winter or early spring. This one may even have been grateful for the shelter provided by the encircling branches of the fallen ash, but it can't stay in there indefinitely. Besides, I don't want an almost horizontal ash growing across the garden. The Systems Administrator had begun to trim some of its outer branches, and I continued the job, being careful not to drop any pieces on the Azara. Removing the highest placed ones without disaster is going to be a nerve wracking process. The Azara did so well to survive the original collapse, it would be a shame to crush it at this stage.
The ash was already starting to send up vertical shoots from its prostrate trunk, as is the way of fallen trees that are not dead. If we take it back to the fence it can send up as many as it likes, until chalara gets it, which I'm afraid it probably will. The mass of ivy almost but not quite clobbered a tree heather and a small leaved conifer. In both cases the part of the crown that was inside the ivy mass has died, while the branches that remained exposed to the light are fine. Rabbits are digging around the base of another tree heather. This is gardening at the frontier.
We had the best of the sunshine in the morning, but it never got terribly warm, so I took advantage of the fact that the bees weren't flying to cut back the brambles encroaching on the beehives. By lunchtime I had quite a tidy looking apiary. I hope they aren't too confused when they next come out and find their surroundings drastically altered. I cut a number of seedling trees down while I was at it, that had managed to gain a foothold in the rough grass, or keep their heads above the brambles. The most common species was ash, but alder was running it a close second even though the meadow is not especially damp. I have let some alders grow up at the far end where we could do with something to screen an especially large telegraph pole, and not all the Italian alders I planted years ago survived. Italian alder, Alnus cordata, is recommended in books as a screening tree, fast growing, glossy leaved and tolerant of poor soil, but I'm perfectly happy with native alder, Alnus glutinosa, if that's what wants to grow there.
I found healthy patches of bluebells under the brambles. The books say that the native wild bluebell is a poor coloniser, spreading only slowly into new areas, but we have odd ones popping up all around the garden. Mind you, I think I've read in one book that alder scarcely manages to spread by seed, and that's clearly not the case here.
Half hidden under the wreckage of an ivy covered mature ash that toppled into the garden but still has enough roots in the ground to keep growing I found a young Azara microphylla, a small leaved, evergreen, shade tolerant and slightly tender tree, which has vanilla scented flowers in late winter or early spring. This one may even have been grateful for the shelter provided by the encircling branches of the fallen ash, but it can't stay in there indefinitely. Besides, I don't want an almost horizontal ash growing across the garden. The Systems Administrator had begun to trim some of its outer branches, and I continued the job, being careful not to drop any pieces on the Azara. Removing the highest placed ones without disaster is going to be a nerve wracking process. The Azara did so well to survive the original collapse, it would be a shame to crush it at this stage.
The ash was already starting to send up vertical shoots from its prostrate trunk, as is the way of fallen trees that are not dead. If we take it back to the fence it can send up as many as it likes, until chalara gets it, which I'm afraid it probably will. The mass of ivy almost but not quite clobbered a tree heather and a small leaved conifer. In both cases the part of the crown that was inside the ivy mass has died, while the branches that remained exposed to the light are fine. Rabbits are digging around the base of another tree heather. This is gardening at the frontier.
Saturday, 21 February 2015
yesterday and today
To resume where we left off. Our broadband is still down, and I'm using the Systems Administrator's portable modem to access the internet. Which the SA pays for by the day, or week, when we are already paying for the broadband service. Which may be back up by Wednesday, so far as I know.
London Bridge station is largely closed for the next year for building works, so if you want to go to Dulwich it's better to catch the line from Victoria, which you can intercept at Blackfriars if starting from points east. Our railway guru advised us to change at Herne Hill and travel one more stop to West Dulwich, but Herne Hill isn't that much longer a walk, so since it wasn't raining and the indicator board was showing an eighteen minute wait for the next West Dulwich bound train, we just walked from there. It takes about twenty minutes.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery is doing two good things at the moment. Their current temporary exhibition, on until 15th March, is of a Canadian painter I'd never heard of called Emily Carr. Not having heard of her puts me in the same position as about 99 per cent of the British population, so I'm not feeling too guilty about that. She worked in the first half of the last century, painting and drawing the trees and landscapes of her native Western Canada, and the canoes and totem poles of its first nation inhabitants (though relatively few actual people). Her work is absolutely marvellous, swirling with vitality, movement and strong colour. You can see a range of influences, so there is a touch of Van Gogh, a dash of Cezanne, a hint of Vorticism and another of cubism, but she is no mere copyist. Her trees breathe life and essence of tree.
