I put a fresh straw bale into the chicken's run before letting them out of their house. With the rain of recent days the soil had suddenly churned, and it can't be very nice for them sliding around in the mud all day, besides which their feet then make the eggs dirty. We are getting to the end of our supply of small bales, and one of the loops of baler twine had broken on this one, making it difficult to lift into the wheelbarrow without it entirely disintegrating. I managed by dint of standing the bale on end and leaning it against my shoulder while I trundled it round to the hen run. The Systems Administrator looked at me doubtfully as I reappeared in the kitchen for breakfast and said You've got grass on you.
I only bothered breaking the bale down into rough chunks, leaving the chickens to do the rest of the work, and by lunchtime they had spread it over most of the run and looked quite happy bouncing up and down on it. They would really like to come out, but they can't.
In the afternoon I finally finished trimming the hornbeam hedge, a job which has been on my list of things to do since last August. This year I must try and do it in August, or at least before we go on holiday. Last year it got a top-dressing of home made compost as I spread the remains of the great neolithic compost burial mound around the utility area, and some fish, blood and bone, and that cheered it up a lot. It thickened somewhat, but still keeps sending up strong vertical shoots from the top instead of growing all over with nice little shoots that I could snip with shears, rather than needing secateurs if not a pruning saw. I don't know what I have to do to it to make it behave more like a Tom Stuart-Smith designed hedge and less like a temporarily thwarted row of incipient trees.
I still haven't got to the origin of the theory that hornbeam should be cut in August. It is not at all tender and I don't see why you shouldn't do it at any point during the winter. I read somewhere recently that it shouldn't be done in the spring because it can bleed, but I have cut mine several times in spring in complete ignorance of this theory and never noticed any signs of bleeding. I'm left holding to my own pet theory that August became the traditional hedge cutting period in the heyday of the grand Edwardian garden because at that time of year there weren't all that many other jobs for the garden staff to be getting on with, and that the idea of the August cut for hornbeam and yew persisted into books and articles aimed at the amateur owner-gardener. Yew is as tough as old boots, and from my own practical experience you can trim it with impunity at pretty much any time you fancy. If it looks whiskery and is annoying you then by all means give it a haircut, it doesn't seem to mind.
Our topiary yews are a he and a she. I did not know this when I bought them as little knee high plants, but as they grew the one to the south turned out to bear berries, though not many due to all the clipping. The other is a male plant. Yew flowers are not showy, but on a windy day you may see absolute clouds of pollen blowing off the plant. Ours was in full flower a few weeks back, releasing clouds as thick as dust blowing off a ploughed field in response to a couple of especially brisk gusts of wind.
I would very much like a yellow berried yew, ever since seeing one in a great garden open to visitors. I can no longer remember which garden, but alas, they did not offer yellowed fruited yew in their plant sales area, and I have never been able to track down a supplier. It irritated me rather when one of the magazines recently included it in their list of ten plants with ornamental fruit for winter, given none of their readers were likely to be able to get one.
Thursday, 9 March 2017
Wednesday, 8 March 2017
the big chop
Today we took down the large field maples that had been allowed to grow up in the hedge behind the greenhouse. Acer campestre is a lovely plant, turning butter yellow in the autumn, but it is quite vigorous for a hedge, perhaps over-vigorous. The Systems Administrator had topped out the ones by the greenhouse in the dim and distant past, but not for several years, during which time they had recovered to a good twenty feet. At that size the prospect of cutting them back was daunting, what with the greenhouse on one side and the telephone line not too far away across the field on the other. In fact, the prospect of reducing them had been getting steadily more daunting for a couple of years, which is one reason why they had been allowed to go on growing unchecked for so long.
The only good thing about trying to reduce a twenty foot hedge with trees in it to a ten foot hedge is that the tree trunks provide something solid to lean a ladder against. The Systems Administrator roped each trunk in turn as far up as possible, using a boat hook to drop the rope over a likely looking high branch, then cut the main trunk at the ten foot mark while I kept tension on the rope from the field side. That left a long list of things that could go wrong, a trunk swinging back into the garden despite the rope and hitting either the SA or the greenhouse, a trunk falling further outwards that we had judged it could and landing on the telephone wire, an accident with the chainsaw, or the SA falling off the ladder, but the SA had spent a long time weighing up the situation, and we were both very considered in our movements. Even so I was relieved as each trunk crashed into the field where it was supposed to fall with no breakages or accidental amputations.
We were so pleased to have got the field maple down without incident that after lunch we tackled a second one by the fruit cage, slightly smaller but closer to the telephone line, and a large hawthorn behind the polytunnel. The whole thing left us with an enormous pile of debris in somebody else's field. Fortunately the farm maintains a wide uncultivated strip around the outside, perhaps as part of some arcane EU grant system for wildlife friendly farming, and at this stage of the year they haven't started cultivating lettuces and the field is still sown with a winter cover of rye grass, so we weren't going to do any harm being there, but still the pile of branches, with the odd vicious rose stem thrown in for good measure, had to be cleared away. The quickest route was to drag it sixty yards further up the field to where there is a thin patch in the hedge, chop it down into pieces small enough to fit through the hole, and pass it through, so that was what we did. I was on the receiving end of the bits and by the time it was all through I had built two piles of brushwood each about the size of a transit van.
The next step will be to trim off all the side branches small enough to go through the shredder and shred them, and cart all the larger wood down to the workshop and section it for firewood. I am hoping the SA will do the lion's share of shredding, though I have promised to help, since I still have about forty-two bags of Strulch to apply. There are still some smaller tall bits of hedge to come down, which the SA might be able to do from ground level with the pole saw. And then we have vowed to each other that now we have such a clear line to cut to, the hedge is not going to be allowed to get that out of control again.
The only good thing about trying to reduce a twenty foot hedge with trees in it to a ten foot hedge is that the tree trunks provide something solid to lean a ladder against. The Systems Administrator roped each trunk in turn as far up as possible, using a boat hook to drop the rope over a likely looking high branch, then cut the main trunk at the ten foot mark while I kept tension on the rope from the field side. That left a long list of things that could go wrong, a trunk swinging back into the garden despite the rope and hitting either the SA or the greenhouse, a trunk falling further outwards that we had judged it could and landing on the telephone wire, an accident with the chainsaw, or the SA falling off the ladder, but the SA had spent a long time weighing up the situation, and we were both very considered in our movements. Even so I was relieved as each trunk crashed into the field where it was supposed to fall with no breakages or accidental amputations.
We were so pleased to have got the field maple down without incident that after lunch we tackled a second one by the fruit cage, slightly smaller but closer to the telephone line, and a large hawthorn behind the polytunnel. The whole thing left us with an enormous pile of debris in somebody else's field. Fortunately the farm maintains a wide uncultivated strip around the outside, perhaps as part of some arcane EU grant system for wildlife friendly farming, and at this stage of the year they haven't started cultivating lettuces and the field is still sown with a winter cover of rye grass, so we weren't going to do any harm being there, but still the pile of branches, with the odd vicious rose stem thrown in for good measure, had to be cleared away. The quickest route was to drag it sixty yards further up the field to where there is a thin patch in the hedge, chop it down into pieces small enough to fit through the hole, and pass it through, so that was what we did. I was on the receiving end of the bits and by the time it was all through I had built two piles of brushwood each about the size of a transit van.
The next step will be to trim off all the side branches small enough to go through the shredder and shred them, and cart all the larger wood down to the workshop and section it for firewood. I am hoping the SA will do the lion's share of shredding, though I have promised to help, since I still have about forty-two bags of Strulch to apply. There are still some smaller tall bits of hedge to come down, which the SA might be able to do from ground level with the pole saw. And then we have vowed to each other that now we have such a clear line to cut to, the hedge is not going to be allowed to get that out of control again.
Tuesday, 7 March 2017
garden society talk
At last I made it to a meeting of my garden club. In January I was laid low by the aftermath of flu, and in February I poked myself in the eye the day before the meeting, but third time lucky, tonight I got there. Which was just as well as it was the annual celebrity lecture. There are some gardening celebrities I'm not so keen on, and I didn't go last year, but this year's famous guest was Anna Pavord speaking on the subject of the tulip.
I have already got her book The Tulip so perhaps I didn't need to go to the talk, if I'd been paying attention when I read it, but as I liked the book I thought it would be fun to hear the author talking about it. And Anna Pavord always comes over in her books and articles as a thoroughly scholarly individual. And one of the committee members told me she has a most beautiful voice, though I think that was after I'd already bought the ticket. In fact, so keen was I to go that the Systems Administrator would have been willing to drive me there, if the celebrity talk had been last month when I couldn't see to drive.
Poor Anna Pavord, she arrived with five minutes to spare before the start after a nightmare seven hour journey. The M25 was at a virtual standstill due to a crash, so she cut off up the A1 and found herself taking forever to get through Hertford, and she was clearly mortified to be late, assuring us that she always built in a margin for delays and normally she and her husband were left kicking their heels for a couple of hours waiting for things to start. I believed her. That is what travelling in the south east is like, and looking on the bright side the meeting began only ten minutes after the advertised start time. If she hadn't allowed that extra couple of hours she wouldn't have arrived until the time when it normally finishes. Then the remote control for her slide projector wouldn't work, and I felt for her again, knowing from personal experience how that feels.
Once she settled into her topic of tulips she cheered up, and gave a very entertaining talk, and I took pages of notes. I expect all the information is somewhere in her book, but I always take notes, an old habit left over from years of taking notes at work of every meeting and telephone call. Sometimes I refer back to them, but mainly the act of writing helps me concentrate. It was very much a talk about the wild origins of tulips and the history of their cultivation, so by the end of it we hadn't learned much about growing them in the garden, but that wasn't the point.
On my way out I collected my seed potato for the potato growing contest. I didn't enter last year, thinking I had enough things to be doing already in the garden without worrying about a potted potato, and perhaps sensitive to the potential embarrassment of the pubic weigh-in when my pot was emptied out if it turned out to still have only one potato in it, perhaps diminished since planting by the effort of growing leaves. Vegetables are not my strong suit, and I don't even know if I am supposed to chit this potato or if I should have done that last month and should now get it straight into its pot (using what sort of compost? And how do I feed it?). But then I thought that wasn't the spirit and I should throw myself into club activities with more gusto, besides which people had told me that the organiser served a lovely tea at the ritual potato pot tipping out. It is a Maris Piper. That's a second early according to the label on the bag. I expect there will be lots of advice available on the internet.
I have already got her book The Tulip so perhaps I didn't need to go to the talk, if I'd been paying attention when I read it, but as I liked the book I thought it would be fun to hear the author talking about it. And Anna Pavord always comes over in her books and articles as a thoroughly scholarly individual. And one of the committee members told me she has a most beautiful voice, though I think that was after I'd already bought the ticket. In fact, so keen was I to go that the Systems Administrator would have been willing to drive me there, if the celebrity talk had been last month when I couldn't see to drive.
Poor Anna Pavord, she arrived with five minutes to spare before the start after a nightmare seven hour journey. The M25 was at a virtual standstill due to a crash, so she cut off up the A1 and found herself taking forever to get through Hertford, and she was clearly mortified to be late, assuring us that she always built in a margin for delays and normally she and her husband were left kicking their heels for a couple of hours waiting for things to start. I believed her. That is what travelling in the south east is like, and looking on the bright side the meeting began only ten minutes after the advertised start time. If she hadn't allowed that extra couple of hours she wouldn't have arrived until the time when it normally finishes. Then the remote control for her slide projector wouldn't work, and I felt for her again, knowing from personal experience how that feels.
Once she settled into her topic of tulips she cheered up, and gave a very entertaining talk, and I took pages of notes. I expect all the information is somewhere in her book, but I always take notes, an old habit left over from years of taking notes at work of every meeting and telephone call. Sometimes I refer back to them, but mainly the act of writing helps me concentrate. It was very much a talk about the wild origins of tulips and the history of their cultivation, so by the end of it we hadn't learned much about growing them in the garden, but that wasn't the point.
On my way out I collected my seed potato for the potato growing contest. I didn't enter last year, thinking I had enough things to be doing already in the garden without worrying about a potted potato, and perhaps sensitive to the potential embarrassment of the pubic weigh-in when my pot was emptied out if it turned out to still have only one potato in it, perhaps diminished since planting by the effort of growing leaves. Vegetables are not my strong suit, and I don't even know if I am supposed to chit this potato or if I should have done that last month and should now get it straight into its pot (using what sort of compost? And how do I feed it?). But then I thought that wasn't the spirit and I should throw myself into club activities with more gusto, besides which people had told me that the organiser served a lovely tea at the ritual potato pot tipping out. It is a Maris Piper. That's a second early according to the label on the bag. I expect there will be lots of advice available on the internet.
Monday, 6 March 2017
cutting down the coloured stems
This morning I cut down the coppiced willow in the ditch bed. I've been putting it off, since the whole point of the willow is to enjoy its bare, egg yolk yellow stems in the winter, but the buds will be swelling and the leaves breaking any day now. The best colour is on the young shoots, besides which left to its own devices it grows far too big, sticking out over the lawn and shading the other plants in the bed. I left the smallest and thinnest stems intact, those of no more than pencil thickness (maybe a fat pencil) to soften the effect and give it a head start with at least some leaves to get it going. There is a theory that taking off all the growth every year weakens the plant and that you can just remove half or a third of the oldest stems each year, but by the end of year two or three they are pretty massive.
The willow loves sun. We have periodically allowed the trees growing along the ditch to grow out over the ditch bed, shading the back of the bed quite heavily. The willow did not think much of this at all, and the back section of the coppice stool died in protest. The part of the stool facing the lawn continues to grow, with the result that the shrub must have crept a foot towards the light since I planted it out of its two or three litre pot quite a few years ago.
