The forecast (with seventy per cent probability) thunderstorms did not materialize. There was a torrential downpour at around three, and by half past four it was dry enough to change back into our gardening clothes and go back outside into what turned into a beautiful evening, bathed in golden light. I was relieved the thunder missed us, because I hate thunder, or more accurately I hate lightning. The Systems Administrator said I was more scared of thunder than the cats, and I pointed out that that was entirely reasonable since the cats did not know they were living in a house with a roof made out of compressed straw.
I am glad it is a nice evening, since the grandson of the neighbour who lives in the further of the cottages in the lane called round a month ago to warn us that he would be having a party. By this morning they had got two portaloos in their field, and a pair of gazebos, and it would have been a pity if it had rained. He plays in a band, or used to a couple of years ago when he warned us he was having another party, at which his band would be playing. They weren't bad, from what I could hear of them across the field, and then the music switched to something else with a female vocalist and I thought Blimey, she is really good, and then realized it was Debbie Harry in one of the tracks from Parallel Lines.
In between the spells of rain the Systems Administrator had time to finish fitting the bamboo screen across the back of the sloping bed just inside the entrance. We will see how it stands up to the gales. I am reasonably optimistic, barring a full blown top end Force Ten*, since it is permeable and flexible, but I think the SA had visions of the top breaking and disintegrating in the wind. As long as it lasts for a few years it won't matter so much, since that will give time for plant cover in the border to grow. The immediate effect is to make the back garden appear more enclosed, and is a great improvement.
The sense of enclosure is one of those design effects that's important but difficult to pin down. You don't need a full blown system of garden rooms with hedges and walls above head height. A waist high barrier can do it, or a strip of tall but see-through planting. You can feel enclosed but still be able to see out. But to have something around the edge that's substantial enough to prevent people passing over or through it, at least assuming they are following norms of behaviour and not chasing around like Bodie and Doyle, makes an area feel more secure, and more like a distinct place. And blocking views of the more mundane or unattractive surroundings helps build the illusion of the garden being its own contained world. The top of the sloping bed was in practical terms already fairly well enclosed, having a rabbit fence along the back of it, and behind the rabbit fence a pile of grass clippings, and beyond the grass clippings a patch of brambles. But it was not an attractive little corner, and as your eye passed over the rabbit fence you mentally left the garden. From all the rest of the back garden once you are in it you could see nothing except the garden, the wood, and the sky.
The turning circle is an area where the sense of enclosure gradually built up, and was all the better for it. First of all it was just a scruffy lawn. Nobody would ever have wanted to sit there. We dug a pond, replaced the grass with gravel, and laid a path across it and a square of paving next to the pond. It was still not a place to linger, even when the first planting of bulbs and low growing plants started to take shape. Now there are banks of lavender, a bulky Phlomis italica, a semi-prostrate rosemary, an olive tree, a young Persian silk tree, a sprawling Teucrium fruticans, myrtles, and other shrubs that thrive on sun and sharp drainage. The little metal cafe table and two chairs at the heart of it feel like a real place to sit, though it is still overlooked by the house and you can eyeball the postman and the Amazon delivery drivers from your chair.
In contrast, the field hedge around the front garden doesn't feel quite as enclosing as I should like, especially in winter when the leaves have fallen. It is a good practical barrier, with rabbit fencing on both sides and quite bushy, and in most places you'd be hard pushed to climb through it, but there is something distracting and exposed about being able to see the field so clearly. I realized that in the odd places where we'd planted a dwarf pine or box close to it the effect was much better, even though you could still see through the hedge above the line of the evergreen shrubs, and so planted more box in front of the hedge with the aim of keeping them clipped to about four feet as they grew. Distant views of the far side of the field and the trees are fine, it is just something about having the field margin in the foreground that feels wrong. As I said, the sense of enclosure is tricky, important, mutable and hard to define. Cats notice it too. Why else would they be so keen on sitting in cardboard boxes, even tiny low sided ones?
*Which is a Storm, not a Gale. On the Beaufort Scale Storms are stronger than Gales, contrary to much popular usage. There used to be an advertisement for, of all people, the RNLI, appealing for us to support them when their crews would go out in Force Ten Gales for us, and it irritated me every time I saw it. I have no idea why the RNLI let their advertising agency run with it, except that most people probably think a Gale sounds the baddest thing there is, except for a Hurricane and we very rarely get those in the UK. It isn't. A Storm is bigger.
Saturday, 5 August 2017
Friday, 4 August 2017
a glut
Mr Cool disgraced himself by catching a green woodpecker. He brought it into the house, where he was intercepted by the Systems Administrator who shouted at Mr Cool and made him drop his quarry. The woodpecker from shamming dead became very much alive and flew about the study. The SA chased Mr Cool out of the room, shut the blinds and opened the back door, and the bird flew towards the light and freedom. Mr Cool seemed rather abashed by what he had done, and spent the rest of the day lying in an armchair looking subdued. Goodness knows how he caught it, but of course they feed on the ground when they are going after ant colonies, and it was probably a young one that had not yet learned about cats. None of the previous cats have ever caught a woodpecker, and there are a lot in the garden. Fortunately the current generation have not caught on to the idea of drilling into beehives.
The fig tree is cropping prodigiously, and blocking more of the garage door day by day. You would not think it was the same sad plant that used to exist in a pot in the conservatory. This year's figs are escaping the attention of the birds, perhaps in part due to the presence of the young cats, though there hasn't been any wasp damage either and I can't credit the cats with keeping wasps at bay. It is a pity that fresh figs keep for such a short time even in the fridge, and that the SA does not like figs.
I looked through some of my cookery books and online for ideas on what to do with them, but after discounting savory partnerships with ham, which the SA would not eat with any degree of enthusiasm, regarding it as a waste of good ham, that left various enormous cakes. The cakes didn't sound as though they would have terribly long shelf lives, and converting a glut of more figs than one person could eat into an even larger cake that one person couldn't eat either wouldn't really help matters. I briefly considered fig jam, but wasn't sure when even I would eat that, and lacked confidence in my ability to tell when boiling sugar had reached the pearl stage. Spoiling a bag of sugar and half wrecking a saucepan in my attempts not to waste the figs would be a false economy. In the end I followed Jane Grigson's method of baking some with vanilla sugar, which I thought would help them keep a while longer in the fridge, and ate some raw for lunch. Last night I paired some with the end of a tub of vanilla ice cream and some honey, and that was good.
I am nearly at the bottom of the first bag of gravel. In fact, I have seen the bottom, though I am still busy scraping shovel loads of gravel out from around the sides. When I consider the rate at which I am shifting it I should remember that of course I am lifting it twice, once when I fill the wheelbarrow and again when I spread it, and in between the two stages I have to push it in the wheelbarrow. It takes ages to dig the last bits out as the edges of the bag keep flopping over and getting in the way. Builders' merchants never seem to put a deposit on the bags nowadays, or ask for them back, and I wonder whether health and safety now dictates that they are single use, or whether on building sites where time is money people slit the bags rather than fiddling about trying to dig from them.
The fig tree is cropping prodigiously, and blocking more of the garage door day by day. You would not think it was the same sad plant that used to exist in a pot in the conservatory. This year's figs are escaping the attention of the birds, perhaps in part due to the presence of the young cats, though there hasn't been any wasp damage either and I can't credit the cats with keeping wasps at bay. It is a pity that fresh figs keep for such a short time even in the fridge, and that the SA does not like figs.
I looked through some of my cookery books and online for ideas on what to do with them, but after discounting savory partnerships with ham, which the SA would not eat with any degree of enthusiasm, regarding it as a waste of good ham, that left various enormous cakes. The cakes didn't sound as though they would have terribly long shelf lives, and converting a glut of more figs than one person could eat into an even larger cake that one person couldn't eat either wouldn't really help matters. I briefly considered fig jam, but wasn't sure when even I would eat that, and lacked confidence in my ability to tell when boiling sugar had reached the pearl stage. Spoiling a bag of sugar and half wrecking a saucepan in my attempts not to waste the figs would be a false economy. In the end I followed Jane Grigson's method of baking some with vanilla sugar, which I thought would help them keep a while longer in the fridge, and ate some raw for lunch. Last night I paired some with the end of a tub of vanilla ice cream and some honey, and that was good.