The other thing Dulwich has done is buy a fake Old Master from China over the internet. There is a regular market in them, sold not with any pretence of authenticity but offered in the same spirit as reproduction furniture. Dulwich has bought one, put it in a nice old frame and hung it somewhere in the permanent collection, with an invitation to visitors to spot the fake if they can, and at any rate think about the nature of art and what it is we value in paintings. I thought this was an absolutely brilliant idea. The art critic of the Guardian thought it was dreadful, but since I seem to disagree with him about most things I'm not letting that put me off. I couldn't identify the Chinese imposter at all.
All will be revealed in April when the modern copy will be identified, and hung side by side with the original so that visitors can compare and contrast. I certainly want to go back for another look to see the two of them together. Copies are interesting the more you think about them. After all, it's generally accepted that Rubens had cohorts of assistants doing a lot of the grunt work for some of his paintings, limiting his own input to sketching out the initial idea and then adding finishing touches (and presumably executing any really difficult bits), while he himself was an accomplished copyist when needs arose in the interests of diplomacy.
After Dulwich we went to the National Portrait Gallery where Grayson Perry's series of fourteen artworks Who are You? are on free display tucked in among the permanent collection, also until 15th March. I adore Grayson Perry (I've a feeling the art critic of the Guardian doesn't like him either, or at least not his Reith Lectures, which I really enjoyed) and I'd watched the TV series about the creation of the works. If you like Grayson Perry and are tickled by the idea of Chris Huhne represented by a broken pot decorated with repetitive phallic patterns, smashed and glued back together with gold paste along the cracks, or if you find the concept of a TV reality star painted in the style of an Elizabethan miniature (complete with lock of hair in the back) amusing, you will love the display. If you don't like Grayson Perry you might as well wait until it's gone before visiting. There was one of his trademark maps on the way in, this one of his own mental state, which was as clever and tongue in cheek as his maps always are, but I was surprised to see a Philip Larkin corner. I wouldn't have had Grayson Perry down as a Larkin fan, but that's one more thing to like about him.
That was yesterday. This afternoon I went to a Plant Heritage lecture by Peter Gibbs, who was thoroughly entertaining, and I now know what the difference between air and ground frosts is. I ran into one of my former colleagues for the second time in three days, having met her at the Chatto gardens, and my old manager, so it was a mini plant centre reunion as well as a lecture. Plant Heritage do extremely good cake as well, courtesy of the WI. I saw from the posters studded along the road that the inhabitants of Stowupland do not want a development of 190 houses built there, which bears out my theory that most communities don't want more housing, despite the housing shortage at a national level. Hilary Benn, take note.
Friday, 20 February 2015
defeated by technology
This is probably going to be a short blog post, because most of our technology seems to be scarcely working. I got home from a very nice day out in London to find that broadband was down. Thank you, BT. I knew it wasn't working earlier because the Systems Administrator told me when I rang from Liverpool Street to say what train I was on. I was apparently lucky to get through, as the land line was out as well for most of the day.
I am connected to the web via a 3 Mobile portable modem, though the SA warned me the speed of that has been patchy through the day. I am not sure whether my laptop's glacial speed just now when I tried to look at my emails and the Daily Telegraph website was down to the dongle, or the laptop. After I'd closed Chrome down and it refused to let me open it again I resorted to rebooting the machine, and we are now tripping along a little faster, but I don't have much confidence in the proceedings.
The SA has managed to negotiate BT's online fault reporting system, presumably using the powers of 3 Mobile, and received an automated reply saying that they have a fault on their system and it should be fixed by Wednesday. Thanks, guys. The laptop has chosen this moment after being switched off and incommunicado for the entire day to want to download all sorts of updates, over the dodgy dongle. Thanks but no thanks.
So while I have been to Dulwich and the National Portrait Gallery, including a special detour via a Sutton train from Blackfriars because London Bridge is pretty much closed for the next year, I think I will tell you about it tomorrow.
I am connected to the web via a 3 Mobile portable modem, though the SA warned me the speed of that has been patchy through the day. I am not sure whether my laptop's glacial speed just now when I tried to look at my emails and the Daily Telegraph website was down to the dongle, or the laptop. After I'd closed Chrome down and it refused to let me open it again I resorted to rebooting the machine, and we are now tripping along a little faster, but I don't have much confidence in the proceedings.
The SA has managed to negotiate BT's online fault reporting system, presumably using the powers of 3 Mobile, and received an automated reply saying that they have a fault on their system and it should be fixed by Wednesday. Thanks, guys. The laptop has chosen this moment after being switched off and incommunicado for the entire day to want to download all sorts of updates, over the dodgy dongle. Thanks but no thanks.
So while I have been to Dulwich and the National Portrait Gallery, including a special detour via a Sutton train from Blackfriars because London Bridge is pretty much closed for the next year, I think I will tell you about it tomorrow.