Then I tackled the coloured stem dogwoods by the oil tank, a mixture of Cornus sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire' and Cornus stolonifera 'Flaviramea', which I see from the RHS website I should now call Cornus sericea 'Flaviramea'. It was stonlonifera when I planted it in 2001, and the name is descriptive because once it gets going it runs at the root. The young shoots are an attractive shade of bright pistachio green. The old ones are dingy brown, and slightly prone to dieback, at least in our dry soil. It's worth cutting out some of the old, dull growth every so often to encourage the new, besides which it will get fairly tall if left untrimmed, fully eight feet, and it was growing up into the crown of a Malus transitoria and through a white flowered Japanese quince. I like my plants to mingle informally up to a point, but the Cornus has no manners, and I should like to be able to see the flowers of the Chaenomeles, while the crab apple would probably prefer its own space.
'Midwinter Fire' has slim young twigs in a vivid shade of orange-red, very pretty in winter. You need to plant them where they get a reasonable amount of sun for the full colour to develop. As the stems age they fade to a nondescript buff and the shrub needs pruning every so often to encourage the production of fresh growth and to make sure that it is produced at a sensible height and not somewhere above your head. My plants are beginning to run at the root after a slow start. Last year they were late coming into leaf and the leaves did not look awfully well, while quite a few young stems turned black and died before the plants pulled themselves together and began to grow properly. After that they were fine for the rest of the season, though it is generally worth giving plants a quick tidy after the leaves have fallen and trimming out any dead twigs so that the effect of the red glow is not diluted.
Side branches of Cornus are produced in opposite pairs, and on Cornus sanguinea they are held at right angles to the main stem, and are thin and flexible. Designed, in fact, to slip around behind people's glasses and scratch their eyes. My recent accident happened while I was cutting down the leaves of the hellebores growing under the 'Midwinter Fire', and this time round I did not go anywhere near them except when I was wearing my safety glasses. That's a third reason to chop them down now. I need to apply Strulch to that bed, and it will be much easier to get at the soil and I shall be much less likely to poke myself in the eye again if I'm not crawling through a thicket of Cornus twigs.
The willow loves sun. We have periodically allowed the trees growing along the ditch to grow out over the ditch bed, shading the back of the bed quite heavily. The willow did not think much of this at all, and the back section of the coppice stool died in protest. The part of the stool facing the lawn continues to grow, with the result that the shrub must have crept a foot towards the light since I planted it out of its two or three litre pot quite a few years ago.
Then I tackled the coloured stem dogwoods by the oil tank, a mixture of Cornus sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire' and Cornus stolonifera 'Flaviramea', which I see from the RHS website I should now call Cornus sericea 'Flaviramea'. It was stonlonifera when I planted it in 2001, and the name is descriptive because once it gets going it runs at the root. The young shoots are an attractive shade of bright pistachio green. The old ones are dingy brown, and slightly prone to dieback, at least in our dry soil. It's worth cutting out some of the old, dull growth every so often to encourage the new, besides which it will get fairly tall if left untrimmed, fully eight feet, and it was growing up into the crown of a Malus transitoria and through a white flowered Japanese quince. I like my plants to mingle informally up to a point, but the Cornus has no manners, and I should like to be able to see the flowers of the Chaenomeles, while the crab apple would probably prefer its own space.
'Midwinter Fire' has slim young twigs in a vivid shade of orange-red, very pretty in winter. You need to plant them where they get a reasonable amount of sun for the full colour to develop. As the stems age they fade to a nondescript buff and the shrub needs pruning every so often to encourage the production of fresh growth and to make sure that it is produced at a sensible height and not somewhere above your head. My plants are beginning to run at the root after a slow start. Last year they were late coming into leaf and the leaves did not look awfully well, while quite a few young stems turned black and died before the plants pulled themselves together and began to grow properly. After that they were fine for the rest of the season, though it is generally worth giving plants a quick tidy after the leaves have fallen and trimming out any dead twigs so that the effect of the red glow is not diluted.
Side branches of Cornus are produced in opposite pairs, and on Cornus sanguinea they are held at right angles to the main stem, and are thin and flexible. Designed, in fact, to slip around behind people's glasses and scratch their eyes. My recent accident happened while I was cutting down the leaves of the hellebores growing under the 'Midwinter Fire', and this time round I did not go anywhere near them except when I was wearing my safety glasses. That's a third reason to chop them down now. I need to apply Strulch to that bed, and it will be much easier to get at the soil and I shall be much less likely to poke myself in the eye again if I'm not crawling through a thicket of Cornus twigs.
Sunday, 5 March 2017
a village concert
The music society hosted its concert for young musicians this afternoon. The village hall was booked, a real piano hired and hauled on to the stage thanks to an educational grant we managed to get from a charitable trust, chairs were put out, a rota of teenage performers was lined up, no fewer than five accompanists were required as some of the young performers preferred to play with their own music teachers and in one case the performer's father, the committee had produced an array of small cakes and scones, and the chairman's cleaner and the cleaner's daughter came to pour out the tea and do the washing up.
One difficulty of staging a children's concert followed by tea is that you don't have the foggiest idea how many people are going to come. It's safe to assume that most of the young performers will be accompanied by one parent, if not two. Maybe some siblings and grandparents or uncles and aunts. Eight young performers might get the audience up to twenty or more. Eight people on the committee plus the more devoted spouses might bring the total to thirty. And then how many more? Will the hall look painfully empty, and how many scones should you make?
According to the person in charge of ticket sales we only sold twenty before the event. When she told me that I thought that twenty was quite encouraging, since we give the performers tickets for their families, and I knew I hadn't bothered to pay in advance. In the event the hall filled up astonishingly and we had to put out two extra rows of chairs. Some of the audience were music society stalwarts who come to every concert and believe passionately in music education. Indeed, some are former committee members. I wondered if others simply fancied getting out of the house for the afternoon. It's been a long winter, it had stopped raining by half past three, and why not stroll down to the village hall for an hour of music and some tea, and to see some different faces and have a chat? The vicar came, with her guide dog.
Apart from the lady vicar, and the dog, it could have been a scene from an English village at practically any point during the past one hundred and twenty years. All sorts of people were there. I met a gardening acquaintance from my plant centre days, who turned out not to have been to the other concerts recently because she was waiting for a new knee and couldn't walk as far as the church in the meantime, and one of the ladies from my ladies group, while the youngest of the performers turned out to be in the same class at school as my niece.
The performers were really pretty good, and all looked very composed as they stood up on the stage, while the only person to lose their place was the accompanying father. It was only a short programme, then there were presentations for everybody, handed out by the youngest performer's younger sister. As the young artists stood eating cake afterwards they all suddenly looked much younger, and you remembered that for all their poise on stage they were still only children.
I had offered to do sandwiches, because they would be quick to make, and because not everybody likes sweet things and it is disappointing for those that don't to find there's nothing on offer but cake and scones with jam. After I'd offered I began to think it hadn't been the best call, since I could always bring any leftover cake home with me but a leftover ham sandwich is no use to anybody, and as we had no idea about numbers we had no clue how much food to take. I decided to limit myself to one packet of Co-Op ham, and as it had five slices of ham in it that translated to twenty sandwiches, which turned out to be almost exactly right, with just one triangle left over at the end. I ate it.
One difficulty of staging a children's concert followed by tea is that you don't have the foggiest idea how many people are going to come. It's safe to assume that most of the young performers will be accompanied by one parent, if not two. Maybe some siblings and grandparents or uncles and aunts. Eight young performers might get the audience up to twenty or more. Eight people on the committee plus the more devoted spouses might bring the total to thirty. And then how many more? Will the hall look painfully empty, and how many scones should you make?
According to the person in charge of ticket sales we only sold twenty before the event. When she told me that I thought that twenty was quite encouraging, since we give the performers tickets for their families, and I knew I hadn't bothered to pay in advance. In the event the hall filled up astonishingly and we had to put out two extra rows of chairs. Some of the audience were music society stalwarts who come to every concert and believe passionately in music education. Indeed, some are former committee members. I wondered if others simply fancied getting out of the house for the afternoon. It's been a long winter, it had stopped raining by half past three, and why not stroll down to the village hall for an hour of music and some tea, and to see some different faces and have a chat? The vicar came, with her guide dog.
Apart from the lady vicar, and the dog, it could have been a scene from an English village at practically any point during the past one hundred and twenty years. All sorts of people were there. I met a gardening acquaintance from my plant centre days, who turned out not to have been to the other concerts recently because she was waiting for a new knee and couldn't walk as far as the church in the meantime, and one of the ladies from my ladies group, while the youngest of the performers turned out to be in the same class at school as my niece.
The performers were really pretty good, and all looked very composed as they stood up on the stage, while the only person to lose their place was the accompanying father. It was only a short programme, then there were presentations for everybody, handed out by the youngest performer's younger sister. As the young artists stood eating cake afterwards they all suddenly looked much younger, and you remembered that for all their poise on stage they were still only children.
I had offered to do sandwiches, because they would be quick to make, and because not everybody likes sweet things and it is disappointing for those that don't to find there's nothing on offer but cake and scones with jam. After I'd offered I began to think it hadn't been the best call, since I could always bring any leftover cake home with me but a leftover ham sandwich is no use to anybody, and as we had no idea about numbers we had no clue how much food to take. I decided to limit myself to one packet of Co-Op ham, and as it had five slices of ham in it that translated to twenty sandwiches, which turned out to be almost exactly right, with just one triangle left over at the end. I ate it.
Saturday, 4 March 2017
five down, forty-five to go
It was raining this morning when I got up. I wasn't sure at first if it was actually raining, or had been raining and was now just grey, but when I opened the bathroom window I could hear the tell-tale drumming of raindrops on the conservatory roof. Bother. The garden is lurching into life now, bulbs poking up, the new leaves of herbaceous plants unfurling and all-too-easily snapped off new shoots swelling on the roses, and I had fifty bags of chopped straw mulch to apply to the borders. I could very much do with it being dry. Apart from my own aversion to getting damp, it is near to impossible to apply fish, blood and bone around wet foliage without it sticking to the leaves, which burns them. Dry days in early March are the gardener's friend.
After a while it stopped raining. I weeded the gravel until lunchtime, hoping that the borders would dry off enough for me to make a start with the Strulch. The Libertia peregrinans has run tremendously, a true pilgrim. The bronze and olive green leaves are very pretty but I'm beginning to wonder if there might be too much of it. There are places where the gravel is very thin and needs topping up, but it seemed silly to order more gravel when I was so far off having used the mulch I already had.
By the afternoon the weak sunshine had dried off the foliage in the borders, even though the lower part of the garden was still evilly squishy, and I set to work tucking Strulch around the Camassia leaves in the far rose bed before they could get any taller. By the time it got too dark to see what I was doing I'd finished something over half the bed, which is by far the smallest bed I need to do, and used five bags of Strulch. The garden would probably happily absorb two pallets' worth of bags, if only I'd bought them, but I probably wouldn't have time to apply it all before growth was too far advanced. Fortunately last year's application is still quite thick in some places.
We had guests coming over to supper tonight, so while the Systems Administrator toiled in the kitchen I put new beeswax candles in the holders. We dipped them ourselves at a friend's candle making day, and they are undeniably hand made but so lumpy and irregular that no self-respecting artisan would admit to them. As a final flourish I tried to comb Our Ginger, who managed to moult a quite enormous quantity of hair over the last visitor he sat on. He purred all the time and seemed to enjoy being groomed but refused to roll over so that I could do the other side and then began to bat at the comb until I thought I'd better stop, so he remained primed to moult over the next guest to offer him a lap.
Moulted animal hair can have its advantages, though. One of yesterday's visitors once lent the family car to her son to take his stuff to university in Birmingham, where it was promptly stolen. The police caught four youths running away from the stolen car and arrested a fifth later on. All denied their involvement, but the evidence was incontrovertible. The five had dog hair on their clothing, which matched the dalmation hair stuck to every seat of the car.
After a while it stopped raining. I weeded the gravel until lunchtime, hoping that the borders would dry off enough for me to make a start with the Strulch. The Libertia peregrinans has run tremendously, a true pilgrim. The bronze and olive green leaves are very pretty but I'm beginning to wonder if there might be too much of it. There are places where the gravel is very thin and needs topping up, but it seemed silly to order more gravel when I was so far off having used the mulch I already had.
By the afternoon the weak sunshine had dried off the foliage in the borders, even though the lower part of the garden was still evilly squishy, and I set to work tucking Strulch around the Camassia leaves in the far rose bed before they could get any taller. By the time it got too dark to see what I was doing I'd finished something over half the bed, which is by far the smallest bed I need to do, and used five bags of Strulch. The garden would probably happily absorb two pallets' worth of bags, if only I'd bought them, but I probably wouldn't have time to apply it all before growth was too far advanced. Fortunately last year's application is still quite thick in some places.
We had guests coming over to supper tonight, so while the Systems Administrator toiled in the kitchen I put new beeswax candles in the holders. We dipped them ourselves at a friend's candle making day, and they are undeniably hand made but so lumpy and irregular that no self-respecting artisan would admit to them. As a final flourish I tried to comb Our Ginger, who managed to moult a quite enormous quantity of hair over the last visitor he sat on. He purred all the time and seemed to enjoy being groomed but refused to roll over so that I could do the other side and then began to bat at the comb until I thought I'd better stop, so he remained primed to moult over the next guest to offer him a lap.
Moulted animal hair can have its advantages, though. One of yesterday's visitors once lent the family car to her son to take his stuff to university in Birmingham, where it was promptly stolen. The police caught four youths running away from the stolen car and arrested a fifth later on. All denied their involvement, but the evidence was incontrovertible. The five had dog hair on their clothing, which matched the dalmation hair stuck to every seat of the car.