I am nearly at the bottom of the first bag of gravel. In fact, I have seen the bottom, though I am still busy scraping shovel loads of gravel out from around the sides. When I consider the rate at which I am shifting it I should remember that of course I am lifting it twice, once when I fill the wheelbarrow and again when I spread it, and in between the two stages I have to push it in the wheelbarrow. It takes ages to dig the last bits out as the edges of the bag keep flopping over and getting in the way. Builders' merchants never seem to put a deposit on the bags nowadays, or ask for them back, and I wonder whether health and safety now dictates that they are single use, or whether on building sites where time is money people slit the bags rather than fiddling about trying to dig from them.
Thursday, 3 August 2017
the gravel arrives
The gravel arrived. I was out in the garden by half past eight, keeping a beady eye out for the lorry, before an email arrived at 08.59 confirming that my order would be arriving between 07.00 and 13.00. That was better than the customer service desk had told me yesterday when they said they couldn't guarantee a delivery time, since while it wasn't a very tight slot at least it didn't mean I was committed to waiting for the lorry all afternoon. Lucky it didn't come between seven and half past eight, though.
It was unlucky that it seemed to be a particularly noisy morning on the farm, which sent me regularly scuttling down to the entrance each time I heard a heavy diesel engine revving or the bleep of a vehicle reversing, only to see a lettuce lorry about to depart or another trailer load of freshly harvested salad arriving. It was unlucky too that it was such a windy day. I had the front door propped open so that I'd hear the phone as I weeded and waited, but when finally the sound of a lorry down at the farm did turn out to be the gravel, by the time I'd walked down the lane to meet him the driver had had time to leave messages on the landline and my mobile. And no, I didn't take my mobile into the garden with me. I never do. It would only get broken.
The driver was much more amiable than the man on the customer service desk, and said he would walk up the lane to have a look at the access. He seemed perfectly happy with it, and when I said that the dustmen had been only that morning he said confidently that anywhere a dustcart could go, he could go. I said that I hadn't been able to understand why the customer service desk had got quite so agitated about the lane, and he said that was because the man on the desk didn't drive a lorry, just sat at a desk, and as he had been there yesterday when I rang it would have been better if he had spoken to me directly. I conceded that it was difficult to form a view about access when you hadn't seen it, and he reversed his lorry up the lane and offloaded the gravel without any trouble. He was not even worried about the high-up bits of the farm's trees and the neighbour's hedge obscuring his wing mirrors, because his lorry had a camera on the back, and he told me not to worry about the dustmen because they always had somebody in the passenger seat who could look out that side.
His firm announced their results today, and profits were down on turnover that was up, reflecting a margin squeeze from higher import costs due to weak sterling and subdued activity in the housing market, but they still made a five per cent margin, so they still seem as solid as they were twenty years ago. Materials distribution is not an inherently high quality business, as witness the collapse of the firm I used to buy acrylic sheet from. It was only because I'd paid using PayPal that I got a refund when after a series of increasingly unconvincing excuses the acrylic still hadn't arrived by the time their website vanished and the consensus among their unhappy customers on the internet was that they'd gone bust. Being quoted is no protection against going bust, but total failure is normally preceded by a couple of profits warnings.
I asked the driver how much a large bulk bag of gravel actually weighed, and he said around a tonne, just over if it was very wet, otherwise just under. I set to work with my wheelbarrow once he'd gone, and spread fresh gravel over the area where the juniper used to be, and started topping up the dry garden planting and the edges of the drive along the base of the ivy hedges where the gravel was thin. I alternated between barrowing gravel and weeding, so as not to strain anything, but by early evening the big muscles between my shoulder blades were starting to ache and I thought that might be enough for one day. I must have spread over half the bag, maybe even two thirds of it, pacing myself over about seven hours. In comparison, when The Flying Scotsman broke the 100 mph barrier in 1934 her fireman shovelled about nine tonnes of coal in five hours, and at the World Coal Shovelling Championship in Tasmania the record for shovelling half a tonne stands at 26 seconds.
It was unlucky that it seemed to be a particularly noisy morning on the farm, which sent me regularly scuttling down to the entrance each time I heard a heavy diesel engine revving or the bleep of a vehicle reversing, only to see a lettuce lorry about to depart or another trailer load of freshly harvested salad arriving. It was unlucky too that it was such a windy day. I had the front door propped open so that I'd hear the phone as I weeded and waited, but when finally the sound of a lorry down at the farm did turn out to be the gravel, by the time I'd walked down the lane to meet him the driver had had time to leave messages on the landline and my mobile. And no, I didn't take my mobile into the garden with me. I never do. It would only get broken.
The driver was much more amiable than the man on the customer service desk, and said he would walk up the lane to have a look at the access. He seemed perfectly happy with it, and when I said that the dustmen had been only that morning he said confidently that anywhere a dustcart could go, he could go. I said that I hadn't been able to understand why the customer service desk had got quite so agitated about the lane, and he said that was because the man on the desk didn't drive a lorry, just sat at a desk, and as he had been there yesterday when I rang it would have been better if he had spoken to me directly. I conceded that it was difficult to form a view about access when you hadn't seen it, and he reversed his lorry up the lane and offloaded the gravel without any trouble. He was not even worried about the high-up bits of the farm's trees and the neighbour's hedge obscuring his wing mirrors, because his lorry had a camera on the back, and he told me not to worry about the dustmen because they always had somebody in the passenger seat who could look out that side.
His firm announced their results today, and profits were down on turnover that was up, reflecting a margin squeeze from higher import costs due to weak sterling and subdued activity in the housing market, but they still made a five per cent margin, so they still seem as solid as they were twenty years ago. Materials distribution is not an inherently high quality business, as witness the collapse of the firm I used to buy acrylic sheet from. It was only because I'd paid using PayPal that I got a refund when after a series of increasingly unconvincing excuses the acrylic still hadn't arrived by the time their website vanished and the consensus among their unhappy customers on the internet was that they'd gone bust. Being quoted is no protection against going bust, but total failure is normally preceded by a couple of profits warnings.
I asked the driver how much a large bulk bag of gravel actually weighed, and he said around a tonne, just over if it was very wet, otherwise just under. I set to work with my wheelbarrow once he'd gone, and spread fresh gravel over the area where the juniper used to be, and started topping up the dry garden planting and the edges of the drive along the base of the ivy hedges where the gravel was thin. I alternated between barrowing gravel and weeding, so as not to strain anything, but by early evening the big muscles between my shoulder blades were starting to ache and I thought that might be enough for one day. I must have spread over half the bag, maybe even two thirds of it, pacing myself over about seven hours. In comparison, when The Flying Scotsman broke the 100 mph barrier in 1934 her fireman shovelled about nine tonnes of coal in five hours, and at the World Coal Shovelling Championship in Tasmania the record for shovelling half a tonne stands at 26 seconds.
Wednesday, 2 August 2017
retail stress
Yesterday I bought a nice, bushy yew about eighteen inches high from the Chatto Gardens, having noticed that they had some when I called in before to buy the Verbena officinalis. At that point I didn't know I would be wanting yew, but the fact that it was in stock registered. August is not a usual time to buy hedging plants. I already had two dahlias growing on in pots and some homemade compost to bulk up the soil before planting, so all that remained to complete the project was more gravel.
After the experience of the collapsing acrylic sheet distributor I am probably neurotic about small materials suppliers. This was one reason why I left it a couple of weeks after my first attempt to buy gravel when I was told the local aggregate merchant's computer was down on Friday and still down on Saturday. Their website was still there yesterday, but when I rang the man who answered the phone sounded very doubtful when I said I wanted to buy two bulk bags of washed shingle, and said he would have to ring me back. Somebody else did ring me back, in more than two minutes, but by then I had lost my nerve and gone to one of the builder's merchants, a quoted company and one which back in the day when I followed the building sector was reckoned to be extremely conservatively run. Mind you, a lot can change in two decades. When I worked for Lloyds TSB they were reckoned to be well and conservatively managed, making a positive virtue out of dullness, and look what they went and did next.