Thursday, 19 February 2015
a garden visit
The radio controlled clock in the kitchen has suddenly lost it. I had just started typing when I heard a strange noise and after peering about in confusion tracked it down to the clock, whose hands were racing madly around the face. After a couple of minutes all went quiet, and the time was safely back at two minutes past four where it should be, so the clock must have advanced itself by twelve hours. My laptop is still working, and I don't see aeroplanes falling out of the sky, so I presume this is a small local problem and not the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it, but it's rather odd.
Meanwhile, back in the non-paranormal world, I visited the Chatto gardens this morning with a friend. We started by walking round the gardens, or rather, we started by her buying a small jug painted with snowdrops as a present for her sister, after one of the staff had kindly filled it with water so that she could check it poured cleanly. It did. Apparently she has a coffee pot which was a wedding present but dribbled so much that she and her husband only used it once. It is now a collector's item, so as I pointed out it's quite handy they didn't use it, otherwise it might have got broken.
The borders at the Chatto gardens and especially the little woodland area were thick with snowdrops, and there were big patches of variegated leaf arum and some drifts of winter aconites. The first hellebores were coming out, but we were a little early for those. A huge and very healthy camellia 'Donation' was studded with flowers in that strong but clean middling dark pink, and the Cornus mas were out. The wind was biting. My friend's verdict was that she preferred the smaller kind of snowdrops, plain Galanthus nivalis, and I agree with her. The big ones at the Chatto gardens are more showy, and certainly the gardens are very nice and worth a visit (especially if you can get in free with your RHS membership card until the end of the month), but the daintier wild kind of snowdrop has more charm.
Then we went for coffee and cake, having worked out that if we looked at the gardens first then we'd feel we'd earned cake after walking about in the cold. And then we had a quick look in the nursery to see if they had any Cyclamen coum, but there were only three or four very sorry looking pots. We kept bumping into one of my former colleagues, who was there on a similar mission to ours with a galanthophile friend, and she told us that they had them in stock at the plant centre where I used to work, but I'm not sure my friend wanted one badly enough to drive that far.
The wind was still raw when I got home, and rain was forecast by mid afternoon (and arrived by half past two) so I gave up on the idea of gardening, and made a cake instead. I need to check the oven in fourteen seconds.
She checks the oven
The cake looks on track. Digital kitchen timers are a wonderful thing. That and not allowing myself to leave something cooking and then nip out into the garden. I destroyed a Le Creuset saucepan that way, years ago, losing track of time.
Meanwhile, back in the non-paranormal world, I visited the Chatto gardens this morning with a friend. We started by walking round the gardens, or rather, we started by her buying a small jug painted with snowdrops as a present for her sister, after one of the staff had kindly filled it with water so that she could check it poured cleanly. It did. Apparently she has a coffee pot which was a wedding present but dribbled so much that she and her husband only used it once. It is now a collector's item, so as I pointed out it's quite handy they didn't use it, otherwise it might have got broken.
The borders at the Chatto gardens and especially the little woodland area were thick with snowdrops, and there were big patches of variegated leaf arum and some drifts of winter aconites. The first hellebores were coming out, but we were a little early for those. A huge and very healthy camellia 'Donation' was studded with flowers in that strong but clean middling dark pink, and the Cornus mas were out. The wind was biting. My friend's verdict was that she preferred the smaller kind of snowdrops, plain Galanthus nivalis, and I agree with her. The big ones at the Chatto gardens are more showy, and certainly the gardens are very nice and worth a visit (especially if you can get in free with your RHS membership card until the end of the month), but the daintier wild kind of snowdrop has more charm.
Then we went for coffee and cake, having worked out that if we looked at the gardens first then we'd feel we'd earned cake after walking about in the cold. And then we had a quick look in the nursery to see if they had any Cyclamen coum, but there were only three or four very sorry looking pots. We kept bumping into one of my former colleagues, who was there on a similar mission to ours with a galanthophile friend, and she told us that they had them in stock at the plant centre where I used to work, but I'm not sure my friend wanted one badly enough to drive that far.
The wind was still raw when I got home, and rain was forecast by mid afternoon (and arrived by half past two) so I gave up on the idea of gardening, and made a cake instead. I need to check the oven in fourteen seconds.
She checks the oven
The cake looks on track. Digital kitchen timers are a wonderful thing. That and not allowing myself to leave something cooking and then nip out into the garden. I destroyed a Le Creuset saucepan that way, years ago, losing track of time.
Wednesday, 18 February 2015
the field hedge
I went for my six-weekly haircut this morning in my hairdresser's new salon. It was her first week of trading, and she looked exhausted after all the panic of getting the building fitted out, but triumphant. It looked smart. She asked if it was too girly, before declaring that it was impossible to be too girly, and actually with the butterflies pattern extending from the wallpaper to the hair dryers it was pretty girly, but in a stylish way. She'd gone for purple rather than pink as her corporate colour, which toned it down a bit. I took her a jar of honey by way of a salon warming present. She gave me a leaflet for beauty treatments as I left, with a discount voucher, but I had to warn her that I wasn't very good at beauty.