Friday, 3 March 2017
a tea party
I had friends round for tea today. I announced yesterday that I would like to use the study instead of the sitting room because it is so much easier to heat at this time of the year, and is fairly tidy at the moment, apart from the sort of normal surface mess of a room that gets used for hobbies besides eating and watching television. The Systems Administrator vacuumed in the morning, and lit the fire after lunch so that it would be warm. I moved an extra chair and a little table from the sitting room, washed the teapot which I hadn't used for such a long time that it was dusty, and dug out a milk jug.
I had a box of chocolate Liebnitz but nine biscuits seemed rather mean among four people, even if they were posh biscuits, so I made a honey loaf. It was rather a long time since I'd done one, and I couldn't remember whether it needed a baffle over it in the bottom oven of the Aga. Turns out it did, or at least the top caught. The risk of cooking sponge cakes at too low a temperature is that they don't rise properly, so it was a gamble either way. It is a good recipe, pleasantly moist, keeping for days and tasting of honey, but lacks kerb appeal even when you don't singe the top because it looks so plain. When I've made it for club events I've brought back more than half each time, and yet people who do try it like it to the point of asking for the recipe. You melt four ounces of soft brown sugar, five of butter and six of honey with a tablespoon of water, add two eggs and seven ounces of self raising flour, and cook it in a lined two pound loaf tin at 180 C for fifty minutes to an hour depending on your oven. Use a large saucepan to melt the butter and you can mix the eggs and flour in the same pan, leaving you with very little washing up.
My friends insisted they had never been in the study before. One of them knew the people we bought the house from, and she had never been in the study when they lived here either. It seems to be a fundamental feature of domestic architecture, holding across time and cultures, that dwellings have a hierarchy of rooms. There are relatively smart rooms, used for formal entertaining or business, and there are less smart (and possibly warmer and cosier) rooms, used for informal entertaining or reserved for private family use. Human nature being what it is we get a buzz from either the first time we are promoted to dinner in the grand dining room after a diet of coffee in the kitchen, or invited into the private sanctum and allowed to see the books and personal clutter instead of the tidy face of the house normally presented to outsiders. Upstairs is another country, rarely visited in other people's houses except for the loo.
Our Ginger who adores visitors planted himself firmly in the lap in front of the fire, and spent the rest of tea purring massively and moulting prodigiously. The artists formerly known as kittens believe that visitors are an appalling concept, and made themselves scarce. Even after our friends had departed and the kitties had been called in for their supper, Mr Cool was unnerved by the sight of the tea tray, and ran out into the garden when the Systems Administrator moved the little table back into the sitting room. The spare chair is still here in the study. We thought we'd better wait to move it until Mr Cool was out.
I had a box of chocolate Liebnitz but nine biscuits seemed rather mean among four people, even if they were posh biscuits, so I made a honey loaf. It was rather a long time since I'd done one, and I couldn't remember whether it needed a baffle over it in the bottom oven of the Aga. Turns out it did, or at least the top caught. The risk of cooking sponge cakes at too low a temperature is that they don't rise properly, so it was a gamble either way. It is a good recipe, pleasantly moist, keeping for days and tasting of honey, but lacks kerb appeal even when you don't singe the top because it looks so plain. When I've made it for club events I've brought back more than half each time, and yet people who do try it like it to the point of asking for the recipe. You melt four ounces of soft brown sugar, five of butter and six of honey with a tablespoon of water, add two eggs and seven ounces of self raising flour, and cook it in a lined two pound loaf tin at 180 C for fifty minutes to an hour depending on your oven. Use a large saucepan to melt the butter and you can mix the eggs and flour in the same pan, leaving you with very little washing up.
My friends insisted they had never been in the study before. One of them knew the people we bought the house from, and she had never been in the study when they lived here either. It seems to be a fundamental feature of domestic architecture, holding across time and cultures, that dwellings have a hierarchy of rooms. There are relatively smart rooms, used for formal entertaining or business, and there are less smart (and possibly warmer and cosier) rooms, used for informal entertaining or reserved for private family use. Human nature being what it is we get a buzz from either the first time we are promoted to dinner in the grand dining room after a diet of coffee in the kitchen, or invited into the private sanctum and allowed to see the books and personal clutter instead of the tidy face of the house normally presented to outsiders. Upstairs is another country, rarely visited in other people's houses except for the loo.
Our Ginger who adores visitors planted himself firmly in the lap in front of the fire, and spent the rest of tea purring massively and moulting prodigiously. The artists formerly known as kittens believe that visitors are an appalling concept, and made themselves scarce. Even after our friends had departed and the kitties had been called in for their supper, Mr Cool was unnerved by the sight of the tea tray, and ran out into the garden when the Systems Administrator moved the little table back into the sitting room. The spare chair is still here in the study. We thought we'd better wait to move it until Mr Cool was out.
Thursday, 2 March 2017
who's the lucky birthday boy
The kittens are one year old today. None of our other cats have had birthdays. We must have known the date the Maine Coons were born because it must have been somewhere on their pedigree papers, but we never knew exactly when any of our other cats were born. We don't even know for sure which year Our Ginger was born, since he gradually moved in with us as a grown cat, and our first splendid black cat came from an RSPCA rescue centre. But the kittens came with a note from the kitten rescue place giving details of the worm treatment they'd received, and stating that they were born on 2 March. It seemed too mean to celebrate their birthday when Our Ginger didn't have one, so from now on 2 March is his official birthday.
On Tuesday I roasted a chicken, so that yesterday I could boil the carcass and today they could have bits of cold boiled chicken for lunch. The remaining flesh always seems pretty mere to me after it's been simmered for stock for eight hours, but cats love it. I sang Happy Birthday to them as they ate it, but they ignored me. The Systems Administrator laughed.
Now they are a year old they are officially cats according to the Channel 5 Secret Life of Kittens. I have told them that they are supposed to be sensible from now on. The recent episode in which a pair of binoculars that had got left on the sitting room window sill behind the curtain was swept to the floor and broke should be the last of its kind (keeping binoculars on the window sill is not especially odd when the main thing you want them for is to look at birds out of the window). I expect to be able to leave paper handkerchief boxes the right way up without coming downstairs in the morning and finding that somebody has excavated all the hankies out of it.
They will probably be known as the kittens, or at least the kitties, for a while yet because we need a collective term that excludes Our Ginger when discussing acts of feline vandalism that he had nothing to do with. Our Ginger has been too sensible to destroy any binoculars or boxes of tissues for a long while now. I must admit that, birthday notwithstanding, I am not holding my breath in the expectation that The Artists Formerly Known as Kittens are about to become sober and upstanding citizens, and did not celebrate their anniversary by unpacking the china that's been safely tucked away in a box in the spare bedroom since they were let out of the study.
They have turned into lovely cats, even if the odd thing does still get broken. Mr Cool has grown into a big beast, with long elegant legs and tail like an engraving by Eric Ravilious. Mr Fluffy is immensely sweet-natured, purrs as soon as you pick him up every time, even if he wasn't asking to be picked up and you have interrupted him in the middle of doing something else, and washes his brothers and Our Ginger zealously. Mr Fidget bounces relentlessly, in and out of the cat door and round and round the room when all the others are quietly snoozing. He might prod one of them to try and get a reaction. He can't sit still long enough to sit in a lap, barely manages to stop wriggling long enough to be picked up, and has no sense of time passing so he wanders off just before mealtimes, but he likes human company and hangs around with us. Mr Cool has an impressive grasp of time. He goes out as soon as he has had his breakfast, but will come strolling in at ten to twelve for his lunch at noon, and at five to four for his tea.
Roll the clock back to June last year, when Mr Fluffy kept hissing at us after trying to hide from us along with Mr Fidget inside the fitted bookcases, while Mr Cool was mute with misery and wouldn't purr or venture on to our laps at all for three or four weeks, and Our Ginger howled and tried to escape each time he was shown the interlopers, and you see that things have come on a long way. And Our Ginger finally has a birthday.
On Tuesday I roasted a chicken, so that yesterday I could boil the carcass and today they could have bits of cold boiled chicken for lunch. The remaining flesh always seems pretty mere to me after it's been simmered for stock for eight hours, but cats love it. I sang Happy Birthday to them as they ate it, but they ignored me. The Systems Administrator laughed.
Now they are a year old they are officially cats according to the Channel 5 Secret Life of Kittens. I have told them that they are supposed to be sensible from now on. The recent episode in which a pair of binoculars that had got left on the sitting room window sill behind the curtain was swept to the floor and broke should be the last of its kind (keeping binoculars on the window sill is not especially odd when the main thing you want them for is to look at birds out of the window). I expect to be able to leave paper handkerchief boxes the right way up without coming downstairs in the morning and finding that somebody has excavated all the hankies out of it.
They will probably be known as the kittens, or at least the kitties, for a while yet because we need a collective term that excludes Our Ginger when discussing acts of feline vandalism that he had nothing to do with. Our Ginger has been too sensible to destroy any binoculars or boxes of tissues for a long while now. I must admit that, birthday notwithstanding, I am not holding my breath in the expectation that The Artists Formerly Known as Kittens are about to become sober and upstanding citizens, and did not celebrate their anniversary by unpacking the china that's been safely tucked away in a box in the spare bedroom since they were let out of the study.
They have turned into lovely cats, even if the odd thing does still get broken. Mr Cool has grown into a big beast, with long elegant legs and tail like an engraving by Eric Ravilious. Mr Fluffy is immensely sweet-natured, purrs as soon as you pick him up every time, even if he wasn't asking to be picked up and you have interrupted him in the middle of doing something else, and washes his brothers and Our Ginger zealously. Mr Fidget bounces relentlessly, in and out of the cat door and round and round the room when all the others are quietly snoozing. He might prod one of them to try and get a reaction. He can't sit still long enough to sit in a lap, barely manages to stop wriggling long enough to be picked up, and has no sense of time passing so he wanders off just before mealtimes, but he likes human company and hangs around with us. Mr Cool has an impressive grasp of time. He goes out as soon as he has had his breakfast, but will come strolling in at ten to twelve for his lunch at noon, and at five to four for his tea.
Roll the clock back to June last year, when Mr Fluffy kept hissing at us after trying to hide from us along with Mr Fidget inside the fitted bookcases, while Mr Cool was mute with misery and wouldn't purr or venture on to our laps at all for three or four weeks, and Our Ginger howled and tried to escape each time he was shown the interlopers, and you see that things have come on a long way. And Our Ginger finally has a birthday.
Wednesday, 1 March 2017
a question of priorities
I had to go into Colchester for a haircut. My hairdresser exclaimed about how much my hair had grown in six weeks, and I wondered if it really grew that much faster than other people's. If so I put it down to all the healthy exercise lugging piles of stuff around the garden. When I got home I moved the bags of Strulch in the back garden from off the grass on to the paving outside the garage. Each bag weighs 13.5 kilos according to the Strulch website, so the whole pallet's worth of fifty bags weighed 675 kilos, which equates to 1,485 pounds or 106 stone. No wonder we ached a bit after moving them all out of the gateway yesterday.
Before changing into my gardening clothes I vacuumed the bedroom. I didn't really feel like it, but there was rather a lot of grit in the carpet, most of which fell out of the hems of my gardening trousers where I rolled them up because I was too idle and impatient to cut off the six surplus inches of material and hem them properly. Since it was mostly my dirt I thought I had better clean it up, though the vacuum cleaner and I do not have a good relationship. It cut out and blinked its red light at me twice, demanding that I clear its filter. I keep thinking I ought to dust the bedroom, but that really is waiting for a wet day.
In the afternoon I sowed seeds in the greenhouse. The Strulch needs spreading, the prunings need shredding, but I thought I had better try and get the seeds out of their seed packets and into pots so that they could start growing while I was doing everything else. I don't understand why I only bought two packets of tomato seed, one cherry variety and one long Italian type for cooking. I have some 'Sungold' left from last year, an F1 variety with eye-wateringly expensive seeds, not to be wasted, and some 'Black Russian' that's getting a bit old, but what else was I planning to do? There is room for six grow bags in the greenhouse, and The Range does a better deal on them if you buy them in pairs, or was it sets of three? Either way I am sure I meant to do six bags this year. I should probably trial a second plum variety, to try and find one that does well here.
When I visit private gardens open to the public, not grand acres attached to an historic house but good everyday gardens open for the Yellow Book scheme or the Red Cross, I am surprised at how few of them have a greenhouse or show any signs of propagating activity. Raising your own plants is such fun, it is surely an intrinsic part of gardening for the true enthusiast. And if you have a lot of space to fill it is a significantly cheaper way of getting a lot of plants than buying them all from a garden cente or nursery. And you would have surplus plants to sell to visitors in aid of your chosen charity. Then at this time of year I remember how much time it takes, with the sowing, the pricking out, the lining up of pots and keeping them watered and weeded until you are ready to use them out in the garden. I guess maintaining a garden to the standard where you would feel comfortable charging people to go round it is a whole art form in itself, and probably doesn't leave enough time over for much in the way of propagation.
Before changing into my gardening clothes I vacuumed the bedroom. I didn't really feel like it, but there was rather a lot of grit in the carpet, most of which fell out of the hems of my gardening trousers where I rolled them up because I was too idle and impatient to cut off the six surplus inches of material and hem them properly. Since it was mostly my dirt I thought I had better clean it up, though the vacuum cleaner and I do not have a good relationship. It cut out and blinked its red light at me twice, demanding that I clear its filter. I keep thinking I ought to dust the bedroom, but that really is waiting for a wet day.