I ordered my gravel online, ticking the box that said I was a DIY customer and not trade, and the one that said access was not suitable for HGVs, and giving details of the single track approach to the house, necessitating reversing one way. An email arrived saying that my delivery would come from the Colchester branch who would contact me to arrange a delivery date. The ETA was given as Wednesday, which suited me fine as I wanted to get on with spreading the gravel. I hovered around near the entrance keeping an ear out for the lorry while weeding, so that I could head the driver off at the pass before he embedded his wing mirrors in the Eleagnus hedge trying to drive right into the garden, and I kept an eye on my phone for my advisory text saying when the gravel was coming.
By lunchtime I'd had neither text nor gravel, and it was forecast to rain, so I rang up the Colchester branch. The conversation went badly from the start. I explained I'd ordered some bulk bags online, would like to know when they were coming, and had the online order number. The man at the Colchester branch said that was not much use and a name and address would be better. I gave him my name and address. He asked when I'd ordered the gravel and I said, Yesterday, and the email had suggested it would be coming today, and I would like to know when it would be coming so that I could be there to make sure it was put down in the right place and the lorry did not try to come into the garden. He did not like the fact that we were not on the public highway at all, or that I was asking his lorry to reverse up a single track lane. Did I know that the lorry could not go off road? I said that I was not asking it to go off road, it was a perfectly good lane, all other lorries managed to get up the lane, including the dustcart that did it every week, the oil delivery lorry, and the local aggregates' firm lorry that had delivered the last lot of gravel a couple of months ago. It was just that there was not room to turn at the top. How was it supposed to reverse? Would there be a banksman to help? I said that I would be there. He told me that he couldn't give a time for the delivery. I said that was all right, I would wait in the garden all day. He warned me the driver would do his best, and some of their drivers went above and beyond the call of duty, but they only delivered to addresses on the road. They were not insured to go off the public highway. And I should have rung them to say that I'd ordered gravel to be delivered to a property with such limited access, it said so on the website.
It doesn't, or if it does it is in size 6 font on a page tucked away in the website's furthest recesses. And I had ticked the box that said it was not suitable for HGVs and given as many details of the lane as I could fit on the online order form. And the confirmation email said that the branch would contact me. And it must be utter bollocks that they are not insured to go off the public highway. They are a builder's merchant. They deliver to building sites and new estates whose roads have not yet been adopted, for goodness sake. And if the company didn't want private punters like me to order stuff they wouldn't have an open access e-commerce site, but one where you had to register as a trade customer and then log on before you could order anything. I can only assume that he had the hump because I'd ordered online and that the firm's business model meant he made less from that than if I'd ordered from the branch, which would be a very silly business model if that was the problem. Perhaps he was just having a very bad day. Whichever way, I won't be using them again, and I shouldn't think the Systems Administrator will be getting the Coroline corrugated roofing to reroof the blue summerhouse from them when that finally rises to the top of the SA's list of Things to Do.
I hate buying gravel.
After the experience of the collapsing acrylic sheet distributor I am probably neurotic about small materials suppliers. This was one reason why I left it a couple of weeks after my first attempt to buy gravel when I was told the local aggregate merchant's computer was down on Friday and still down on Saturday. Their website was still there yesterday, but when I rang the man who answered the phone sounded very doubtful when I said I wanted to buy two bulk bags of washed shingle, and said he would have to ring me back. Somebody else did ring me back, in more than two minutes, but by then I had lost my nerve and gone to one of the builder's merchants, a quoted company and one which back in the day when I followed the building sector was reckoned to be extremely conservatively run. Mind you, a lot can change in two decades. When I worked for Lloyds TSB they were reckoned to be well and conservatively managed, making a positive virtue out of dullness, and look what they went and did next.
I ordered my gravel online, ticking the box that said I was a DIY customer and not trade, and the one that said access was not suitable for HGVs, and giving details of the single track approach to the house, necessitating reversing one way. An email arrived saying that my delivery would come from the Colchester branch who would contact me to arrange a delivery date. The ETA was given as Wednesday, which suited me fine as I wanted to get on with spreading the gravel. I hovered around near the entrance keeping an ear out for the lorry while weeding, so that I could head the driver off at the pass before he embedded his wing mirrors in the Eleagnus hedge trying to drive right into the garden, and I kept an eye on my phone for my advisory text saying when the gravel was coming.
By lunchtime I'd had neither text nor gravel, and it was forecast to rain, so I rang up the Colchester branch. The conversation went badly from the start. I explained I'd ordered some bulk bags online, would like to know when they were coming, and had the online order number. The man at the Colchester branch said that was not much use and a name and address would be better. I gave him my name and address. He asked when I'd ordered the gravel and I said, Yesterday, and the email had suggested it would be coming today, and I would like to know when it would be coming so that I could be there to make sure it was put down in the right place and the lorry did not try to come into the garden. He did not like the fact that we were not on the public highway at all, or that I was asking his lorry to reverse up a single track lane. Did I know that the lorry could not go off road? I said that I was not asking it to go off road, it was a perfectly good lane, all other lorries managed to get up the lane, including the dustcart that did it every week, the oil delivery lorry, and the local aggregates' firm lorry that had delivered the last lot of gravel a couple of months ago. It was just that there was not room to turn at the top. How was it supposed to reverse? Would there be a banksman to help? I said that I would be there. He told me that he couldn't give a time for the delivery. I said that was all right, I would wait in the garden all day. He warned me the driver would do his best, and some of their drivers went above and beyond the call of duty, but they only delivered to addresses on the road. They were not insured to go off the public highway. And I should have rung them to say that I'd ordered gravel to be delivered to a property with such limited access, it said so on the website.
It doesn't, or if it does it is in size 6 font on a page tucked away in the website's furthest recesses. And I had ticked the box that said it was not suitable for HGVs and given as many details of the lane as I could fit on the online order form. And the confirmation email said that the branch would contact me. And it must be utter bollocks that they are not insured to go off the public highway. They are a builder's merchant. They deliver to building sites and new estates whose roads have not yet been adopted, for goodness sake. And if the company didn't want private punters like me to order stuff they wouldn't have an open access e-commerce site, but one where you had to register as a trade customer and then log on before you could order anything. I can only assume that he had the hump because I'd ordered online and that the firm's business model meant he made less from that than if I'd ordered from the branch, which would be a very silly business model if that was the problem. Perhaps he was just having a very bad day. Whichever way, I won't be using them again, and I shouldn't think the Systems Administrator will be getting the Coroline corrugated roofing to reroof the blue summerhouse from them when that finally rises to the top of the SA's list of Things to Do.
I hate buying gravel.
Tuesday, 1 August 2017
of witch hazel and wisteria
This will be a late and probably short blog post, since I was late in from the monthly meeting of the garden club, and never got round to posting anything before I went out because I was gardening. I had reminded the Systems Administrator in advance that I would not be around for supper today because it was the first Tuesday of the month, and this morning asked the SA to give me a nudge if I looked as though I might have forgotten that I was supposed to be going out. At this time of the year I'm usually out in the garden until half past six, if not seven, and it is very easy to get engrossed in what you are doing and forget to come inside in time to get cleaned up and have something to eat. Sure enough, when the SA came over at quarter to six to check I'd remembered I was going out I was still busily planting up the newly cleared end of the dahlia bed and only vaguely starting to think about packing up.
Tonight's lecturer was a highly knowledgeable and experienced nurseryman, Chris Lane, who holds a National Collection of Hamamelis and another of Wisteria. I have heard him speak a couple of times before, but am always happy to hear a shrub expert who really knows their stuff holding forth. I have his book on witch hazels, purchased second hand from a US based seller after it had gone out of print and hit astronomical prices in the UK. My nice and very clean copy was remaindered from the Orange County library service. He is working on another book on wisteria which I shall certainly buy, if and when it comes out, since he was working on it the last time I heard him talk and that must have been a year ago.