Then it was back to the hedge along the meadow. We can't have touched that hedge for at least two years, and it was a case of not a trim but of lopping off eight foot branches. My conclusion, after living with a mixed native field hedge for twenty years, is that dogwood and gardens do not mix. It suckers madly, it seeds itself, and where the branches touch the ground they layer themselves. Dogwood does not want to be a hedge, it has ambitions to become a thicket, while field maple wants to become a full sized tree. The idea of a mixed hedge is delightful, and the yellow autumn leaves of field maple are very pretty, but from a practical gardening point of view I suspect that plain hawthorn would be better. Or maybe with some hazel for the catkins, which provide such good forage for the bees on mild winter days. Hazel is not so invasive as dogwood nor so huge as field maple.
I took out quite a lot of the overhanging high branches with the long handled loppers, but it could do with a session with the electric pole saw, to take the tops out of some of the field maples before they really do turn into full sized trees. Not that they don't make very attractive trees, but I don't want that much shade, and I do want the hedge to remain thick at the bottom, so that at least in summer it will screen us from the lettuce field. At this time of the year it is entirely see-through.
In theory it is supposed to contain some hedgerow trees. Planting them was a condition of the grant that our contractor somehow managed to obtain on our behalf. There must have been more public money sloshing around the rural economy in the early 1990s. The contractor duly included some oaks, swaddled in tree tubes, and while we did not harm them, we did not favour them more than the rest of the hedge. Soon after the hedge was planted we had two brutally dry summers in a row, at a time when we were still on a private water supply and watering several hundred feet of hedging a long distance from the house was impossible. Some of the trees survived, and some seem to have disappeared. There is one chestnut that's looking particularly tree like, but I think that had better be managed as a pollard. Pollarding is a traditional treatment for trees, although chestnut was usually coppiced, and we don't want a full sized chestnut tree looming over the meadow. Chestnuts grow huge. If all the contractor's grant stipulated trees had survived and grown to maturity we wouldn't have a meadow any more, we'd have a shady edge of woodland path.
On the other side of the meadow the brambles are running riot along the edge of the wood. I feel as though I'm working against the clock now, only another two or three weeks to do all the cutting back and bramble extracting I can, before the birds start nesting in earnest and it's game over until the autumn.
Then it was back to the hedge along the meadow. We can't have touched that hedge for at least two years, and it was a case of not a trim but of lopping off eight foot branches. My conclusion, after living with a mixed native field hedge for twenty years, is that dogwood and gardens do not mix. It suckers madly, it seeds itself, and where the branches touch the ground they layer themselves. Dogwood does not want to be a hedge, it has ambitions to become a thicket, while field maple wants to become a full sized tree. The idea of a mixed hedge is delightful, and the yellow autumn leaves of field maple are very pretty, but from a practical gardening point of view I suspect that plain hawthorn would be better. Or maybe with some hazel for the catkins, which provide such good forage for the bees on mild winter days. Hazel is not so invasive as dogwood nor so huge as field maple.
I took out quite a lot of the overhanging high branches with the long handled loppers, but it could do with a session with the electric pole saw, to take the tops out of some of the field maples before they really do turn into full sized trees. Not that they don't make very attractive trees, but I don't want that much shade, and I do want the hedge to remain thick at the bottom, so that at least in summer it will screen us from the lettuce field. At this time of the year it is entirely see-through.
In theory it is supposed to contain some hedgerow trees. Planting them was a condition of the grant that our contractor somehow managed to obtain on our behalf. There must have been more public money sloshing around the rural economy in the early 1990s. The contractor duly included some oaks, swaddled in tree tubes, and while we did not harm them, we did not favour them more than the rest of the hedge. Soon after the hedge was planted we had two brutally dry summers in a row, at a time when we were still on a private water supply and watering several hundred feet of hedging a long distance from the house was impossible. Some of the trees survived, and some seem to have disappeared. There is one chestnut that's looking particularly tree like, but I think that had better be managed as a pollard. Pollarding is a traditional treatment for trees, although chestnut was usually coppiced, and we don't want a full sized chestnut tree looming over the meadow. Chestnuts grow huge. If all the contractor's grant stipulated trees had survived and grown to maturity we wouldn't have a meadow any more, we'd have a shady edge of woodland path.
On the other side of the meadow the brambles are running riot along the edge of the wood. I feel as though I'm working against the clock now, only another two or three weeks to do all the cutting back and bramble extracting I can, before the birds start nesting in earnest and it's game over until the autumn.
Tuesday, 17 February 2015
pond talk
This a late post, and will probably be a short one, as I'm tired, and if I spend long over it then by the time I press Publish it will be tomorrow's. I was out earlier this evening, doing my pond talk. I could have blogged before going out, but it was a nice afternoon, and after spending the first half of the morning mugging up on the talk I was busy doing the garden.