In the afternoon I sowed seeds in the greenhouse. The Strulch needs spreading, the prunings need shredding, but I thought I had better try and get the seeds out of their seed packets and into pots so that they could start growing while I was doing everything else. I don't understand why I only bought two packets of tomato seed, one cherry variety and one long Italian type for cooking. I have some 'Sungold' left from last year, an F1 variety with eye-wateringly expensive seeds, not to be wasted, and some 'Black Russian' that's getting a bit old, but what else was I planning to do? There is room for six grow bags in the greenhouse, and The Range does a better deal on them if you buy them in pairs, or was it sets of three? Either way I am sure I meant to do six bags this year. I should probably trial a second plum variety, to try and find one that does well here.
When I visit private gardens open to the public, not grand acres attached to an historic house but good everyday gardens open for the Yellow Book scheme or the Red Cross, I am surprised at how few of them have a greenhouse or show any signs of propagating activity. Raising your own plants is such fun, it is surely an intrinsic part of gardening for the true enthusiast. And if you have a lot of space to fill it is a significantly cheaper way of getting a lot of plants than buying them all from a garden cente or nursery. And you would have surplus plants to sell to visitors in aid of your chosen charity. Then at this time of year I remember how much time it takes, with the sowing, the pricking out, the lining up of pots and keeping them watered and weeded until you are ready to use them out in the garden. I guess maintaining a garden to the standard where you would feel comfortable charging people to go round it is a whole art form in itself, and probably doesn't leave enough time over for much in the way of propagation.
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
the mulch arrives
The Strulch arrived today. Strulch stands for straw mulch. It consists of chopped up straw, treated with a mystery mixture of minerals, that prevents annual weeds from germinating in the borders, helps keep moisture in the soil, and lasts for about two years before rotting down. It is very useful in the garden, though not so exciting as some new plants or a sculpture would be. None of the local garden centres stock it. You can buy it by the bag from Crocus, but it is much cheaper per litre if you buy it by the pallet load direct from the manufacturers.
This must have been my fourth or fifth order, which represents an awful lot of plants and sculptures I could have had, but also an awful lot of hours I could have spent weeding and watering. I ordered by phone, to make sure I got my five per cent off for ordering before the end of February and to try and give precise delivery instructions. The company founder, who still answers the phone herself by name when you ring up, balked at the instructions, saying plaintively that the delivery company only gave her a very small box in which to write anything.
It is the delivery stage that is most problematic when buying a pallet of Strulch. Ordering it is fine. The company founder is always polite and very pleased that you are buying her product, the Strulch always arrives on the day you have specified, the correct amount is always charged to your credit card. Persuading the carrier to communicate anything about the delivery to the driver is another matter. Add that to the unpredictable and congested roads of the south east and you have a perfect witches' brew. There was the time the lorry didn't arrive until dusk due to catastrophic traffic delays on the M25 and the A12, and still had more deliveries to make after unloading ours. There was no working interior light, and as the driver lowered the tail lift with the pallet on it the whole thing collapsed, scattering bags all over the drive. There was the time the driver could not get the pallet jack off the tail lift because it bogged down in the gravel, and we ended up breaking down the pallet in situ. He was jolly grumpy about that. It does say in the terms and conditions that the driver is not obliged to handle the bags. There was the driver who drove in forwards, having not read my instructions to reverse up the track because they were taped to the pallet with no copy in the cab. We had to give up with the tail lift that time and offload every bad individually off the side of the lorry. I think that driver was quite cheerful about it. The others blur into a composite of wing mirrors sticking in the eleagnus hedge, and the jack never, ever working on the gravel. I know they don't, but gravel is what we've got.
I wanted to tell today's driver to reverse up to the house, but the instructions on how to find the house and when to start reversing wouldn't fit in the little box, so I told Strulch that he (or she, but it is always a he) should ring us when they got to the farm and we would come and explain. The message didn't get through, as usual, and I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen within earshot of the phone which never rang, until at noon I went out to do some weeding by way of a change, still within easy reach of the phone, and instead heard a lorry which seemed not to be part of the lettuce farm because it was getting nearer. I scooted down the track and explained he would do better to reverse in then he could drive straight out, and it took him ages to turn round at the farm and come back up again. I was slightly puzzled that the lorry belonged to a firm of sash window specialists, and the driver said that his lorry was being serviced and he had never driven this one before.
Then it took some time to unhook the rear curtain which was very stiff. Our pallet was impressively guyed with several ropes and seemed to be the only cargo, and the pallet trolley provided was barely able to lift it off the floor. The driver asked hopefully if the Systems Adminstrator could come up and push. I stepped well back out of the way, wondering what the penalties for the driver would be if there was any kind of accident, and ready to shout if the SA looked like stepping backwards off the tail lift. The pallet did not want to be pushed, and the tail lift was barely wide enough for it, but eventually they got the pallet to the ground, and then the trolley would not wheel off the lift, even though we were doing the whole exercise at the gate where it's mostly just tarmac. I suggested they might be able to topple the whole thing off, since it wouldn't hurt the Strulch, but it was too heavy, and we ended up dragging all fifty bags off by hand as usual.
Fifty one hundred and fifty litre bags of straw mulch make an impressive barricade, and the driver now saw why I was so keen on him reversing in, if he hadn't before, while I was very glad we didn't have to move all fifty bags past the lorry before he could leave. The SA set about hauling half the bags in the garden trolley over to the concrete by the greenhouse for later use, and I humped the other half round to the back garden to use more immediately, and luckily no other vehicles arrived before we'd finished. Lunch was very late, and there were no pancakes left over for breakfast even though I'd made a pint of batter.
It rained in the afternoon, and I honestly felt as though I'd lifted enough straw mulch for one day. I'm all set to go, though. I have fifty bags of Strulch and twenty-five kilos of blood, fish and bone. A full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes. It's dark and I'm wearing prescription safety glasses. There is going to be some serious mulching going on in the next couple of weeks.
This must have been my fourth or fifth order, which represents an awful lot of plants and sculptures I could have had, but also an awful lot of hours I could have spent weeding and watering. I ordered by phone, to make sure I got my five per cent off for ordering before the end of February and to try and give precise delivery instructions. The company founder, who still answers the phone herself by name when you ring up, balked at the instructions, saying plaintively that the delivery company only gave her a very small box in which to write anything.
It is the delivery stage that is most problematic when buying a pallet of Strulch. Ordering it is fine. The company founder is always polite and very pleased that you are buying her product, the Strulch always arrives on the day you have specified, the correct amount is always charged to your credit card. Persuading the carrier to communicate anything about the delivery to the driver is another matter. Add that to the unpredictable and congested roads of the south east and you have a perfect witches' brew. There was the time the lorry didn't arrive until dusk due to catastrophic traffic delays on the M25 and the A12, and still had more deliveries to make after unloading ours. There was no working interior light, and as the driver lowered the tail lift with the pallet on it the whole thing collapsed, scattering bags all over the drive. There was the time the driver could not get the pallet jack off the tail lift because it bogged down in the gravel, and we ended up breaking down the pallet in situ. He was jolly grumpy about that. It does say in the terms and conditions that the driver is not obliged to handle the bags. There was the driver who drove in forwards, having not read my instructions to reverse up the track because they were taped to the pallet with no copy in the cab. We had to give up with the tail lift that time and offload every bad individually off the side of the lorry. I think that driver was quite cheerful about it. The others blur into a composite of wing mirrors sticking in the eleagnus hedge, and the jack never, ever working on the gravel. I know they don't, but gravel is what we've got.
I wanted to tell today's driver to reverse up to the house, but the instructions on how to find the house and when to start reversing wouldn't fit in the little box, so I told Strulch that he (or she, but it is always a he) should ring us when they got to the farm and we would come and explain. The message didn't get through, as usual, and I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen within earshot of the phone which never rang, until at noon I went out to do some weeding by way of a change, still within easy reach of the phone, and instead heard a lorry which seemed not to be part of the lettuce farm because it was getting nearer. I scooted down the track and explained he would do better to reverse in then he could drive straight out, and it took him ages to turn round at the farm and come back up again. I was slightly puzzled that the lorry belonged to a firm of sash window specialists, and the driver said that his lorry was being serviced and he had never driven this one before.
Then it took some time to unhook the rear curtain which was very stiff. Our pallet was impressively guyed with several ropes and seemed to be the only cargo, and the pallet trolley provided was barely able to lift it off the floor. The driver asked hopefully if the Systems Adminstrator could come up and push. I stepped well back out of the way, wondering what the penalties for the driver would be if there was any kind of accident, and ready to shout if the SA looked like stepping backwards off the tail lift. The pallet did not want to be pushed, and the tail lift was barely wide enough for it, but eventually they got the pallet to the ground, and then the trolley would not wheel off the lift, even though we were doing the whole exercise at the gate where it's mostly just tarmac. I suggested they might be able to topple the whole thing off, since it wouldn't hurt the Strulch, but it was too heavy, and we ended up dragging all fifty bags off by hand as usual.
Fifty one hundred and fifty litre bags of straw mulch make an impressive barricade, and the driver now saw why I was so keen on him reversing in, if he hadn't before, while I was very glad we didn't have to move all fifty bags past the lorry before he could leave. The SA set about hauling half the bags in the garden trolley over to the concrete by the greenhouse for later use, and I humped the other half round to the back garden to use more immediately, and luckily no other vehicles arrived before we'd finished. Lunch was very late, and there were no pancakes left over for breakfast even though I'd made a pint of batter.
It rained in the afternoon, and I honestly felt as though I'd lifted enough straw mulch for one day. I'm all set to go, though. I have fifty bags of Strulch and twenty-five kilos of blood, fish and bone. A full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes. It's dark and I'm wearing prescription safety glasses. There is going to be some serious mulching going on in the next couple of weeks.
Monday, 27 February 2017
a grand send-off
The funeral was enormous. We arrived half an hour before time, and had to queue to turn off the main road into the lane leading to the church because cars were stacked up nose to tail all the way down the lane to the farmyard that had been co-opted for overflow parking. There was somebody on car park duty, and we were relieved to be given a spot that felt as though there was something reasonably solid underneath the mud.
When one of the neighbours told us that there was going to be a marquee at the church I didn't quite believe him, but there was, and even then there was not room for everybody to sit down and there were people standing all around the edges of the marquee. We watched the service relayed to two screens by the same firm that does the sound system for the Tendring Show every year. It was a good service. There is something rather poignant about hearing about the early life of someone you only knew when they were old. Our late neighbour used to play hockey as a young man, and I'd never have guessed that, or imagined him as tall and as thin as he was when he got married, several years before I was born.
Although the funeral service was held in the local church where he used to be a church warden the commital was held in the crematorium at Colchester, for family only, which gave us a breathing space to go home and dish out the cats' lunch. As we turned up the track to our house we could see somebody down on the farm in a high visibility jacket frantically waving to us to let us know we were heading in the wrong direction and funeral parking was over here. We gave it half an hour before walking down to the second marquee in our late neighbour's garden, and it was another hour before the family arrived.
At a big country funeral you see how different strands of life tie together. We met another of the local beekeepers and his mother who did the teas when he hosted beekeepers' meetings in his garden. The treasurer of my music society came with his wife. There were a couple of ladies from my ladies' group, and the owner of the lettuce farm. Even the caterer was a familiar face because he did the drinks and nibbles for the Dedham party we went to only three weeks ago, at which point our neighbour was still alive and comparatively well. Our late neighbour was a sociable man who after his wife died went to a lot of trouble hosting lunch parties, including the odd gathering for the locals, and he continued the tradition even in death as we met the couple who live in another of the houses on the farm. Tucked away down our separate tracks we don't bump into each other very often.
In the afternoon we performed a second social duty and went to help take down the stage in the church left from yesterday's concert. There were four of us including the guardian of the stage who is eighty-six and has just had an operation for carpal tunnel syndrome so was not supposed to be lifting anything but seemed very keen to carry things anyway in his one good hand, and the stage came down pretty easily. I persuaded the Systems Administrator to come and help in case we needed the extra muscle power or technical input from a person who was technically competent, since I and my fellow volunteer who writes the programme notes will both cheerfully admit that we are no good with machinery. It was certainly faster with all of us, but we could have done it without the SA's help if we'd had to. The chairman, who is forbidden to lift anything at the moment following a cataract operation, appeared just as we were finishing with the offer of tea.
It rained all day, so it's not as if I missed any gardening. The cats were bored stiff.
When one of the neighbours told us that there was going to be a marquee at the church I didn't quite believe him, but there was, and even then there was not room for everybody to sit down and there were people standing all around the edges of the marquee. We watched the service relayed to two screens by the same firm that does the sound system for the Tendring Show every year. It was a good service. There is something rather poignant about hearing about the early life of someone you only knew when they were old. Our late neighbour used to play hockey as a young man, and I'd never have guessed that, or imagined him as tall and as thin as he was when he got married, several years before I was born.
Although the funeral service was held in the local church where he used to be a church warden the commital was held in the crematorium at Colchester, for family only, which gave us a breathing space to go home and dish out the cats' lunch. As we turned up the track to our house we could see somebody down on the farm in a high visibility jacket frantically waving to us to let us know we were heading in the wrong direction and funeral parking was over here. We gave it half an hour before walking down to the second marquee in our late neighbour's garden, and it was another hour before the family arrived.
At a big country funeral you see how different strands of life tie together. We met another of the local beekeepers and his mother who did the teas when he hosted beekeepers' meetings in his garden. The treasurer of my music society came with his wife. There were a couple of ladies from my ladies' group, and the owner of the lettuce farm. Even the caterer was a familiar face because he did the drinks and nibbles for the Dedham party we went to only three weeks ago, at which point our neighbour was still alive and comparatively well. Our late neighbour was a sociable man who after his wife died went to a lot of trouble hosting lunch parties, including the odd gathering for the locals, and he continued the tradition even in death as we met the couple who live in another of the houses on the farm. Tucked away down our separate tracks we don't bump into each other very often.