I picked up some new strange and interesting snippets. I knew that Hamamelis were traditionally propagated by grafting, and it turns out that they still are. I wondered if nowadays they might be micropropagated, but it turns out that the numbers involved are too small to be commercially attractive, and that in any event it doesn't work with witch hazel. Plant science has got so sophisticated, it wouldn't have occurred to me that you couldn't micropropagate pretty much any woody species if you wanted to, but apparently not. The tubes fill with strange brown gunk and it just doesn't work. For home gardeners who haven't mastered the art of grafting you can layer them, giving the branches a couple of years to root, or even air layer them, but in commercial nurseries they are still grafted, as plants have been for hundreds of years.
Young wisteria need generous watering to get them going. Once established they are fine with normal watering, and water logging is fatal, but until then they need lots of water. That will be why my plant that's supposed to be growing up the scaffolding pole is not doing anything. I watered it in dry spells early on to keep it from dying, but I have not regularly lavished water upon it. I had better give it more.
He elaborated on his statement in a previous talk that wisteria tends not to flower until it has reached the limits of whatever it is growing on, be that a six foot pole or a large tree. The mechanism is that the new, whippy young growths will not extend more than a yard or so beyond their support. If at that point they sense they are still flailing around with nothing to cling on to, they stop growing. So if a wisteria has a whole tree to explore it will keep growing until is has poked its way out of the tree by the requisite yard, while if it only has a pergola, or a pole, it will reach the point of no support rather sooner. Once it has discovered it has nowhere else to go it will start putting more of its energies into flowering.
Chris Lane sells strictly by wholesale, except on his nursery open days. The dates of those tend to be advertised on his website only a few weeks in advance, because the timing of flowering is so dependent on the weather. The sight of his stock beds of witch hazels must be a sight to behold. I need to convince the SA of this, since I don't think I should have the energy to drive all the way to Faversham in my Skoda in February. I was thinking how good a garden club coach trip would be, until the winner of the potato competition who was sitting next to me pointed out that you couldn't book a coach when you didn't know in advance when the witch hazels were going to be out.
Tonight's lecturer was a highly knowledgeable and experienced nurseryman, Chris Lane, who holds a National Collection of Hamamelis and another of Wisteria. I have heard him speak a couple of times before, but am always happy to hear a shrub expert who really knows their stuff holding forth. I have his book on witch hazels, purchased second hand from a US based seller after it had gone out of print and hit astronomical prices in the UK. My nice and very clean copy was remaindered from the Orange County library service. He is working on another book on wisteria which I shall certainly buy, if and when it comes out, since he was working on it the last time I heard him talk and that must have been a year ago.
I picked up some new strange and interesting snippets. I knew that Hamamelis were traditionally propagated by grafting, and it turns out that they still are. I wondered if nowadays they might be micropropagated, but it turns out that the numbers involved are too small to be commercially attractive, and that in any event it doesn't work with witch hazel. Plant science has got so sophisticated, it wouldn't have occurred to me that you couldn't micropropagate pretty much any woody species if you wanted to, but apparently not. The tubes fill with strange brown gunk and it just doesn't work. For home gardeners who haven't mastered the art of grafting you can layer them, giving the branches a couple of years to root, or even air layer them, but in commercial nurseries they are still grafted, as plants have been for hundreds of years.
Young wisteria need generous watering to get them going. Once established they are fine with normal watering, and water logging is fatal, but until then they need lots of water. That will be why my plant that's supposed to be growing up the scaffolding pole is not doing anything. I watered it in dry spells early on to keep it from dying, but I have not regularly lavished water upon it. I had better give it more.
He elaborated on his statement in a previous talk that wisteria tends not to flower until it has reached the limits of whatever it is growing on, be that a six foot pole or a large tree. The mechanism is that the new, whippy young growths will not extend more than a yard or so beyond their support. If at that point they sense they are still flailing around with nothing to cling on to, they stop growing. So if a wisteria has a whole tree to explore it will keep growing until is has poked its way out of the tree by the requisite yard, while if it only has a pergola, or a pole, it will reach the point of no support rather sooner. Once it has discovered it has nowhere else to go it will start putting more of its energies into flowering.
Chris Lane sells strictly by wholesale, except on his nursery open days. The dates of those tend to be advertised on his website only a few weeks in advance, because the timing of flowering is so dependent on the weather. The sight of his stock beds of witch hazels must be a sight to behold. I need to convince the SA of this, since I don't think I should have the energy to drive all the way to Faversham in my Skoda in February. I was thinking how good a garden club coach trip would be, until the winner of the potato competition who was sitting next to me pointed out that you couldn't book a coach when you didn't know in advance when the witch hazels were going to be out.
Monday, 31 July 2017
making progress on two fronts
The Systems Administrator cleared away the heap of juniper branches and roots, all except the stump which I helped lift into the trailer before the SA packed up for the afternoon and went to cook supper. I need to give the remains of the gravel a final tidying up, pulling out the last roots and treading it flat, and the SA has offered to sweep the newly accessible concrete parking area in the morning, and then it will only need a fresh coat of gravel and the juniper clearance project will be finished. When I added Sort out conifers by concrete to free up parking to the list of things to do (currently number 67) I imagined cutting them back without entirely butchering them, but the drive looks much better with them gone. It just goes to show that it is worth trying to look at a garden with a fresh eye. Once plants have been there for a long time it is easy to regard them as fixtures, but really anything can be up for grabs at any time, except for trees with Preservation Orders on them.
Meanwhile I am close to finishing weeding the mess just inside the entrance to the garden. I haven't managed to get every last bramble root out, and I expect they will shoot again in due course, but I shall be ready for them with glyphosate. I took the SA to see what I'd been doing after tea, and set out my requests for projects with which I should like help, which sounded rather long when presented as a list, even when hedged around with disclaimers about some of them not being urgent, and more something for the SA to ponder possible solutions in odd moments.
I should like a screen for the bins, so that the first thing one saw on entering the garden was not the dustbin and the brown garden waste recycling wheelie bin. I should also like a screen for the grass clippings the SA dumps into the odd corner of the next field which under the way the farm was carved up ended up as part of our garden. I should like to fix a reed screen up to head height, or perhaps split bamboo might be more durable, along the back of the newly weeded and cleared border at the top of the slope, so that when I replanted it with whatever shrubs I decide might cope with the wind and sand they would have a more attractive background than brambles, a pile of grass clippings, and any stuff the neighbours had left lying around their field at the time. Sometimes they have a portable miniature football goal, though that hasn't been in evidence recently. And I should like help installing (for which read like the SA to install) my new artwork. The artwork was more urgent, since I had already bought it, and in fact the screen along the back of the bed was quite urgent, since I should like to get on with planting up the border.
It sounded like a long list, and I felt rather mean, when garden artworks are part of my hobby and not really anything to do with the Systems Administrator. The SA drew a deep breath and explained that as this was an exceptionally windy corner, exposed to the full blast of the south westerlies, that movable screens for bins and lawn clippings would be quite difficult to design so that they did not fall to bits after a few months. Likewise there was the risk that a bamboo screen along the back of the border would blow apart. On the other hand, the SA could see my point that as the top corner of the slope was visible along both of the main paths through the back garden and along the drive from the house it would be better if it did not consist of some wire rabbit netting and a mound of brambles. The SA began to talk about battens and to warm to the theme, and we agreed that as a roll of split bamboo screen would not be vastly expensive that I would get one, the SA would fix it, and we would see how it worked out.