The talk went OK. Or rather, it went well in that they seemed to enjoy it, but I miscalculated the timing and over-ran. That can happen to the best of people. I've seen Roy Lancaster go on beyond his allotted slot until he was rudely cut off before he'd got through all his material (a miscalculation by the organisers, I thought, since what Roy Lancaster had to say about plants was much more interesting than what the RHS apparatchik had to say about the RHS). I was not cut off, nor did any of my audience leave the hall or go to sleep, but it's still disappointing not to manage to keep to the timetable. I have to console myself with the thought that it was the first time I'd done the talk to an audience, and it's very difficult to be certain of how the time will work out live when you've only been through it in your head.
It's also a relief to have got the first run out of the way, given that a month ago while I had plenty of ideas I had no script, no slides and not much firm data. Ponds are (is?) a big topic, if you include the aesthetics of how they might fit into a designed landscape and the nuts and bolts of building and maintaining one. Liners, levels, filters, fountains, fish or no fish, oxygenating plants, invasive species of oxygenating plants (now banned by Defra), there's a lot to think about. I say the first run, as things stand the world premiere could be the only performance, but some other garden club might like to know about ponds at some point. The first run went well enough that I'd be happy offering it to other clubs, now I know to tighten up on the timing.
Anyway, that was ponds. Time to press Publish before it turns into Wednesday.
The talk went OK. Or rather, it went well in that they seemed to enjoy it, but I miscalculated the timing and over-ran. That can happen to the best of people. I've seen Roy Lancaster go on beyond his allotted slot until he was rudely cut off before he'd got through all his material (a miscalculation by the organisers, I thought, since what Roy Lancaster had to say about plants was much more interesting than what the RHS apparatchik had to say about the RHS). I was not cut off, nor did any of my audience leave the hall or go to sleep, but it's still disappointing not to manage to keep to the timetable. I have to console myself with the thought that it was the first time I'd done the talk to an audience, and it's very difficult to be certain of how the time will work out live when you've only been through it in your head.
It's also a relief to have got the first run out of the way, given that a month ago while I had plenty of ideas I had no script, no slides and not much firm data. Ponds are (is?) a big topic, if you include the aesthetics of how they might fit into a designed landscape and the nuts and bolts of building and maintaining one. Liners, levels, filters, fountains, fish or no fish, oxygenating plants, invasive species of oxygenating plants (now banned by Defra), there's a lot to think about. I say the first run, as things stand the world premiere could be the only performance, but some other garden club might like to know about ponds at some point. The first run went well enough that I'd be happy offering it to other clubs, now I know to tighten up on the timing.
Anyway, that was ponds. Time to press Publish before it turns into Wednesday.
Monday, 16 February 2015
gardens with chickens
The chickens did not live up to my previous favourable report of their behaviour. I let them out at two, which was with hindsight too early. They joined me for a while on the gravel in the turning circle, scratching about for things to eat while I weeded, and kept glancing at them beady eyed in case they were ripping the buds from the emerging bulbs. But after half an hour of playing in the gravel they'd had enough, and I suddenly looked up from my task of teasing grass seedlings out from around the stems of Asphodeline luteus, whose strap shaped foliage looks not completely unlike grass except that it is a different shade of green, to discover that all my chickens had gone.
I tracked them down to the sloping bed in the back garden, where they were once again busy scratching about, so I went and got a rake and the shears and went on raking oak leaves from the daffodil bank and cutting the remaining long grass. That's a job I'd have finished comfortably before Christmas if I hadn't overdone it and sprained my arm. I realised that I was now down to four hens, but since there hadn't been any screaming I presumed the fifth was around somewhere, and we hadn't suffered a visit from the fox. Also, Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat was sitting in the driveway entrance, looking vaguely antagonistic as he usually does, but quite calm. Alsatian Killer does not attack chickens, but I don't think he'd sit impassively in the face of a fox attack.
The sloping bed kept the chickens happy for a while, then they headed downhill to the bog bed, which is not especially boggy at the moment. It was one of their favourite places last year. I never imagined that hens would enjoy paddling in mud, but it turned out that they did. I fetched buckets, some secateurs and the pickaxe, and busied myself chopping down old iris foliage, pulling up weeds and chopping out a piece of bamboo which had escaped beyond the ring of galvanised lawn edging intended to delineate where it is allowed to be. I'd been meaning to do that for ages.