In the afternoon we performed a second social duty and went to help take down the stage in the church left from yesterday's concert. There were four of us including the guardian of the stage who is eighty-six and has just had an operation for carpal tunnel syndrome so was not supposed to be lifting anything but seemed very keen to carry things anyway in his one good hand, and the stage came down pretty easily. I persuaded the Systems Administrator to come and help in case we needed the extra muscle power or technical input from a person who was technically competent, since I and my fellow volunteer who writes the programme notes will both cheerfully admit that we are no good with machinery. It was certainly faster with all of us, but we could have done it without the SA's help if we'd had to. The chairman, who is forbidden to lift anything at the moment following a cataract operation, appeared just as we were finishing with the offer of tea.
It rained all day, so it's not as if I missed any gardening. The cats were bored stiff.
Sunday, 26 February 2017
out and about
I have been out enough that the cats look reproachful when I come in. Last night soon after getting back from the lecture on Meconopsis I was off out again to a quiz night, organised by a friend to raise funds for her village hall. Village halls do sometimes seem to take on a life of their own, existing to host events to raise the money needed to run the hall. Though this one does hold external events as well.
Our table managed to turn in a solidly middling performance, so we did not win but neither did we disgrace ourselves. We did very badly on the sports round and not much better on the TV soaps, which was not surprising given that nobody around the table followed either. I was disappointed that we did so badly on the UK geography round, but they were hard questions. Would you know which was Britain's second largest cathedral? Or in which port Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Dickens were born? I didn't, and I have read a biography of Brunel. I can't have been paying attention. But I did know that Pilsner was brewed in Czechoslovakia and make a correct guess that the Midlands town where Marston's was originally brewed was Burton-upon-Trent, based on the fact that I knew that something had been brewed there on account of Burton-upon-Trent's highly suitable water supply, and as nobody else around the table had any better idea then it might have been Marston's. And I managed to dredge from the depths of my memory the name of the firm that Reginald Perrin worked for. Sunshine Desserts. Eleven minutes late, staff difficulties.
The cats were rather hurt when I got home at quarter to eleven and I had to sit up with them for a while. Then this afternoon I abandoned them again for a music society concert. I was slightly later than I meant to be getting there because as I got into the car I realised that the chickens were looking at me so had to go and check what it was that they wanted. They had run out of food and since I couldn't drive off and leave them hungry until after chicken bedtime I had to unlock the front door again and sort out some food for them. When I arrived at the church it was already quite full, but fortuitously there was a seat vacant next to my former colleague from the plant centre in a spot that gave a proper sight line to the stage, not hidden behind a pillar which is is the risk if you arrive late.
We had a string quartet and they played Shostakovich, Borodin, Beethoven, and two pieces by still living composers who I had never heard of, and one of which I spelled wrong on the website until the chairman pointed it out. The third movement from Borodin's string quartet no. 2 is one of those bits of music that make you go Oh, this, when you hear it, because it is so familiar. How it came to be so much more familiar than the other three movements of the same quartet I can't work out. Somebody told me it was used in Kismet, but I haven't seen Kismet so that can't be it. The Borodin was immensely pretty, and there is nothing wrong with music being attractive sometimes, but it was the Shostakovich that made my skin prickle. Beethoven was muscular and admirable.
The modern piece by the Irish composer was recognisably Irish and quite interesting, with fragments of My Lagan Love underneath the Radiophonic Workshop effects, or so it seemed to me. Whether it was more interesting than a straight set of Irish airs played by Martin Hayes is a moot point. The modern piece by a Norwegian composer did not sound Scandinavian at all to me, more like Bloch, but maybe he wasn't aiming to sound Norwegian.
By the time I got home the Systems Administrator had returned from a racing mini-tour taking in Exeter and Chepstow, having had a very nice time but having caught a cold, possibly from getting rained on at Chepstow. The SA had fed the cats, which was just as well as half way to the concert I remembered I'd forgotten to give them an advance on their tea to tide them over. Apparently they were pleased to see the SA, a fresh face after two and half days of nobody but me.
Our table managed to turn in a solidly middling performance, so we did not win but neither did we disgrace ourselves. We did very badly on the sports round and not much better on the TV soaps, which was not surprising given that nobody around the table followed either. I was disappointed that we did so badly on the UK geography round, but they were hard questions. Would you know which was Britain's second largest cathedral? Or in which port Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Dickens were born? I didn't, and I have read a biography of Brunel. I can't have been paying attention. But I did know that Pilsner was brewed in Czechoslovakia and make a correct guess that the Midlands town where Marston's was originally brewed was Burton-upon-Trent, based on the fact that I knew that something had been brewed there on account of Burton-upon-Trent's highly suitable water supply, and as nobody else around the table had any better idea then it might have been Marston's. And I managed to dredge from the depths of my memory the name of the firm that Reginald Perrin worked for. Sunshine Desserts. Eleven minutes late, staff difficulties.
The cats were rather hurt when I got home at quarter to eleven and I had to sit up with them for a while. Then this afternoon I abandoned them again for a music society concert. I was slightly later than I meant to be getting there because as I got into the car I realised that the chickens were looking at me so had to go and check what it was that they wanted. They had run out of food and since I couldn't drive off and leave them hungry until after chicken bedtime I had to unlock the front door again and sort out some food for them. When I arrived at the church it was already quite full, but fortuitously there was a seat vacant next to my former colleague from the plant centre in a spot that gave a proper sight line to the stage, not hidden behind a pillar which is is the risk if you arrive late.
We had a string quartet and they played Shostakovich, Borodin, Beethoven, and two pieces by still living composers who I had never heard of, and one of which I spelled wrong on the website until the chairman pointed it out. The third movement from Borodin's string quartet no. 2 is one of those bits of music that make you go Oh, this, when you hear it, because it is so familiar. How it came to be so much more familiar than the other three movements of the same quartet I can't work out. Somebody told me it was used in Kismet, but I haven't seen Kismet so that can't be it. The Borodin was immensely pretty, and there is nothing wrong with music being attractive sometimes, but it was the Shostakovich that made my skin prickle. Beethoven was muscular and admirable.
The modern piece by the Irish composer was recognisably Irish and quite interesting, with fragments of My Lagan Love underneath the Radiophonic Workshop effects, or so it seemed to me. Whether it was more interesting than a straight set of Irish airs played by Martin Hayes is a moot point. The modern piece by a Norwegian composer did not sound Scandinavian at all to me, more like Bloch, but maybe he wasn't aiming to sound Norwegian.
By the time I got home the Systems Administrator had returned from a racing mini-tour taking in Exeter and Chepstow, having had a very nice time but having caught a cold, possibly from getting rained on at Chepstow. The SA had fed the cats, which was just as well as half way to the concert I remembered I'd forgotten to give them an advance on their tea to tide them over. Apparently they were pleased to see the SA, a fresh face after two and half days of nobody but me.
Saturday, 25 February 2017
dreams of blue poppies
I went to the monthly Suffolk Plant Heritage meeting this afternoon. The lecture was by Christopher Grey-Wilson, former senior Kew botanist, plant hunter, authority on alpines, cyclamen guru, and expert extraordinaire. He was talking on the subject of blue poppies, which don't really grow awfully well in East Anglia, but it doesn't hurt to dream of things you aren't going to do yourself. After all, I enjoy the art documentaries on BBC4 despite the fact that I am never going to own a Rembrandt or a Rothko.
Christopher Grey-Wilson assured us that we could grow a few species of Meconopsis even in the dry flatlands, but since his suggested method involved half barrels filled with leaf mould over a base layer of manure I thought I probably wouldn't try. I don't really have a sheltered, semi-shaded spot within easy reach of a tap where I could stand the half barrel, assuming that I had a half barrel, which I haven't. I could always get one, or make do with the old log basket that's been sitting in the garage since the bottom fell out, in case it came in useful as a planter lined with an old compost bag turned black side out. But I could not conjure up the damp air they would prefer. Blue poppies, and the white and yellow and purple and red flowered species of Meconopsis, are children of the monsoon. They would like a great deal of rain between May and June, and to be shrouded in mist. They are not going to feel at home in the Clacton coastal strip, the driest bit of land in England.
They all come from north Asia, the great mountainous sweep of Tibet, the western reaches of China, Bhutan, the far north of India and northern Myanmar. The species from really high altitudes, eighteen or twenty thousand feet, are almost impossible to grow in the UK even for the experts at Kew. Some species from lower altitudes and relatively low rainfall areas will grow beautifully in Scottish and Irish gardens and the Lake District. I have seen blue poppies growing in an Essex garden, and their owner was very proud of them, but they did not honestly luxuriate like the ones in a photograph of a Scottish garden shown to us by Christopher Grey-Wilson in his talk.
Many species are not perennial even if you can get them to grow. A plant that takes between two and six years to form a rosette up to a yard across before throwing up a magnificent spike of flowers, following which it promptly dies, is not going to be easy to incorporate into a normal smallish garden designed for low to medium maintenance. I wish now I had asked Christopher Grey-Wilson what, if anything, people who grow them use to fill the gaps while the rosettes are building up to full size, since you would not want anything that competed with the poppies or that was so rare and precious that you would mind if the poppies' expanding rosettes smothered it. The lovely little red flowered Meconopsis punicea, star of the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, almost always dies after flowering and to add insult to injury does not set seed in the Essex climate.
The cheerful little Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica, has been reclassified by the botanists and is no longer considered a member of the genus. I have never introduced them to our garden because their reputation for reckless self seeding makes even me nervous, and because I am not sure I am so keen on that shade of yellow that I want it everywhere all summer.
So it was an enjoyable talk, and it was nice to catch up with a former colleague from the plant centre whom I hadn't seen for a while, but I think I will go on enjoying blue poppies in the pages of magazines and at Chelsea, and leave the challenge of growing them to other people.
Christopher Grey-Wilson assured us that we could grow a few species of Meconopsis even in the dry flatlands, but since his suggested method involved half barrels filled with leaf mould over a base layer of manure I thought I probably wouldn't try. I don't really have a sheltered, semi-shaded spot within easy reach of a tap where I could stand the half barrel, assuming that I had a half barrel, which I haven't. I could always get one, or make do with the old log basket that's been sitting in the garage since the bottom fell out, in case it came in useful as a planter lined with an old compost bag turned black side out. But I could not conjure up the damp air they would prefer. Blue poppies, and the white and yellow and purple and red flowered species of Meconopsis, are children of the monsoon. They would like a great deal of rain between May and June, and to be shrouded in mist. They are not going to feel at home in the Clacton coastal strip, the driest bit of land in England.
They all come from north Asia, the great mountainous sweep of Tibet, the western reaches of China, Bhutan, the far north of India and northern Myanmar. The species from really high altitudes, eighteen or twenty thousand feet, are almost impossible to grow in the UK even for the experts at Kew. Some species from lower altitudes and relatively low rainfall areas will grow beautifully in Scottish and Irish gardens and the Lake District. I have seen blue poppies growing in an Essex garden, and their owner was very proud of them, but they did not honestly luxuriate like the ones in a photograph of a Scottish garden shown to us by Christopher Grey-Wilson in his talk.
Many species are not perennial even if you can get them to grow. A plant that takes between two and six years to form a rosette up to a yard across before throwing up a magnificent spike of flowers, following which it promptly dies, is not going to be easy to incorporate into a normal smallish garden designed for low to medium maintenance. I wish now I had asked Christopher Grey-Wilson what, if anything, people who grow them use to fill the gaps while the rosettes are building up to full size, since you would not want anything that competed with the poppies or that was so rare and precious that you would mind if the poppies' expanding rosettes smothered it. The lovely little red flowered Meconopsis punicea, star of the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, almost always dies after flowering and to add insult to injury does not set seed in the Essex climate.
The cheerful little Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica, has been reclassified by the botanists and is no longer considered a member of the genus. I have never introduced them to our garden because their reputation for reckless self seeding makes even me nervous, and because I am not sure I am so keen on that shade of yellow that I want it everywhere all summer.
So it was an enjoyable talk, and it was nice to catch up with a former colleague from the plant centre whom I hadn't seen for a while, but I think I will go on enjoying blue poppies in the pages of magazines and at Chelsea, and leave the challenge of growing them to other people.
Friday, 24 February 2017
shredding and sowing
As I pulled up the bathroom blind this morning it was a relief to see all the trees still standing in the wake of Storm Doris. Overall the damage hasn't been too bad. Some roof felt is flapping on the Systems Administrator's summerhouse, but it was due to be re-roofed with corrugated sheets anyway since the SA got fed up with mending it after gales. Some felt has gone on my pot shed as well, which was more of a blow since the pot shed was not scheduled for a new roof this summer. The battens we installed to stop the felt ballooning up and ripping in a gale had snapped in one corner, so they must have rotted. An acrylic pane popped out of the greenhouse roof but did not break and can be slid in again. And that was about it. I feared worse.
I spent the morning processing hedge trimmings between firewood and smaller bits for shredding. Truthfully I'd rather have been doing something that felt more like gardening, but I thought I'd better show my appreciation of the hours the Systems Administrator has put into cutting the hedge rather than appearing to ignore the meadow entirely. Work got off to a slow start since pieces of willow from the far bottom corner of the back garden had got mixed up with everything else in the muddle of branches round the bonfire heap. Willow doesn't go through our rather elderly shredder properly and wraps itself around the insides in long strips instead of emerging as chunky chips of wood ready to be used as mulch around the compost bins. It is possible to tell the difference between willow branches and the rest, hawthorn, hazel, dogwood and field maple when they are all out of leaf, but it is not the easiest thing to do in a hurry. The buds and habit of growth and texture of the bark are all different, but the buds are difficult to see clearly when you are as short sighted and middle aged as I am and wearing distance glasses instead of varifocals.