The artwork provoked similar anxiety about the wind, and we ended up with a compromise that it could be fixed at waist rather than head height. I have just bought a set of ten capital letters in an elegant serif font, stamped out of thin rusted metal sheet, and I want them fastened up by the entrance to the garden where they will spell out a line from Samuel Beckett which could be every gardener's motto (and is especially apt for this dry and windy corner where I have struggled for nearly a quarter of a century with a series of unsuccessful planting schemes). Instead of a view of dustbins as you arrive I want people to see the words:
FAIL BETTER
Meanwhile I am close to finishing weeding the mess just inside the entrance to the garden. I haven't managed to get every last bramble root out, and I expect they will shoot again in due course, but I shall be ready for them with glyphosate. I took the SA to see what I'd been doing after tea, and set out my requests for projects with which I should like help, which sounded rather long when presented as a list, even when hedged around with disclaimers about some of them not being urgent, and more something for the SA to ponder possible solutions in odd moments.
I should like a screen for the bins, so that the first thing one saw on entering the garden was not the dustbin and the brown garden waste recycling wheelie bin. I should also like a screen for the grass clippings the SA dumps into the odd corner of the next field which under the way the farm was carved up ended up as part of our garden. I should like to fix a reed screen up to head height, or perhaps split bamboo might be more durable, along the back of the newly weeded and cleared border at the top of the slope, so that when I replanted it with whatever shrubs I decide might cope with the wind and sand they would have a more attractive background than brambles, a pile of grass clippings, and any stuff the neighbours had left lying around their field at the time. Sometimes they have a portable miniature football goal, though that hasn't been in evidence recently. And I should like help installing (for which read like the SA to install) my new artwork. The artwork was more urgent, since I had already bought it, and in fact the screen along the back of the bed was quite urgent, since I should like to get on with planting up the border.
It sounded like a long list, and I felt rather mean, when garden artworks are part of my hobby and not really anything to do with the Systems Administrator. The SA drew a deep breath and explained that as this was an exceptionally windy corner, exposed to the full blast of the south westerlies, that movable screens for bins and lawn clippings would be quite difficult to design so that they did not fall to bits after a few months. Likewise there was the risk that a bamboo screen along the back of the border would blow apart. On the other hand, the SA could see my point that as the top corner of the slope was visible along both of the main paths through the back garden and along the drive from the house it would be better if it did not consist of some wire rabbit netting and a mound of brambles. The SA began to talk about battens and to warm to the theme, and we agreed that as a roll of split bamboo screen would not be vastly expensive that I would get one, the SA would fix it, and we would see how it worked out.
The artwork provoked similar anxiety about the wind, and we ended up with a compromise that it could be fixed at waist rather than head height. I have just bought a set of ten capital letters in an elegant serif font, stamped out of thin rusted metal sheet, and I want them fastened up by the entrance to the garden where they will spell out a line from Samuel Beckett which could be every gardener's motto (and is especially apt for this dry and windy corner where I have struggled for nearly a quarter of a century with a series of unsuccessful planting schemes). Instead of a view of dustbins as you arrive I want people to see the words:
FAIL BETTER
Sunday, 30 July 2017
the stump is out
The juniper stump is out. The pile of debris next to where the juniper used to be is taller than I am, though the Systems Administrator has offered to move it to the bonfire heap tomorrow. I feel rather stiff but mightily self-satisfied. Also relieved, as there was a point about half way through the excavation when I began to wonder if I was going to be able to get it out by hand.
Poor juniper, I still feel mean removing a healthy plant, and it was a very healthy specimen. Having said that they will not regenerate from old wood, there were a few little points of new leaves sprouting right in the very heart of the plant. I would not rely on being able to cut one down to stumps and it reclothing itself in fresh growth in any sensible time period, though.
The roots went mostly horizontally, echoing the growth habit above ground, and I was able to dig most of them out. Branches and roots are both made of soft wood and easy to cut by hand. The Systems Administrator spent ten minutes before lunch today cutting down the last couple of feet of the main stems with the chainsaw, which had reached four to six inches in diameter after two decades, but I dismantled most of the canopy with a manual pruning saw and loppers.
Getting the roots out was hard work, but not the part that almost threw me. It was getting the stump out that was the real challenge. It was made up of several stems, occupying a space getting on for a yard long and half as wide. After working my way round the centre several times, sawing and cutting through the roots as I went, I had to start undercutting the mass of stems in the middle using the pick axe, and keep chopping the ends of the severed roots ever shorter using loppers and the pruning saw, so that the great central lump began to shrink down to a more reasonable size and I stood a chance of eventually cutting my way right to the centre.
There was no central massive anchoring tap root, as there is under some plants, but several smallish roots plunging straight down from underneath the cluster of trunks. At the end, when I'd undercut so far that the rootball wobbled under my touch, it still refused to lift out of the hole, and I had to tip it as far as I could to one side, feel under it to see where it was anchored, and then reach under it while still managing to keep it tipped and cut through the remaining roots, identifying them by touch.
The cats seemed mildly appalled to see a shrub, a hitherto dependable garden fixture, disappearing in front of their eyes. Change is bad, when you are a cat. Mr Cool was especially fascinated by the hole, which he came and inspected very carefully, while Mr Fluffy unfortunately took the large area of freshly disturbed earth to be a new and magnificent lavatory.
I do wish that gardening programmes on TV would be more honest about the work it takes to dig out mature shrubs by hand. They make it look as though after ten minutes of digging with a spade you will have a trench right around the shrub, while a few more brisk chops will cut under the root ball, and it is really not like that, or at least not most of the time. The main roots of the juniper were over two inches in diameter and the smaller ones an inch, and if I'd chopped at them with a spade all that would have happened is I'd have jarred my arms painfully until the spade broke. The pick axe bounced off them if I hit them directly. Instead I dug down to them and with the blade under them used the leverage of the handle to raise them to a point where I could sever them, or if they were too thick to lift at all I dug a hole on either side to give access to saw through them.
Anyway, it is out now, and I have almost finished filling the hole and smoothing off the site, and it looks much better. All it needs now is a tonne of gravel. I feel rather stiff, but I don't think I've torn or injured anything. I was very careful to let the axe do the work. I know someone who managed to rip a couple of ribs loose by dint of tugging furiously at a thing she was trying to dislodge, but brute strength is not the answer, not when you are small and no longer young. Cunning, leverage, gravity, and sharp cutting tools, that's the way to do it.
Poor juniper, I still feel mean removing a healthy plant, and it was a very healthy specimen. Having said that they will not regenerate from old wood, there were a few little points of new leaves sprouting right in the very heart of the plant. I would not rely on being able to cut one down to stumps and it reclothing itself in fresh growth in any sensible time period, though.
The roots went mostly horizontally, echoing the growth habit above ground, and I was able to dig most of them out. Branches and roots are both made of soft wood and easy to cut by hand. The Systems Administrator spent ten minutes before lunch today cutting down the last couple of feet of the main stems with the chainsaw, which had reached four to six inches in diameter after two decades, but I dismantled most of the canopy with a manual pruning saw and loppers.
Getting the roots out was hard work, but not the part that almost threw me. It was getting the stump out that was the real challenge. It was made up of several stems, occupying a space getting on for a yard long and half as wide. After working my way round the centre several times, sawing and cutting through the roots as I went, I had to start undercutting the mass of stems in the middle using the pick axe, and keep chopping the ends of the severed roots ever shorter using loppers and the pruning saw, so that the great central lump began to shrink down to a more reasonable size and I stood a chance of eventually cutting my way right to the centre.
There was no central massive anchoring tap root, as there is under some plants, but several smallish roots plunging straight down from underneath the cluster of trunks. At the end, when I'd undercut so far that the rootball wobbled under my touch, it still refused to lift out of the hole, and I had to tip it as far as I could to one side, feel under it to see where it was anchored, and then reach under it while still managing to keep it tipped and cut through the remaining roots, identifying them by touch.
The cats seemed mildly appalled to see a shrub, a hitherto dependable garden fixture, disappearing in front of their eyes. Change is bad, when you are a cat. Mr Cool was especially fascinated by the hole, which he came and inspected very carefully, while Mr Fluffy unfortunately took the large area of freshly disturbed earth to be a new and magnificent lavatory.