Then the chickens tired of the bog bed and went back up the hill to the front garden. They move quickly once they get going, and by the time I'd collected my tools and emptied the bucket of weeds I'd temporarily lost them again. In the front garden they rejoined the fifth hen, who was standing in front of the hen house. Maybe she'd popped in to lay an egg, and when she came out they'd all gone. After that they stayed in the front garden, and I was able to return to what I'd been doing originally, having left a trail of sweepings and prunings behind me stretching the length of the garden. That can be the trouble with gardening with hens. You do a bit of this and a bit of that and don't finish anything, but I suppose looking on the bright side I'm unlikely to sprain my arm if I never stick to doing the same thing for more than half an hour.
I tracked them down to the sloping bed in the back garden, where they were once again busy scratching about, so I went and got a rake and the shears and went on raking oak leaves from the daffodil bank and cutting the remaining long grass. That's a job I'd have finished comfortably before Christmas if I hadn't overdone it and sprained my arm. I realised that I was now down to four hens, but since there hadn't been any screaming I presumed the fifth was around somewhere, and we hadn't suffered a visit from the fox. Also, Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat was sitting in the driveway entrance, looking vaguely antagonistic as he usually does, but quite calm. Alsatian Killer does not attack chickens, but I don't think he'd sit impassively in the face of a fox attack.
The sloping bed kept the chickens happy for a while, then they headed downhill to the bog bed, which is not especially boggy at the moment. It was one of their favourite places last year. I never imagined that hens would enjoy paddling in mud, but it turned out that they did. I fetched buckets, some secateurs and the pickaxe, and busied myself chopping down old iris foliage, pulling up weeds and chopping out a piece of bamboo which had escaped beyond the ring of galvanised lawn edging intended to delineate where it is allowed to be. I'd been meaning to do that for ages.
Then the chickens tired of the bog bed and went back up the hill to the front garden. They move quickly once they get going, and by the time I'd collected my tools and emptied the bucket of weeds I'd temporarily lost them again. In the front garden they rejoined the fifth hen, who was standing in front of the hen house. Maybe she'd popped in to lay an egg, and when she came out they'd all gone. After that they stayed in the front garden, and I was able to return to what I'd been doing originally, having left a trail of sweepings and prunings behind me stretching the length of the garden. That can be the trouble with gardening with hens. You do a bit of this and a bit of that and don't finish anything, but I suppose looking on the bright side I'm unlikely to sprain my arm if I never stick to doing the same thing for more than half an hour.
Sunday, 15 February 2015
winter flowers
I finished my first seed sowing this morning. The sunflowers which germinate rapidly and make big strong seedlings can wait until March, like it says on the packet, as can the half hardy annuals. I don't normally raise many of those, having nowhere to grow them, but schemes for a pot garden by the back door and a cutting bed in the veg patch could use some. If I get that far. Ideas that seem absolutely brilliant in February have a way of unravelling by May. As I went through the box of seed packets I remembered the other reason why I start sowing now, which is that there isn't room in the heated propagator to do everything at once.
The beds around the bottom lawn in the back garden are looking really good, as is the end of the wood, so much so that I persuaded the Systems Administrator to go and have a look at them after lunch. The snowdrops are hitting their peak season, and are standing in lovely fat, tall clumps. They must have liked the weather over the past year. The Daphne bholua are still in full bloom, and were humming with bees when the sun came out, and Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' is still going strong. This viburnum is fantastic value in the garden, because it has such a long flowering season, but don't try to grow on on light soil where it has to compete with an established hedge. I did, and 'Charles Lamont''s predecessor gradually died.
The punctuation of that last sentence looks iffy. 'Charles Lamont' needs to be in single apostrophes because varietal plant names should be, and I am a firm believer in the use of the possessive apostrophe. It is not difficult or confusing and people who say it should be abolished are simply wrong. But the two apostrophes together look odd. I must browse through Christopher Lloyd's writings when I have an evening to spare and see how he and his editors dealt with it. Maybe I should just have said its.
Near the daphnes the Edgeworthia chrysantha is starting to open its flowers. They are the most unlikely looking blooms, fleshy yellow and white funnels held in cone shaped clusters, with a marvellous scent. This is also the Mark II version, the first having been doing very nicely until the water table rose under it and it drowned. We tried to rescue it by digging a soakaway, but when a crowbar we were using to investigate the ground disappeared two feet into the soil under minimal pressure we realised that corner of the garden had turned to quicksand, and had to abandon the original Edgeworthia to its fate. Its successor has recovered from the cold winters, which nipped it back, and as well as being covered in exciting clusters of fat buds is suckering lavishly at the base. The stems are so flexible you can tie them in knots without breaking them should you want to, though I don't myself, and the bark can be used to make paper, but I'm not planning on doing that either.
The white flowered forsythia relative, Abeliophyllum distichum, is still doing precisely nothing. It is supposed to flower on last year's growth, when it flowers, to which end it benefits from a feeding and pruning regime to encourage it to make strong new shoots each year. I was obviously not generous or brutal enough, because mine didn't send up much in the way of fresh growth. What there was has got tiny, rather shrivelled, greyish brown bobbles on it, but I'm not convinced they are going to suddenly swell and open into starry white flowers. Maybe I am being too hasty in writing it off. It is one of those shrubs which look irresistible when seen flowering in a garden centre, carefully pumped and primed by the nursery grower, but I've seldom seen it ever looking so floriferous again in anybody's garden.