By lunchtime I'd got half a dozen big bags of chippings and made a pitifully small dent on the trail of branches in the meadow, but I decided that would have to do for the time being. After lunch I set about starting to sow seeds in the greenhouse, after a long preamble moving pots around to make room on the bench for my new propagating cases. Those Fritillaria meleagris that were in full growth were stood outside on the concrete, where I am hoping Mr Cool will defend them from attack by rodents. Some bulbs had gone mouldy in their pots despite my best efforts not to over water them. It is faintly surprising that they are so fussy about their watering regime in pots when you think that in the wild they grow in damp river meadows, but they are.
I rinsed the inside of the heated propagating case, wiped it with kitchen towel and sprayed it with Milton for luck. Mould is one of the big problems when trying to raise plants from seed in a crowded multi-purpose greenhouse. It is disheartening when nothing even comes up while a fuzzy layer of fungus spreads over the surface of the compost. Mind you, sometimes you can see it started on the coats of the seeds themselves. I used to water the seed pots with the copper based fungicide Cheshunt compound, but it was withdrawn a few years ago, and there is nothing now marketed to amateurs to treat pots of seeds. Good hygiene and sparse sowing to avoid overcrowding the seedlings are about the best you can do.
I hope the seed compost will be all right. Seed composts need to be low in nutrients and drain well while simultaneously not drying right out too easily. I bought a new bag of a John Innes type compost last week, and fluffed it with my fingers to break up any lumps while avoiding tamping it down to leave the air in it, but was rather surprised at how much it settled in the pots as soon as I watered it. I am using new pots as well, and only sowing half the packet if there are plenty of seeds in it so I can have another go if the first sowing fails. I enjoy growing things from seed, and it is a great way of getting lots of plants if you need to cover the ground and of obtaining things you won't see offered for sale in most garden centres, but I am more relaxed about it a couple of weeks after sowing when I can see the first tiny shoots emerging and no mass outbreak of mould, and know that the compost was OK and I got the watering right.
I spent the morning processing hedge trimmings between firewood and smaller bits for shredding. Truthfully I'd rather have been doing something that felt more like gardening, but I thought I'd better show my appreciation of the hours the Systems Administrator has put into cutting the hedge rather than appearing to ignore the meadow entirely. Work got off to a slow start since pieces of willow from the far bottom corner of the back garden had got mixed up with everything else in the muddle of branches round the bonfire heap. Willow doesn't go through our rather elderly shredder properly and wraps itself around the insides in long strips instead of emerging as chunky chips of wood ready to be used as mulch around the compost bins. It is possible to tell the difference between willow branches and the rest, hawthorn, hazel, dogwood and field maple when they are all out of leaf, but it is not the easiest thing to do in a hurry. The buds and habit of growth and texture of the bark are all different, but the buds are difficult to see clearly when you are as short sighted and middle aged as I am and wearing distance glasses instead of varifocals.
By lunchtime I'd got half a dozen big bags of chippings and made a pitifully small dent on the trail of branches in the meadow, but I decided that would have to do for the time being. After lunch I set about starting to sow seeds in the greenhouse, after a long preamble moving pots around to make room on the bench for my new propagating cases. Those Fritillaria meleagris that were in full growth were stood outside on the concrete, where I am hoping Mr Cool will defend them from attack by rodents. Some bulbs had gone mouldy in their pots despite my best efforts not to over water them. It is faintly surprising that they are so fussy about their watering regime in pots when you think that in the wild they grow in damp river meadows, but they are.
I rinsed the inside of the heated propagating case, wiped it with kitchen towel and sprayed it with Milton for luck. Mould is one of the big problems when trying to raise plants from seed in a crowded multi-purpose greenhouse. It is disheartening when nothing even comes up while a fuzzy layer of fungus spreads over the surface of the compost. Mind you, sometimes you can see it started on the coats of the seeds themselves. I used to water the seed pots with the copper based fungicide Cheshunt compound, but it was withdrawn a few years ago, and there is nothing now marketed to amateurs to treat pots of seeds. Good hygiene and sparse sowing to avoid overcrowding the seedlings are about the best you can do.
I hope the seed compost will be all right. Seed composts need to be low in nutrients and drain well while simultaneously not drying right out too easily. I bought a new bag of a John Innes type compost last week, and fluffed it with my fingers to break up any lumps while avoiding tamping it down to leave the air in it, but was rather surprised at how much it settled in the pots as soon as I watered it. I am using new pots as well, and only sowing half the packet if there are plenty of seeds in it so I can have another go if the first sowing fails. I enjoy growing things from seed, and it is a great way of getting lots of plants if you need to cover the ground and of obtaining things you won't see offered for sale in most garden centres, but I am more relaxed about it a couple of weeks after sowing when I can see the first tiny shoots emerging and no mass outbreak of mould, and know that the compost was OK and I got the watering right.
Thursday, 23 February 2017
stormbound
Storm Doris put paid to outdoor work today, and is upsetting the cats. Strong winds always make them jumpy and reluctant to go outside. Instead they spent the day mostly indoors, staring out of the window, sitting in boxes, wandering around aimlessly, creeping up to me for reassurance, and rioting in turn.
I occupied myself for the first part of the morning clearing out a cache of geriatric marmalade from the garage. I made a great deal too much in February 2011. I don't know what I was thinking of, except that I like making marmalade and I think the first batch had come out a bit too dark and I was keen for another go. After six years what is left had darkened to a colour close to treacle, and crystallised rock hard on to the walls of the jars. It would have been nice just to chuck the whole lot into a bin bag, but good citizen that I am I felt obliged to scoop out what I could and put it in the food recycling bin, and put the jars to soak until I could get the solidified shards of marmalade out prior to putting the jars in the glass recycling skip.
Then I began to sort out our CD collection, thus marking myself down as deeply nerdy on at least two counts. But it needed sorting out because it had got to the point where it was very difficult to find whatever you wanted to listen to, because as I kept buying CDs work in the same genre and even by the same artist got split between different shelves and boxes. And as I intend to go on buying CDs I needed space to slot future purchases in. I know it wholly unnecessary and I could buy downloads instead and help save the planet, since I am so anxious about recycling jam jars and old marmalade, but I like CDs. I like owning a physical thing that I can put in a machine and it will work, most of the time. I still have all my old vinyl as well. Some of my CDs date from the earliest days of the technology and they still play, contrary to some dire predictions, while no computer I have ever owned has lasted more than five years tops. I know I could store downloads in the cloud, but it seems so much easier just to have a small box on a shelf. And I am not the most computer literate person and can imagine myself getting in a real muddle by the time I'd bought downloads from Presto Classical and Amazon and direct from artists websites, trying to integrate them all into one collection and keep tabs of what was being safeguarded by whom. I trust Amazon to look after the books on my Kindle, but they won't be interested in curating music bought from other sources.
As if to preempt my thought that I should sort out the CDs the cats got the ball rolling by tipping over one of the stands the CDs live in. Once I'd picked those up off the floor I thought I might as well keep going, and took all of them from their various shelves, racks, boxes and carousels, and spread them out over the floor in a sort of cognitive map of music. Early music, Baroque music, Irish folk, Scottish folk, English folk. West African folk. Welsh folk. German classical composers. Twentieth century British composers. 1970s and 1980s rock and pop. Folk rock. Klezmer. Comedy. Rhythm and Blues. Blues. Music of the American Civil War. 1990s pop, some slightly regrettable. Touches of Country. The frankly unclassifiable. In general I'm not keen on putting art in boxes, but there needs to be a system. If you were looking for Gerry Rafferty or Trio Medieval or Satie how would you know where to look?
I am going to need more boxes, that's the conclusion. Trying to file music or books at ninety-eight per cent shelf capacity is about as inefficient as trying to run a hospital with ninety-eight per cent bed occupancy. It can't be done. I stole a couple of boxes the cats had been sleeping in to hold the overflow until I can get to The Range and buy some more of their useful brown faux leather boxes.
Among the marmalade I found a jar of something labelled Apple Chutney 2009. I don't know what was in it, but since emptying the jar and trying to rinse it I can't get the smell off my hands however much I wash them.
I occupied myself for the first part of the morning clearing out a cache of geriatric marmalade from the garage. I made a great deal too much in February 2011. I don't know what I was thinking of, except that I like making marmalade and I think the first batch had come out a bit too dark and I was keen for another go. After six years what is left had darkened to a colour close to treacle, and crystallised rock hard on to the walls of the jars. It would have been nice just to chuck the whole lot into a bin bag, but good citizen that I am I felt obliged to scoop out what I could and put it in the food recycling bin, and put the jars to soak until I could get the solidified shards of marmalade out prior to putting the jars in the glass recycling skip.
Then I began to sort out our CD collection, thus marking myself down as deeply nerdy on at least two counts. But it needed sorting out because it had got to the point where it was very difficult to find whatever you wanted to listen to, because as I kept buying CDs work in the same genre and even by the same artist got split between different shelves and boxes. And as I intend to go on buying CDs I needed space to slot future purchases in. I know it wholly unnecessary and I could buy downloads instead and help save the planet, since I am so anxious about recycling jam jars and old marmalade, but I like CDs. I like owning a physical thing that I can put in a machine and it will work, most of the time. I still have all my old vinyl as well. Some of my CDs date from the earliest days of the technology and they still play, contrary to some dire predictions, while no computer I have ever owned has lasted more than five years tops. I know I could store downloads in the cloud, but it seems so much easier just to have a small box on a shelf. And I am not the most computer literate person and can imagine myself getting in a real muddle by the time I'd bought downloads from Presto Classical and Amazon and direct from artists websites, trying to integrate them all into one collection and keep tabs of what was being safeguarded by whom. I trust Amazon to look after the books on my Kindle, but they won't be interested in curating music bought from other sources.
As if to preempt my thought that I should sort out the CDs the cats got the ball rolling by tipping over one of the stands the CDs live in. Once I'd picked those up off the floor I thought I might as well keep going, and took all of them from their various shelves, racks, boxes and carousels, and spread them out over the floor in a sort of cognitive map of music. Early music, Baroque music, Irish folk, Scottish folk, English folk. West African folk. Welsh folk. German classical composers. Twentieth century British composers. 1970s and 1980s rock and pop. Folk rock. Klezmer. Comedy. Rhythm and Blues. Blues. Music of the American Civil War. 1990s pop, some slightly regrettable. Touches of Country. The frankly unclassifiable. In general I'm not keen on putting art in boxes, but there needs to be a system. If you were looking for Gerry Rafferty or Trio Medieval or Satie how would you know where to look?
I am going to need more boxes, that's the conclusion. Trying to file music or books at ninety-eight per cent shelf capacity is about as inefficient as trying to run a hospital with ninety-eight per cent bed occupancy. It can't be done. I stole a couple of boxes the cats had been sleeping in to hold the overflow until I can get to The Range and buy some more of their useful brown faux leather boxes.
Among the marmalade I found a jar of something labelled Apple Chutney 2009. I don't know what was in it, but since emptying the jar and trying to rinse it I can't get the smell off my hands however much I wash them.
Wednesday, 22 February 2017
pruning and pots
This morning, as I probed with a sewing needle at the rose thorn lodged in the pad of my left thumb, I wondered why it was that so much of the equipment available for gardeners is so rubbish. Other hobbies have embraced modern technology and materials. What do we get? Pruning gloves still made out of leather, that aren't thorn proof and go as stiff as a board the first time they get wet, while dyeing your fingers orange for good measure. Why can't we have gloves made out of kevlar or something that actually works? Gardening is supposed to be one of the biggest leisure activities in the UK. Perhaps gardeners are viewed as hopeless reactionaries, people who make their own cold frames out of old windows and wouldn't spend the money to buy decent kit, lacking the commercial potential to sell boys' toys of cycling or even cookery.
Once I had dethorned my thumb and failed to get a tiny, tiny prickle out of my finger I returned to the pruning, and pollarded the orange twigged lime, following which I felt like a tree murderer. The trunk was studded with adventitious shoots and there were visible little dormant buds at the point on the trunk which I have arbitrarily decided is going to be the top of the pollard (it is not really arbitrary but driven by the height I feel comfortable working at from the step ladder. If I were taller it might have been six or eight inches higher). I left a few side branches to lessen the shock and give it some leaves for this spring to be going on with, and I am intellectually fairly confident that it will throw out lots of lovely new orange twigs, and that I will end up with a nice ball of bright green foliage for the summer and vivid twigs for the winter, that doesn't cast too much shade over the rest of the bed. I have read Monty Don's account of the joy of pleaching orange stemmed limes after admiring the warm colour of the twigs all winter. I know that as the old branches fade to a nondescript shade of greyish green and the brightest colour is on the young twigs that my trained shrub lime will be more colourful than if it were allowed to grow on into a full sized tree. It is just that I really hate taking the top out of a fast growing, healthy young tree. Now the fell deed is done maybe it will feel better next year, just as I don't mind cutting the topiary yews and box.
Then I found a lot more dead material to come out of the shrub roses, really a surprising amount more given that I thought I was getting to the end of it yesterday. In the course of removing the latest bits of 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' to have spread across the wooden steps to the bottom lawn I put my feet right through one of the treads. It is fortunate that the Systems Administrator, having been rather resistant to the idea of having to rebuild the steps, suddenly agreed this lunchtime and even had a plan about what sort of wood to use and where to source it (scaffolding boards, available from Wickes in a small lorry and with a time specific delivery slot).