I do wish that gardening programmes on TV would be more honest about the work it takes to dig out mature shrubs by hand. They make it look as though after ten minutes of digging with a spade you will have a trench right around the shrub, while a few more brisk chops will cut under the root ball, and it is really not like that, or at least not most of the time. The main roots of the juniper were over two inches in diameter and the smaller ones an inch, and if I'd chopped at them with a spade all that would have happened is I'd have jarred my arms painfully until the spade broke. The pick axe bounced off them if I hit them directly. Instead I dug down to them and with the blade under them used the leverage of the handle to raise them to a point where I could sever them, or if they were too thick to lift at all I dug a hole on either side to give access to saw through them.
Anyway, it is out now, and I have almost finished filling the hole and smoothing off the site, and it looks much better. All it needs now is a tonne of gravel. I feel rather stiff, but I don't think I've torn or injured anything. I was very careful to let the axe do the work. I know someone who managed to rip a couple of ribs loose by dint of tugging furiously at a thing she was trying to dislodge, but brute strength is not the answer, not when you are small and no longer young. Cunning, leverage, gravity, and sharp cutting tools, that's the way to do it.
Saturday, 29 July 2017
talking about trees
The setting for today's woodland charity talk was rather different to some. For a start, it was in Suffolk. For years I have tried to explain to a series of volunteer organizers that I live close to the county boundary. It takes me, on average, just over twenty minutes to get into Suffolk, versus a good hour and a quarter to get to Romford and longer by the time I've allowed for delays on the A12, but they have all insisted on running things on a strictly county driven basis. I was once offered a booking in Stansted Mountfitchet, still part of Essex but the other side of the M11, and it came as a revelation to the administrative assistant concerned that if she were to look at a map she would see that Hertford and Cambridge were both much closer to Stansted Mountfitchet than I was starting from the east of Colchester.
Hats off, therefore, to the latest volunteer manager, who seems to have a better grasp of geography and a less blinkered view of county boundaries than many of her predecessors. She has also issued me with a name badge, a set of business cards which have my name printed on them and not just generic cards for the charity on which I am supposed to write my details in biro, and a portable banner on a stand. I feel we are going places.
Today's talk was unusual for being on a Saturday morning. Who goes to talks on a Saturday morning? It was part of a summer long festival of trees and gardening, the first time the organizers had run one. I didn't know what to expect, and was reconciled to nobody wanting to come to an ad hoc Saturday morning lecture on woodlands. In the event there was an audience, small but friendly, and I did not feel an idiot talking to them, as I might have done if the festival organizers had outnumbered the members of the public.
If they do it again I think they could do with roping in somebody with flair and experience to help with the publicity. It must be difficult running a series of events when you have no history, no database of past supporters, and pretty much no budget, but there was no notice outside the venue to say that a talk would be taking place on Saturday morning. I saw nothing about the festival in any of the local papers I read online, and it didn't get a mention at the garden club, which meets not very far away, or any publicity at their Open Gardens. The only person I know who lives in the town didn't know there was a festival of trees and gardening running over the summer. Still, it was brave of the organizers to try, and it must be as potentially embarrassing for them as for their speakers to stage events and risk nobody turning up. More so, in fact, as my name wasn't on the programme. They were doing a guided tree walk this afternoon, so I hope some people went to that, because it began to rain soon after lunch.
Hats off, therefore, to the latest volunteer manager, who seems to have a better grasp of geography and a less blinkered view of county boundaries than many of her predecessors. She has also issued me with a name badge, a set of business cards which have my name printed on them and not just generic cards for the charity on which I am supposed to write my details in biro, and a portable banner on a stand. I feel we are going places.
Today's talk was unusual for being on a Saturday morning. Who goes to talks on a Saturday morning? It was part of a summer long festival of trees and gardening, the first time the organizers had run one. I didn't know what to expect, and was reconciled to nobody wanting to come to an ad hoc Saturday morning lecture on woodlands. In the event there was an audience, small but friendly, and I did not feel an idiot talking to them, as I might have done if the festival organizers had outnumbered the members of the public.
If they do it again I think they could do with roping in somebody with flair and experience to help with the publicity. It must be difficult running a series of events when you have no history, no database of past supporters, and pretty much no budget, but there was no notice outside the venue to say that a talk would be taking place on Saturday morning. I saw nothing about the festival in any of the local papers I read online, and it didn't get a mention at the garden club, which meets not very far away, or any publicity at their Open Gardens. The only person I know who lives in the town didn't know there was a festival of trees and gardening running over the summer. Still, it was brave of the organizers to try, and it must be as potentially embarrassing for them as for their speakers to stage events and risk nobody turning up. More so, in fact, as my name wasn't on the programme. They were doing a guided tree walk this afternoon, so I hope some people went to that, because it began to rain soon after lunch.
Friday, 28 July 2017
a party of cats
Whatever Mr Cool was doing on his travels yesterday must have exhausted him, for he spent most of today sleeping in the trug I use to carry twigs to the woodland charity talks, and is now lying sprawled across the end of the kitchen table. It is going to be a blow to him when after tomorrow's talk the trug goes back down to the garage and he has to make do with his wicker cat bed and whatever assortment of cardboard boxes we have lying around at the time*.
I spent much of the day sawing my way through the gigantic juniper at the end of the dahlia bed**.The pile of prunings on the concrete is already vast, and I haven't finished yet***.I think it is large enough that it will be worthwhile for the Systems Administrator to pump up the tyre of the old tractor, which has a slow puncture, and sort out whatever the problem with the fuel system is to get it to run, so that we can clear the heap using the big trailer rather than making twenty journeys with the little, hand pulled one.
There is something sad about dismantling a healthy plant simply because it has outgrown its space, but it has to be admitted that the drive is already starting to look better without it. Seeing the gap highlights how the juniper had ceased to have any useful purpose. It blocked access on foot and for vehicles to places to which there ought to be access, and created a thirty foot detour in getting from one side of the dahlia bed to the other, and it was not a thing of such beauty that one didn't mind accommodating it. Almost the first exercise we did in class in the first term at Writtle was to conduct a landscape appraisal, which means looking at everything in a landscape and deciding what its function was. The poor old juniper had no function.
The SA has offered to cut through the thickest branches with the chainsaw, if I remove the lighter top layers by hand. That will speed things up, but still leaves the roots to dig out. I have a nasty feeling that is going to be a pig of a job with the pick axe, the juniper being in the pink of health, unlike the sea buckthorns, and presumably having a massive root system to match its enormous top growth. There are twenty years' worth of fallen and decaying needles to scoop up as well, and the gravel will need replenishing. In fact, I think I had better order an extra bag****when I buy the next load.
*In the time it took me to type that last sentence Mr Cool returned to the trug.
**Mr Cool was promptly replaced by Our Ginger and Mr Fluffy. Our Ginger gave the top of Mr Fluffy's head a good wash, and Mr Fluffy is now lying down looking cute and purring at one end of the table while Our Ginger lies at the other end with his paw on my arm, purring. Stereo purring.
***Now Mr Fidget has arrived and he and Mr Fluffy are washing each other. The kitchen table is getting rather crowded.
****Mr Cool began to feel lonely in his trug and has joined the party on the table. Four cats. Ernest Hemingway, eat your heart out.
I spent much of the day sawing my way through the gigantic juniper at the end of the dahlia bed**.The pile of prunings on the concrete is already vast, and I haven't finished yet***.I think it is large enough that it will be worthwhile for the Systems Administrator to pump up the tyre of the old tractor, which has a slow puncture, and sort out whatever the problem with the fuel system is to get it to run, so that we can clear the heap using the big trailer rather than making twenty journeys with the little, hand pulled one.
There is something sad about dismantling a healthy plant simply because it has outgrown its space, but it has to be admitted that the drive is already starting to look better without it. Seeing the gap highlights how the juniper had ceased to have any useful purpose. It blocked access on foot and for vehicles to places to which there ought to be access, and created a thirty foot detour in getting from one side of the dahlia bed to the other, and it was not a thing of such beauty that one didn't mind accommodating it. Almost the first exercise we did in class in the first term at Writtle was to conduct a landscape appraisal, which means looking at everything in a landscape and deciding what its function was. The poor old juniper had no function.