I let the chickens out for a run for the second half of the afternoon. They behaved very well, keeping together in a tight flock and staying in the front garden where I was working, so I could get on with things instead of spending a chilly and unproductive hour following them about or trying to be in two places at once as they split up. Little do they know, but behaving nicely when let out is their best guarantee of being let out again. Unless they do know? Chickens are brighter than you think, but I'm not sure they're that bright.
The beds around the bottom lawn in the back garden are looking really good, as is the end of the wood, so much so that I persuaded the Systems Administrator to go and have a look at them after lunch. The snowdrops are hitting their peak season, and are standing in lovely fat, tall clumps. They must have liked the weather over the past year. The Daphne bholua are still in full bloom, and were humming with bees when the sun came out, and Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' is still going strong. This viburnum is fantastic value in the garden, because it has such a long flowering season, but don't try to grow on on light soil where it has to compete with an established hedge. I did, and 'Charles Lamont''s predecessor gradually died.
The punctuation of that last sentence looks iffy. 'Charles Lamont' needs to be in single apostrophes because varietal plant names should be, and I am a firm believer in the use of the possessive apostrophe. It is not difficult or confusing and people who say it should be abolished are simply wrong. But the two apostrophes together look odd. I must browse through Christopher Lloyd's writings when I have an evening to spare and see how he and his editors dealt with it. Maybe I should just have said its.
Near the daphnes the Edgeworthia chrysantha is starting to open its flowers. They are the most unlikely looking blooms, fleshy yellow and white funnels held in cone shaped clusters, with a marvellous scent. This is also the Mark II version, the first having been doing very nicely until the water table rose under it and it drowned. We tried to rescue it by digging a soakaway, but when a crowbar we were using to investigate the ground disappeared two feet into the soil under minimal pressure we realised that corner of the garden had turned to quicksand, and had to abandon the original Edgeworthia to its fate. Its successor has recovered from the cold winters, which nipped it back, and as well as being covered in exciting clusters of fat buds is suckering lavishly at the base. The stems are so flexible you can tie them in knots without breaking them should you want to, though I don't myself, and the bark can be used to make paper, but I'm not planning on doing that either.
The white flowered forsythia relative, Abeliophyllum distichum, is still doing precisely nothing. It is supposed to flower on last year's growth, when it flowers, to which end it benefits from a feeding and pruning regime to encourage it to make strong new shoots each year. I was obviously not generous or brutal enough, because mine didn't send up much in the way of fresh growth. What there was has got tiny, rather shrivelled, greyish brown bobbles on it, but I'm not convinced they are going to suddenly swell and open into starry white flowers. Maybe I am being too hasty in writing it off. It is one of those shrubs which look irresistible when seen flowering in a garden centre, carefully pumped and primed by the nursery grower, but I've seldom seen it ever looking so floriferous again in anybody's garden.
I let the chickens out for a run for the second half of the afternoon. They behaved very well, keeping together in a tight flock and staying in the front garden where I was working, so I could get on with things instead of spending a chilly and unproductive hour following them about or trying to be in two places at once as they split up. Little do they know, but behaving nicely when let out is their best guarantee of being let out again. Unless they do know? Chickens are brighter than you think, but I'm not sure they're that bright.
Saturday, 14 February 2015
sowing seeds
I started sowing my stash of seeds today. I vary the catalogues I buy from in the years when I buy seeds, for a change of list, and there's always a great pile of free packets that came with magazines, some useful and others varieties I wouldn't give house (or rather garden) room to. This year was the turn of Chiltern Seeds and for the first time I'm trying Derry Watkins' Special Plants Nursery. Other years I use Thompson and Morgan, Mr Fothergill, DT Brown or Plant World Seeds. I haven't noticed that one firm produces consistently better or worse germination than another. The main variables seem to be the compost and the weather. After last year's disappointing growth, when most pots germinated but several utterly failed to make any further progress, I'm not bothering with a special low nutrient seed compost but simply giving it a go in my usual brand of multi-purpose.
I usually do the main sowing in the second week of February. After I'd finished for the day I read the leaflet that Derry Watkins enclosed with her order, and discovered that she recommends leaving tender plants until April or May when light levels are higher. Ah well, too late. I've found the problem with April sowings is that it only takes one hot day when I'm out for them to cook. Not that I don't paint the greenhouse with shading paint, but there can be a lot of heat in the sun by May, and keeping the temperature in a domestic greenhouse at an equable level for tiny seedlings when you aren't there to damp the floor down at lunchtime can be tricky. So I'd rather my sowings had graduated to the level of young plants by then, able to take a little more stress on the odd occasion. I ignore Chiltern's sternly worded advice to use a soil based seed compost as well. I've tried John Innes, never got on with it.