Finally I decided I'd chopped through enough branches for one day and spent a happy hour tidying up the auriculas and the pots of violets, picking off the dead leaves and shrivelled viola stems. The auriculas have come through the winter with a one hundred per cent survival rate, eleven out of eleven pots. I lost one last summer but that was due to soaking it until it was too wet after it had got too dry in a too small pot. Now they are in classic five inch terracotta long tom pots, slightly bigger than you would see used for showing, but easier to manage for general garden use. The vintage pots I bought unseen and second hand turned out to be critically too small. The auriculas have wintered standing against the back wall of the conservatory facing the wall of the house, so in rain shadow from two directions, open to the sky overhead but out of the direct sun, tucked out of the line of the westerly gales but with plenty of air circulation. The situation seems to suit them, and now I've found a supply of pots I might add to the collection in due course. Exhibitors growing for show would divide the plants to reduce them to one rosette each, but I am not going to bother, since I'm not growing for exhibition and don't have time and anyway am quite happy with the idea of a bigger plant with presumably more flowers.
The violas did not fare so well, especially Viola cornuta where only one plant out of four looked entirely healthy, the other three looking very dubiously alive if not fairly certainly dead. Six out of seven of the miniature pansy like violas were green and healthy but the brown remains of the seventh lifted clean away from the compost with no signs of life beneath. The violas were in the same passage way as the auriculas, though the pansy types were against the house wall and so got more sun, and potentially more rain. I cut them all hard down last autumn as the growers' websites advise, and don't yet have a theory on why some died.
As everything was in active growth, the auricula pushing out fat little new leaves and the violas making new shoots below the chopped down remains of last year's foliage, it seemed like time to apply a dose of Vitax Q4. I opened my newly purchased tub, and as I darkly suspected it would be it was formed into little pellets, looking though not smelling just like rabbit food. My searches on the internet seemed to suggest that Vitax Q4 as sold to the retail market was now pelleted and hence Dust Free. Original Formula Vitax Q4 was available, but only in bags of twenty kilos or more, presumably aimed at professionals. I thought that it would take me rather a long time to get through twenty kilos of Vitax Q4, even using it in the conservatory as well as the auricula pots, so opted for the pellets while wondering why I had to be protected from dust when it was apparently fine if only I bought five times as much of it.
I tried scattering a few pellets of rabbit food around a viola and it did not look right, the great lumps of plant food out of proportion to the size of the pot so that I had no idea how many to use, and I certainly wasn't applying them to the auriculas. Instead using the pestle and mortar out of the kitchen I reduced the wretched lumps to the sort of granules I'd wanted in the first place and scattered them carefully around my plants with a teaspoon. I don't suppose that's what the bright spark who decided I couldn't be trusted with powder and must have huge great pellets intended, but that's tough.
Tuesday, 21 February 2017
my safety glasses arrive
My prescription safety glasses arrived in the morning post. That's pretty good going, since I ordered them on 8 February. On 9 February somebody from the company rang me to check that I really had put the correct distance between my pupils on the online order form, and to suggest that a different choice of frames might be better. She had worked out that if the measurements I'd given were correct then I must have a small face, while the frames I'd chosen were enormous. With visions of my gigantic safety glasses sliding perpetually down my nose, weighed down by their fat extra strength lenses sticking out beyond the rim of the frame, I chose different ones. The sales person spent ages explaining all this to me and the glasses I ended up with were cheaper than the ones I'd originally chosen, so there was nothing in it for her beyond a happy customer, and it is not as though I'm likely to buy another pair in the next year or two or be ordering them on behalf of my firm for my whole workforce. The firm is safetyspecs.co.uk and they deserve ten out of ten for customer service. I would unhesitatingly recommend them to any of my friends, except that none of them are planning to buy prescription safety glasses so far as I know.
The safety glasses I ended up with are almost exactly the same size as my normal glasses, but with the curved side pieces at the outer edge of each eye. I wore them for most of the day, and they seem pretty comfortable. At first you are acutely aware of the side guards lurking at the edge of your field of vision, like having dental work done and being unable to ignore the strange new contours of your teeth against your tongue. After a while your brain filters out the novel but pointless stimulus and you cease to notice. Opting for distance vision turned out to be the correct choice. I can see perfectly clearly at arms length, which is where I'm mostly working, and can see where I'm putting my feet. I would struggle to use a computer or check my phone wearing them, but I don't need to.
Emboldened by my new protective eyewear I went on pruning the roses. I am on the home straight, I think, and not a day too soon. Pruning shrub roses that are growing well is a pleasure, as all you have to do is take out any dead or moribund old stems, while the more recent growth emerges plump and shining green as the old, gnarled and twiggy brown is stripped away. Cutting the buddleia back hard feels unkind, although I know they will bounce back, making six or eight feet of new growth by the end of the season. Meanwhile their neighbouring roses will enjoy the extra light. It feels very drastic to take so much off a woody plant, but buddleia can regenerate from the roots. I know, since the only reason I have two is that I planted a second after the first was ripped out of the ground by a gale. In due course the first came back.
I pollarded all the Paulownia shoots, of which there were many because it suckers. Cutting them down feels drastic too, though not as poignant as cutting down the buddleia because they do not yet have any leaves. The Paulownia will send up new shoots up to ten or fifteen feet tall by the end of the summer, clothed in gigantic furry leaves. I haven't seen it generally used among shrub roses. I put a couple into the bed, grown from seed, because the roses had such boring little leaves and I thought the Paulownia would make it more exciting. A few years ago I let one hopeful shoot flower, and somehow never got around to cutting it down, so now have a foxglove tree in the middle of the bed. After pruning it once as a standard flowering shrub I swore that it was going to have to come down, but somehow it is still there. The flowers are such fun, like a cross between a foxglove and a horse chestnut, carried in mauvish blue candles in early summer, and the veranda gives such a good vantage point to look at them. Staring up at bluish flowers against a blue sky can be an unrewarding experience, which is why you are advised to plant a foxglove tree downhill of your viewing point if you can. By accident I have. And the crown is conveniently placed to block the view from the sitting room of the next door farm's wind turbine. If I just saw off one low branch to lift the crown and then keep at it with the pole lopper maybe I can manage it as a standard after all.
I have not yet pollarded the orange twigged lime but I must, as I really can't have a full sized lime tree growing that close to the house. I should remember the notice in the extraordinarily good garden we visited in Richmond, explaining to visitors that a virtually leafless and branchless yew had been hard pruned to control its size, but would recover, and that they did a lot of that sort of maintenance in the garden to keep the plants in scale. It would be nice to have tens of acres, though, and be able to let my trees grow huge. They would like it, and so would I.
The safety glasses I ended up with are almost exactly the same size as my normal glasses, but with the curved side pieces at the outer edge of each eye. I wore them for most of the day, and they seem pretty comfortable. At first you are acutely aware of the side guards lurking at the edge of your field of vision, like having dental work done and being unable to ignore the strange new contours of your teeth against your tongue. After a while your brain filters out the novel but pointless stimulus and you cease to notice. Opting for distance vision turned out to be the correct choice. I can see perfectly clearly at arms length, which is where I'm mostly working, and can see where I'm putting my feet. I would struggle to use a computer or check my phone wearing them, but I don't need to.
Emboldened by my new protective eyewear I went on pruning the roses. I am on the home straight, I think, and not a day too soon. Pruning shrub roses that are growing well is a pleasure, as all you have to do is take out any dead or moribund old stems, while the more recent growth emerges plump and shining green as the old, gnarled and twiggy brown is stripped away. Cutting the buddleia back hard feels unkind, although I know they will bounce back, making six or eight feet of new growth by the end of the season. Meanwhile their neighbouring roses will enjoy the extra light. It feels very drastic to take so much off a woody plant, but buddleia can regenerate from the roots. I know, since the only reason I have two is that I planted a second after the first was ripped out of the ground by a gale. In due course the first came back.
I pollarded all the Paulownia shoots, of which there were many because it suckers. Cutting them down feels drastic too, though not as poignant as cutting down the buddleia because they do not yet have any leaves. The Paulownia will send up new shoots up to ten or fifteen feet tall by the end of the summer, clothed in gigantic furry leaves. I haven't seen it generally used among shrub roses. I put a couple into the bed, grown from seed, because the roses had such boring little leaves and I thought the Paulownia would make it more exciting. A few years ago I let one hopeful shoot flower, and somehow never got around to cutting it down, so now have a foxglove tree in the middle of the bed. After pruning it once as a standard flowering shrub I swore that it was going to have to come down, but somehow it is still there. The flowers are such fun, like a cross between a foxglove and a horse chestnut, carried in mauvish blue candles in early summer, and the veranda gives such a good vantage point to look at them. Staring up at bluish flowers against a blue sky can be an unrewarding experience, which is why you are advised to plant a foxglove tree downhill of your viewing point if you can. By accident I have. And the crown is conveniently placed to block the view from the sitting room of the next door farm's wind turbine. If I just saw off one low branch to lift the crown and then keep at it with the pole lopper maybe I can manage it as a standard after all.
I have not yet pollarded the orange twigged lime but I must, as I really can't have a full sized lime tree growing that close to the house. I should remember the notice in the extraordinarily good garden we visited in Richmond, explaining to visitors that a virtually leafless and branchless yew had been hard pruned to control its size, but would recover, and that they did a lot of that sort of maintenance in the garden to keep the plants in scale. It would be nice to have tens of acres, though, and be able to let my trees grow huge. They would like it, and so would I.
Monday, 20 February 2017
spring is in the air
The warm weather brought everybody out. The Systems Administrator reported that bees were charging up and down the meadow. The kittens raced around the garden. Our Ginger sat magisterially on the front door step. Business at the Clacton garden centre and the tip (sorry, recycling centre) was booming.
I needed to call in at the garden centre since I wanted seed compost plus industrial quantities of blood, fish and bone, I was hoping they might have crushed oyster shell for the chickens, and one of my wellington boots had split. I'd have like some Vitax Q4 as well for the pots of violas and auriculas, as recommended by the growers at Chelsea, but couldn't see any. I got everything else on the list, though, and in a fit of extravagance treated myself to two new large propagating cases for the seeds. The lids of my old ones have chipped at the corners and gone yellow with age, and while I managed to gaffer tape over the holes well enough to keep the mice off the small bulbs this winter, I thought I couldn't be messing around with taped together lids for seed pots where I need to check the watering daily, and the yellowing and crazing must cut down the light considerably. Not so important when you're waiting for tulip bulbs to form roots, not so good when you're trying to prevent seedlings from becoming leggy.
The tip is just around the corner from the garden centre so I generally try to combine the two into one trip. As I drove to Clacton a trail of bamboo prunings along the road told me I was not the only gardener going to the tip today. Sure enough, when I turned off the main road into Jaywick lane there was another final piece of bamboo ahead of me on the tarmac. Somebody didn't secure their trailer properly. I wanted to dump the hellebore leaves, which filled several sacks by the time I'd finished cutting them off and are not supposed to go on the home compost heap to avoid spreading any hellebore leaf diseases. If I had left the sacks for six months or a year the leaves would have shrunk down to nothing, but since I needed the compost and everything else I thought I might as well not be stuck with several large bags of decaying hellebore leaves for the summer. A very polite, very helpful, very heavily tattooed young member of staff emptied most of my bags, for which I was duly grateful, though at the garden centre afterwards when the woman on the till seemed quite reluctant to believe that I could load my 25 kilo bag of fish, blood and bone into the car myself I began to wonder if I was looking particularly decrepit.
Actually, my hands were feeling it after yesterday's pruning session so to give them a break I started clearing the overwintering pots of herbaceous plants out of the greenhouse, and investigating the ones still on the concrete that never made it into the greenhouse due to lack of space. Most of the Verbascum chaixii have overwintered successfully out in the open on the concrete, some in 1L and some in 2L pots. It is a nuisance that they are supposed to be the white form but most flowered yellow last year. The Lysimachia atropurpurea died, but they are basically annuals. I raised them intending to plant them in the vegetable patch to use for cutting, but never got round to the planting bit. It makes me a little cross when I see garden centres selling them alongside their perennial plants and priced at several pounds each, when they are generally very short lived. The Linaria purpurea 'Canon Went' also mostly died, but not before seeding themselves into their pots and most of the neighbouring pots, so I shall not be short of pink toadflax this summer. The Aquilegia that didn't manage to squeeze inside seem absolutely fine in 1L and 9cm pots. A tray of rooted box cuttings look starving but have survived.
I looked online for Vitax Q4 and Amazon came up trumps, yet again. If somebody can draft UK tax law properly so that they pay their fair share I don't even mind paying more for their products, but it is so useful to be able to press a button and have garden sundries you need urgently arrive the next day in a van. After I lost the spring of my secateurs I ordered the replacement at half past three in the afternoon and it was with me by half past ten the following morning.
I needed to call in at the garden centre since I wanted seed compost plus industrial quantities of blood, fish and bone, I was hoping they might have crushed oyster shell for the chickens, and one of my wellington boots had split. I'd have like some Vitax Q4 as well for the pots of violas and auriculas, as recommended by the growers at Chelsea, but couldn't see any. I got everything else on the list, though, and in a fit of extravagance treated myself to two new large propagating cases for the seeds. The lids of my old ones have chipped at the corners and gone yellow with age, and while I managed to gaffer tape over the holes well enough to keep the mice off the small bulbs this winter, I thought I couldn't be messing around with taped together lids for seed pots where I need to check the watering daily, and the yellowing and crazing must cut down the light considerably. Not so important when you're waiting for tulip bulbs to form roots, not so good when you're trying to prevent seedlings from becoming leggy.