The SA has offered to cut through the thickest branches with the chainsaw, if I remove the lighter top layers by hand. That will speed things up, but still leaves the roots to dig out. I have a nasty feeling that is going to be a pig of a job with the pick axe, the juniper being in the pink of health, unlike the sea buckthorns, and presumably having a massive root system to match its enormous top growth. There are twenty years' worth of fallen and decaying needles to scoop up as well, and the gravel will need replenishing. In fact, I think I had better order an extra bag****when I buy the next load.
*In the time it took me to type that last sentence Mr Cool returned to the trug.
**Mr Cool was promptly replaced by Our Ginger and Mr Fluffy. Our Ginger gave the top of Mr Fluffy's head a good wash, and Mr Fluffy is now lying down looking cute and purring at one end of the table while Our Ginger lies at the other end with his paw on my arm, purring. Stereo purring.
***Now Mr Fidget has arrived and he and Mr Fluffy are washing each other. The kitchen table is getting rather crowded.
****Mr Cool began to feel lonely in his trug and has joined the party on the table. Four cats. Ernest Hemingway, eat your heart out.
Thursday, 27 July 2017
the mystery of the vanishing mr cool
Mr Cool was not in for his breakfast this morning. Initially I was not too fussed, since he likes to go out and normally shows up by nine or half past. When he had not come in by ten I walked up the side of the wood calling for him, and round the back garden, but he didn't appear. I had to go out soon after midday for an afternoon woodland charity talk, and as I set off there was still no sign of him.
I fretted about him all the way up the A12, then managed to stop thinking about him once I was set up in the hall, ready to go. Today's group was a U3A with a proper sound system including big speakers on stands, a lapel microphone that didn't keep cutting out or depend on my holding my head in exactly the right position at all times, and a cheerful man who knew how it all worked. Since the first part of the talk is accompanied by actual twigs, and I tend to move about and use my hands to illustrate points while lecturing, it is a lot easier not to be rooted to a microphone stand or desperately concentrating on holding the microphone the correct distance from my chin with one hand while operating the projector or rifling through a basket of twigs with the other. The only technical issue today was that the hall's big screen was above the stage, and even with maximum tilt on my projector table and a magazine wedged under the projector's front feet the image still fell short of the top of the screen, and I had to raid my pile of leaflets for extra packing.
The U3A seemed to enjoy the talk, or at they stayed awake and some of them were smiling and some came up afterwards to say that they had enjoyed it. I'd give this afternoon's effort an alpha minus, whereas I rated the last one beta double plus. It is very hard to tell, though, like trying to say how you did after an exam. There have been times when the audience have sat through a talk so solemnly and stiffly I've been amazed to get a call a year or two later inviting me back, but other times when people seemed to love the talk on the day then I never heard from any of them again.
As I packed up my things I remembered that Mr Cool had not been seen since about ten last night. I drove back up the A12 telling myself that when I got home the Systems Administrator would greet me with the news that Mr Cool was back, but Mr Cool was not back and it was raining. The SA had been up the side of the wood and through the wood calling him before the rain, to no avail. I changed into my gardening clothes to start looking for Mr Cool, and Mr Cool appeared, soaking wet. He graciously consented to be clasped to my bosom while water soaked into my t shirt, then he ate some tea, or perhaps it was a late lunch or breakfast, and then he went to sleep in my chair in the study.
Today was the longest we have gone so far without sight of him. Even when he isn't hungry he pops in after we've got up to say hello, and he generally wants lunch. There were strange people here this afternoon, first of all some friends kindly bringing us straw bales for the chicken run, and then our cheerful local boiler specialist to do the annual service and measure up to replace the heated towel rails, which are leaking. Mr Cool hates strange people, so perhaps once they started to turn up he remained out of sight until they had gone and it started to rain. That doesn't explain why he ignored us calling for him earlier, when yesterday he was enormously friendly, but that's cats for you.
I fretted about him all the way up the A12, then managed to stop thinking about him once I was set up in the hall, ready to go. Today's group was a U3A with a proper sound system including big speakers on stands, a lapel microphone that didn't keep cutting out or depend on my holding my head in exactly the right position at all times, and a cheerful man who knew how it all worked. Since the first part of the talk is accompanied by actual twigs, and I tend to move about and use my hands to illustrate points while lecturing, it is a lot easier not to be rooted to a microphone stand or desperately concentrating on holding the microphone the correct distance from my chin with one hand while operating the projector or rifling through a basket of twigs with the other. The only technical issue today was that the hall's big screen was above the stage, and even with maximum tilt on my projector table and a magazine wedged under the projector's front feet the image still fell short of the top of the screen, and I had to raid my pile of leaflets for extra packing.
The U3A seemed to enjoy the talk, or at they stayed awake and some of them were smiling and some came up afterwards to say that they had enjoyed it. I'd give this afternoon's effort an alpha minus, whereas I rated the last one beta double plus. It is very hard to tell, though, like trying to say how you did after an exam. There have been times when the audience have sat through a talk so solemnly and stiffly I've been amazed to get a call a year or two later inviting me back, but other times when people seemed to love the talk on the day then I never heard from any of them again.
As I packed up my things I remembered that Mr Cool had not been seen since about ten last night. I drove back up the A12 telling myself that when I got home the Systems Administrator would greet me with the news that Mr Cool was back, but Mr Cool was not back and it was raining. The SA had been up the side of the wood and through the wood calling him before the rain, to no avail. I changed into my gardening clothes to start looking for Mr Cool, and Mr Cool appeared, soaking wet. He graciously consented to be clasped to my bosom while water soaked into my t shirt, then he ate some tea, or perhaps it was a late lunch or breakfast, and then he went to sleep in my chair in the study.
Today was the longest we have gone so far without sight of him. Even when he isn't hungry he pops in after we've got up to say hello, and he generally wants lunch. There were strange people here this afternoon, first of all some friends kindly bringing us straw bales for the chicken run, and then our cheerful local boiler specialist to do the annual service and measure up to replace the heated towel rails, which are leaking. Mr Cool hates strange people, so perhaps once they started to turn up he remained out of sight until they had gone and it started to rain. That doesn't explain why he ignored us calling for him earlier, when yesterday he was enormously friendly, but that's cats for you.
Wednesday, 26 July 2017
a decision
This morning, as I headed off to the railway gravel to plant out some more of the stash of plants in pots by the greenhouse, an idea struck me with great clarity, and I realized that I should remove the large semi prostrate juniper at the end of the dahlia bed. It is a specimen of Juniperus x pfizeriana 'Pfitzeriana Aurea', a name that does not exactly trip off the tongue, and was planted nearly twenty years ago, since when it has overwhelmed two other, lesser prostrate junipers, and changed its name from the slightly more manageable Juniperus x media.
You would probably recognize it if you saw one, even though you might not know its name, for it is a classic landscaping plant of the 1970s, and none the worse for that. Willing to live in miserable soil, or shade, and gently spreading to fill odd shaped gaps or corners with a weed proof, impenetrable, evergreen cover, it used to be one of the plants that landscape architects reached for when they had an awkward space to fill. It will tolerate regular trimming, but woe betide you if you cut hard into old wood behind the current growth. It will not reshoot, and you will be left looking at the stumps.
My regular trimming has not been regular enough, so that after two decades the juniper has spread to occupy the end of the dahlia bed and almost a car's length of parking on the drive, as well as creeping nearly mid way across the concrete so blocking half of the overflow parking area, and has advanced towards the long bed until there is only a pinched, eighteen inch path left between them. I have been fiddling around trying to reduce it to improve access to the concrete and the railway, but the real solution is to chop it all out. Suddenly we would regain a space as large as some small front gardens.