I didn't start actually sowing until after lunch, because up to that point I was shuffling trays around to make space, and cleaning any dead leaves off the overwintering plants. They act as magnets for botrytis, and it's a job I should have done before, though actually things weren't looking too bad. A few weeds had sprung up in some of the pots since the autumn, and I had those too while I was at it.
The depressing task was sorting through the trays of bulbs that the mice had got at. I haven't had the heart to go through my list of last autumn's orders and see exactly what I've lost, but it's quite a few things. The autumn flowering crocus and small species tulips were safe, because I put those in large propagating cases from the start, but mice managed to get inside a smaller case and destroy some fritillaries, and have eaten things they never showed an interest in before, Muscari, Scilla, Puschkinia, Corydalis and Erythronium. They even excavated one of the pots of hyacinths that were tucked under the bench to keep them from the worst of the winter weather, ripping off the leaves and well-developed bud to eat the top of the bulb, and reducing my neat quincunx to an irregular foursome. I am beginning to take this personally and to hate the mice with a passion. Next year everything apart from the daffodils is going to have to go under cover, and I might even seal the lids on to the trays with gaffer tape.
I don't know what to do about the hyacinths, other than make space for them up high and set traps beneath. Which is a nuisance, since room in the light is at a premium in the greenhouse during the winter, and bulbs are perfectly happy in the darkness under the bench, if only things wouldn't eat them. Thank goodness daffodils are poisonous and the mice don't seem to touch them. Though who on earth confuses them with onions? They don't smell remotely like onions, either raw or cooked (not that I have ever cooked a daffodil but I'm sure it doesn't suddenly start tasting like onions). No, I am with The Now Show, and anyone daft enough to eat a daffodil deserves a Darwin Award and will be doing the rest of the human race a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool. I make an exception for small children who will eat anything, but they aren't going to be shopping in the supermarket vegetable aisles and wouldn't be able to read the warning notices anyway.
I usually do the main sowing in the second week of February. After I'd finished for the day I read the leaflet that Derry Watkins enclosed with her order, and discovered that she recommends leaving tender plants until April or May when light levels are higher. Ah well, too late. I've found the problem with April sowings is that it only takes one hot day when I'm out for them to cook. Not that I don't paint the greenhouse with shading paint, but there can be a lot of heat in the sun by May, and keeping the temperature in a domestic greenhouse at an equable level for tiny seedlings when you aren't there to damp the floor down at lunchtime can be tricky. So I'd rather my sowings had graduated to the level of young plants by then, able to take a little more stress on the odd occasion. I ignore Chiltern's sternly worded advice to use a soil based seed compost as well. I've tried John Innes, never got on with it.
I didn't start actually sowing until after lunch, because up to that point I was shuffling trays around to make space, and cleaning any dead leaves off the overwintering plants. They act as magnets for botrytis, and it's a job I should have done before, though actually things weren't looking too bad. A few weeds had sprung up in some of the pots since the autumn, and I had those too while I was at it.
The depressing task was sorting through the trays of bulbs that the mice had got at. I haven't had the heart to go through my list of last autumn's orders and see exactly what I've lost, but it's quite a few things. The autumn flowering crocus and small species tulips were safe, because I put those in large propagating cases from the start, but mice managed to get inside a smaller case and destroy some fritillaries, and have eaten things they never showed an interest in before, Muscari, Scilla, Puschkinia, Corydalis and Erythronium. They even excavated one of the pots of hyacinths that were tucked under the bench to keep them from the worst of the winter weather, ripping off the leaves and well-developed bud to eat the top of the bulb, and reducing my neat quincunx to an irregular foursome. I am beginning to take this personally and to hate the mice with a passion. Next year everything apart from the daffodils is going to have to go under cover, and I might even seal the lids on to the trays with gaffer tape.
I don't know what to do about the hyacinths, other than make space for them up high and set traps beneath. Which is a nuisance, since room in the light is at a premium in the greenhouse during the winter, and bulbs are perfectly happy in the darkness under the bench, if only things wouldn't eat them. Thank goodness daffodils are poisonous and the mice don't seem to touch them. Though who on earth confuses them with onions? They don't smell remotely like onions, either raw or cooked (not that I have ever cooked a daffodil but I'm sure it doesn't suddenly start tasting like onions). No, I am with The Now Show, and anyone daft enough to eat a daffodil deserves a Darwin Award and will be doing the rest of the human race a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool. I make an exception for small children who will eat anything, but they aren't going to be shopping in the supermarket vegetable aisles and wouldn't be able to read the warning notices anyway.
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