The tip is just around the corner from the garden centre so I generally try to combine the two into one trip. As I drove to Clacton a trail of bamboo prunings along the road told me I was not the only gardener going to the tip today. Sure enough, when I turned off the main road into Jaywick lane there was another final piece of bamboo ahead of me on the tarmac. Somebody didn't secure their trailer properly. I wanted to dump the hellebore leaves, which filled several sacks by the time I'd finished cutting them off and are not supposed to go on the home compost heap to avoid spreading any hellebore leaf diseases. If I had left the sacks for six months or a year the leaves would have shrunk down to nothing, but since I needed the compost and everything else I thought I might as well not be stuck with several large bags of decaying hellebore leaves for the summer. A very polite, very helpful, very heavily tattooed young member of staff emptied most of my bags, for which I was duly grateful, though at the garden centre afterwards when the woman on the till seemed quite reluctant to believe that I could load my 25 kilo bag of fish, blood and bone into the car myself I began to wonder if I was looking particularly decrepit.
Actually, my hands were feeling it after yesterday's pruning session so to give them a break I started clearing the overwintering pots of herbaceous plants out of the greenhouse, and investigating the ones still on the concrete that never made it into the greenhouse due to lack of space. Most of the Verbascum chaixii have overwintered successfully out in the open on the concrete, some in 1L and some in 2L pots. It is a nuisance that they are supposed to be the white form but most flowered yellow last year. The Lysimachia atropurpurea died, but they are basically annuals. I raised them intending to plant them in the vegetable patch to use for cutting, but never got round to the planting bit. It makes me a little cross when I see garden centres selling them alongside their perennial plants and priced at several pounds each, when they are generally very short lived. The Linaria purpurea 'Canon Went' also mostly died, but not before seeding themselves into their pots and most of the neighbouring pots, so I shall not be short of pink toadflax this summer. The Aquilegia that didn't manage to squeeze inside seem absolutely fine in 1L and 9cm pots. A tray of rooted box cuttings look starving but have survived.
I looked online for Vitax Q4 and Amazon came up trumps, yet again. If somebody can draft UK tax law properly so that they pay their fair share I don't even mind paying more for their products, but it is so useful to be able to press a button and have garden sundries you need urgently arrive the next day in a van. After I lost the spring of my secateurs I ordered the replacement at half past three in the afternoon and it was with me by half past ten the following morning.
Sunday, 19 February 2017
pruning the willow leaved bay
When I went to see the gardens of the Italian lakes and visited the Villa del Balbianello one of the things that intrigued me was how their evergreen oaks were persuaded to grow as such perfect mushroom domes. The answer, it turns out, is that arborists clamber around inside them like monkeys carrying out high level pruning. We don't manage anything so glamorous, but today I did prune the willow leaved bay.
Laurus nobilis 'Angustifolia' is a really good plant. I got mine from Architectural Plants in 2002 and liked it so much I tried to persuade the plant centre to stock it when I worked there, but they didn't, dismissing it as not that different from ordinary bay. They were wrong, but the RHS now lists fourteen suppliers so it would not be too difficult to track one down if you wanted to. The leaves are much more slender than those of the normal bay, like evergreen versions of willow leaves, hence the name. The growth habit is strongly upright, and with annual clipping it will make a dense, nicely tapered specimen. According to Architectural Plants it is hardier than the type, and certainly mine came through the two successive very cold winters we had about five years ago with no more damage than some burnt and brown leaves. Normal bay can be cut to the ground in harsh winters, and while it will generally sucker generously from the root and regenerate over a few years I did not want mine to sucker, because I wanted it as a fastigiate specimen on a single trunk.
Architectural Plants say it is not a particularly fast grower and the excellent Bluebell Nursery describe it as slow to moderate. I'd say it was more moderate than slow, given that I've been lopping shoots up to two feet long off the top of mine, and as it was planted fifteen years ago it is no longer in the first flush of youth. In that last sentence the misleading element is the casual use of the word lopping.
If the bay were standing alone in the middle of a lawn or a nice big patch of gravel, or even surrounded by something low growing like lavender, cutting it would be quite straightforward. I would get a step ladder and the Henchman out and away I'd go with the secateurs and loppers. The bay, however, is standing in a large border surrounded by shrub roses, a couple of buddleia, a rare and precious tree peony, the knobbly stems of Tetrapanax papyrifera, a deciduous ceanothus, and a couple of ludicrously expensive metal tripods with clematis on them. Towards the edges of the bed are snowdrops and the emerging snouts of hyacinths. Under the shrub roses is a ground cover of herbaceous plants just beginning to emerge from their winter slumbers. The bed slopes quite steeply. Getting any kind of scaffolding in there is completely out of the question. I can wedge the step ladder against the uphill side of the bay to help me reach slightly further up it by hand, but the vast bulk of the pruning is done with a pole lopper.
It was ideal weather for pole lopping, not too cold, not windy, and overcast. You do not want to be squinting into the sun as you try to locate a stem fifteen feet above your head with what is essentially a pair of heavily geared secateurs on a very long stick, and you do not want the stems to be lashing around in the wind while you do it. It is hard work, though, holding up the pole and not letting it crash down across the very precious tree peony or anything else, and looking upwards all the time gives you a crick in your neck. In an ideal world you would step back from any piece of topiary quite frequently while cutting it, to check how you are doing, but stepping back from the bay means wriggling out from among the roses and everything else, being terribly careful with every step where you are putting your feet.
I now feel rather stiff but with this mild weather there is no time to be lost with the rest of the pruning. Buds are swelling, things emerging from below ground just waiting to be trodden on, and the sooner it is all done the better.
Laurus nobilis 'Angustifolia' is a really good plant. I got mine from Architectural Plants in 2002 and liked it so much I tried to persuade the plant centre to stock it when I worked there, but they didn't, dismissing it as not that different from ordinary bay. They were wrong, but the RHS now lists fourteen suppliers so it would not be too difficult to track one down if you wanted to. The leaves are much more slender than those of the normal bay, like evergreen versions of willow leaves, hence the name. The growth habit is strongly upright, and with annual clipping it will make a dense, nicely tapered specimen. According to Architectural Plants it is hardier than the type, and certainly mine came through the two successive very cold winters we had about five years ago with no more damage than some burnt and brown leaves. Normal bay can be cut to the ground in harsh winters, and while it will generally sucker generously from the root and regenerate over a few years I did not want mine to sucker, because I wanted it as a fastigiate specimen on a single trunk.
Architectural Plants say it is not a particularly fast grower and the excellent Bluebell Nursery describe it as slow to moderate. I'd say it was more moderate than slow, given that I've been lopping shoots up to two feet long off the top of mine, and as it was planted fifteen years ago it is no longer in the first flush of youth. In that last sentence the misleading element is the casual use of the word lopping.
If the bay were standing alone in the middle of a lawn or a nice big patch of gravel, or even surrounded by something low growing like lavender, cutting it would be quite straightforward. I would get a step ladder and the Henchman out and away I'd go with the secateurs and loppers. The bay, however, is standing in a large border surrounded by shrub roses, a couple of buddleia, a rare and precious tree peony, the knobbly stems of Tetrapanax papyrifera, a deciduous ceanothus, and a couple of ludicrously expensive metal tripods with clematis on them. Towards the edges of the bed are snowdrops and the emerging snouts of hyacinths. Under the shrub roses is a ground cover of herbaceous plants just beginning to emerge from their winter slumbers. The bed slopes quite steeply. Getting any kind of scaffolding in there is completely out of the question. I can wedge the step ladder against the uphill side of the bay to help me reach slightly further up it by hand, but the vast bulk of the pruning is done with a pole lopper.
It was ideal weather for pole lopping, not too cold, not windy, and overcast. You do not want to be squinting into the sun as you try to locate a stem fifteen feet above your head with what is essentially a pair of heavily geared secateurs on a very long stick, and you do not want the stems to be lashing around in the wind while you do it. It is hard work, though, holding up the pole and not letting it crash down across the very precious tree peony or anything else, and looking upwards all the time gives you a crick in your neck. In an ideal world you would step back from any piece of topiary quite frequently while cutting it, to check how you are doing, but stepping back from the bay means wriggling out from among the roses and everything else, being terribly careful with every step where you are putting your feet.
I now feel rather stiff but with this mild weather there is no time to be lost with the rest of the pruning. Buds are swelling, things emerging from below ground just waiting to be trodden on, and the sooner it is all done the better.
Saturday, 18 February 2017
pruning
Now it's the second half of February I feel free to cut down all the herbaceous stems left standing over the winter so that the birds could eat the seed heads, and in hopes of getting some of those mornings you see photographed in magazines when every stalk and withered flower head is rendered miraculous by frost. Or else heavy dew shining magically on the spiders' webs. We had maybe half a dozen such mornings. But now bulbs are coming through and the ground level buds of this year's herbaceous plants swelling, all waiting to be trodden on, and the sooner I am on those beds to do my work and off again the better. The only problem is deciding what to do first.
I took a deep breath, steadied my nerves and reduced the shrub rose 'Sally Holmes' hard. I've been psyching myself up to do the deed for months. 'Sally Holmes' is a modern shrub rose, with clusters of creamy white shading to soft pink, single flowers produced in successive flushes through the summer, with good hips if you aren't too enthusiastic about deadheading the final flush. In the past couple of years she has not performed as well as she used to. I tried taking her down fairly drastically once before and she did not like it and I vowed not to do it again, but then I began to remember how Christopher Lloyd wrote that you would not kill a middle aged rose by hard pruning, on the contrary it could be rejuvenating. And I remembered the Systems Administrator's story of the SA's father performing drastic surgery learned on a pruning course at Wisley on the straggly hedge of the rose 'Elizabeth' in the front garden of their new house. The neighbours were horrified by the Wisley chop, and the next year 'Elizabeth' had never performed so well.
I have not one but three plants of 'Sally Holmes'. When I bought them I didn't grasp that they would grow quite so large, well over six feet tall and as much across. Still, in a large garden you don't want the planting to be too bitty, so I am happy with the group of three. The trouble was that after years of dead heading and taking out dead wood, the framework of branches was an awkward muddle of twiggy growth going in all directions above bare trunks. As plants they were not beautiful, and they weren't flowering as freely as they once did. My researches unearthed one contributor to an internet forum who said that as 'Sally Holmes' tended to flower best on new wood, owners who were continually removing most of the recent growth to limit its size could be left with few flowers. I haven't been doing that, but in the past couple of years mine haven't made all that much new wood. Growth, they say, follows the knife. I shall feed my plants very generously when I top up the Strulch and keep feeding them through the season.
That kind of pruning takes concentration. I normally listen to the radio while I'm working on the borders, but I can't while doing major pruning, it is too distracting when I am trying to decide where to place every cut and how much to take off. A lot, was the answer. A couple of hydrangeas next to the clump will be relieved to no longer have a stray arm flung across their heads.
It was so emotionally draining that when I finished I stuck to cutting down herbaceous stems in the island bed for the rest of the afternoon. Tomorrow or the next day the Buddleja davidii 'Black Knight' are for chop, and I shall have to steel myself to cut down the dogwoods and willow grown for their coloured stems, and worse still pollard the orange twigged lime. I am not a naturally enthusiastic pruner. I like plants to grow, and it seems so ungrateful to lop their efforts off. Some people enjoy it, causing ructions between couples where one (often though not always a man) loves chopping things down, and the other (frequently though not invariably a woman) is for a fuller, more natural look. But it has to be done. Our back garden is over twenty years old and in danger of getting dark and woody. It needs a ruthless hand on the saw from time to time.
I took a deep breath, steadied my nerves and reduced the shrub rose 'Sally Holmes' hard. I've been psyching myself up to do the deed for months. 'Sally Holmes' is a modern shrub rose, with clusters of creamy white shading to soft pink, single flowers produced in successive flushes through the summer, with good hips if you aren't too enthusiastic about deadheading the final flush. In the past couple of years she has not performed as well as she used to. I tried taking her down fairly drastically once before and she did not like it and I vowed not to do it again, but then I began to remember how Christopher Lloyd wrote that you would not kill a middle aged rose by hard pruning, on the contrary it could be rejuvenating. And I remembered the Systems Administrator's story of the SA's father performing drastic surgery learned on a pruning course at Wisley on the straggly hedge of the rose 'Elizabeth' in the front garden of their new house. The neighbours were horrified by the Wisley chop, and the next year 'Elizabeth' had never performed so well.
I have not one but three plants of 'Sally Holmes'. When I bought them I didn't grasp that they would grow quite so large, well over six feet tall and as much across. Still, in a large garden you don't want the planting to be too bitty, so I am happy with the group of three. The trouble was that after years of dead heading and taking out dead wood, the framework of branches was an awkward muddle of twiggy growth going in all directions above bare trunks. As plants they were not beautiful, and they weren't flowering as freely as they once did. My researches unearthed one contributor to an internet forum who said that as 'Sally Holmes' tended to flower best on new wood, owners who were continually removing most of the recent growth to limit its size could be left with few flowers. I haven't been doing that, but in the past couple of years mine haven't made all that much new wood. Growth, they say, follows the knife. I shall feed my plants very generously when I top up the Strulch and keep feeding them through the season.
That kind of pruning takes concentration. I normally listen to the radio while I'm working on the borders, but I can't while doing major pruning, it is too distracting when I am trying to decide where to place every cut and how much to take off. A lot, was the answer. A couple of hydrangeas next to the clump will be relieved to no longer have a stray arm flung across their heads.
It was so emotionally draining that when I finished I stuck to cutting down herbaceous stems in the island bed for the rest of the afternoon. Tomorrow or the next day the Buddleja davidii 'Black Knight' are for chop, and I shall have to steel myself to cut down the dogwoods and willow grown for their coloured stems, and worse still pollard the orange twigged lime. I am not a naturally enthusiastic pruner. I like plants to grow, and it seems so ungrateful to lop their efforts off. Some people enjoy it, causing ructions between couples where one (often though not always a man) loves chopping things down, and the other (frequently though not invariably a woman) is for a fuller, more natural look. But it has to be done. Our back garden is over twenty years old and in danger of getting dark and woody. It needs a ruthless hand on the saw from time to time.
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