Most of it would not be space for new planting, just parking, but it would still be welcome, and I would want to put something in its place to mark the end of the dahlia bed. For a few hours I toyed with the idea of a dwarf pine, not too tiny or slow growing but that wouldn't get too large. I love pines, and all those we've tried so far have done extremely well in the sand. A form of the native Pinus sylvestris whose new growth emerged pale yellow, perhaps, or a dark, gnarled pine like the ones seen in some recent Chelsea gardens. But neither of these felt right, and my budget would not stretch to the sort of pines seen at Chelsea, and how long would I have to wait for one to reach that size? No, the answer, it turned out, was another yew, to echo the two topiary domes topped with cake stands in the long bed. I would not make another cake stand, but perhaps a spiral, or a sort of Cleopatra's needle obelisk.
Yew is by no means instant, but it will make getting on for eighteen inches annual growth when young if fed and watered, and it likes good drainage. In damp ground it is vulnerable to phytophthora, but in sand it is pretty bullet proof. There is not, so far and touching wood, a yew blight to go with box blight.
I ran the idea past the Systems Administrator, who turned out to be delighted at the prospect of the juniper going, so pleased in fact that I thought the SA could always have asked before. I suppose it is part of our modus vivendi that my plants are allowed to do their thing without criticism in case I should dearly love them, the main exception being when they block the signal to the Sky dish.
You would probably recognize it if you saw one, even though you might not know its name, for it is a classic landscaping plant of the 1970s, and none the worse for that. Willing to live in miserable soil, or shade, and gently spreading to fill odd shaped gaps or corners with a weed proof, impenetrable, evergreen cover, it used to be one of the plants that landscape architects reached for when they had an awkward space to fill. It will tolerate regular trimming, but woe betide you if you cut hard into old wood behind the current growth. It will not reshoot, and you will be left looking at the stumps.
My regular trimming has not been regular enough, so that after two decades the juniper has spread to occupy the end of the dahlia bed and almost a car's length of parking on the drive, as well as creeping nearly mid way across the concrete so blocking half of the overflow parking area, and has advanced towards the long bed until there is only a pinched, eighteen inch path left between them. I have been fiddling around trying to reduce it to improve access to the concrete and the railway, but the real solution is to chop it all out. Suddenly we would regain a space as large as some small front gardens.
Most of it would not be space for new planting, just parking, but it would still be welcome, and I would want to put something in its place to mark the end of the dahlia bed. For a few hours I toyed with the idea of a dwarf pine, not too tiny or slow growing but that wouldn't get too large. I love pines, and all those we've tried so far have done extremely well in the sand. A form of the native Pinus sylvestris whose new growth emerged pale yellow, perhaps, or a dark, gnarled pine like the ones seen in some recent Chelsea gardens. But neither of these felt right, and my budget would not stretch to the sort of pines seen at Chelsea, and how long would I have to wait for one to reach that size? No, the answer, it turned out, was another yew, to echo the two topiary domes topped with cake stands in the long bed. I would not make another cake stand, but perhaps a spiral, or a sort of Cleopatra's needle obelisk.
Yew is by no means instant, but it will make getting on for eighteen inches annual growth when young if fed and watered, and it likes good drainage. In damp ground it is vulnerable to phytophthora, but in sand it is pretty bullet proof. There is not, so far and touching wood, a yew blight to go with box blight.
I ran the idea past the Systems Administrator, who turned out to be delighted at the prospect of the juniper going, so pleased in fact that I thought the SA could always have asked before. I suppose it is part of our modus vivendi that my plants are allowed to do their thing without criticism in case I should dearly love them, the main exception being when they block the signal to the Sky dish.
Tuesday, 25 July 2017
an unwelcome discovery
I finished moving the Tithonia on into bigger containers, so they are now in 27cm diameter pots and we shall see how that works. They had made a lot of roots in their old pots, and I am coming to the view that they are better with plenty of space, plenty of water, and probably plenty of food. In contrast one of the Zinnia 'Queen Red Lime' had collapsed over the past few days, and I'm pretty sure that was because it got too wet, from the spells of very heavy rain as much as from my over watering it. Luckily I had one plant left in the greenhouse, still in its two litre plastic pot, so I was able to substitute that for the dying one. It looks as though with Zinnia you want to keep the pot on the small side, and try to keep them from getting soggy.
I potted on the Nicotiana mutablis by the front door, all except one because I ran out of the right size pots, and then I made a very unwelcome discovery about the fuchsias. I have been fretting since mid spring when they came back into growth that most were not bushing up as well as I'd like. They produced leaves, and some flowers, but not many new shoots, and as the summer went on the rate of production of leaves and flowers started to tail off instead of gaining momentum. I wondered if I had fed them too little, or too much, or with the wrong kind of food and they didn't like Vitax Q4, or if they had been too wet on average, or allowed to get too dry between waterings in the hot weather.
This afternoon as I was picking off the fallen flowers and snipping off the fruits from those that set berries I noticed a distorted shoot tip. Peering over the top of my safety spectacles, my nose pressed up close to the foliage so that I could see, I found more misshapen growth, stems fattened and flattened, leaves stunted, flower buds distorted. I went and checked the symptoms on the internet, but I was already pretty sure what I'd got, fuchsia gall mite. It is a relatively new pest in the UK. The RHS magazine had warned that enquiries about it were rocketing up their league table of most asked about pests and diseases, so I suppose that like Hemerocallis gall midge it was only a matter of time before it found its way here.
I felt quite cast down anyway, a sort of Vissi d'arte gardening moment. Here I am trying to mind my own business and remain mostly harmless, diligently concocting cheese puddings out of stale bread and cheese to avoid wasting them, still wearing t-shirts that are a quarter of a century old because they have not actually dropped to bits yet, solemnly sorting out the recycling every week, and taking all my holidays in the UK instead of flying. Why does the ungrateful earth have to unleash a debilitating foreign fuchsia pest upon my garden when I have been decorating my particular altar with flowers with sincere faith?
It is a tiny, tiny mite, resistant to any pesticide available to amateurs, and in any case since fuchsia flowers are attractive to bees you wouldn't want the whole plant laced with pesticide. I threw out the two worst affected small plants, snipped off every dodgy looking shoot I could see on the others, and sprayed them all with an organic soap based treatment. The soap will kill those mites it envelops by physical smothering, but they are so small and tucked away in the crevices of the plants that it won't touch all of them. All I can do is keep trimming out visible damage and soap spraying at frequent intervals, and see if I can get on top of the problem. In the autumn I shall cut all the fuchsias down very hard so that I get rid of most of the infected material, and hope that they shoot back from ground level in the spring. Then I had better get going at once with soap spray, and if there are still mites then bin the fuchsias. That would be a great shame, as I am very fond of fuchsias and had just started to build up a little collection. It is sheer chance that I didn't buy more recently. I was all set to put in another order with Other Fellow Fuchsias when the variety I particularly wanted went out of stock and I decided to leave it for the time being.
On a happier note, the replacements arrived for the five primula that should have been orange but all flowered purple. As the driver hunted for the right box in the back of his van he said that the garden was lovely, he really liked the way we'd done it though it must be a lot of work. He sounded as though he meant it, and I was deeply touched. Somehow I hadn't expected a young man driving a white van to be interested.
I potted on the Nicotiana mutablis by the front door, all except one because I ran out of the right size pots, and then I made a very unwelcome discovery about the fuchsias. I have been fretting since mid spring when they came back into growth that most were not bushing up as well as I'd like. They produced leaves, and some flowers, but not many new shoots, and as the summer went on the rate of production of leaves and flowers started to tail off instead of gaining momentum. I wondered if I had fed them too little, or too much, or with the wrong kind of food and they didn't like Vitax Q4, or if they had been too wet on average, or allowed to get too dry between waterings in the hot weather.
This afternoon as I was picking off the fallen flowers and snipping off the fruits from those that set berries I noticed a distorted shoot tip. Peering over the top of my safety spectacles, my nose pressed up close to the foliage so that I could see, I found more misshapen growth, stems fattened and flattened, leaves stunted, flower buds distorted. I went and checked the symptoms on the internet, but I was already pretty sure what I'd got, fuchsia gall mite. It is a relatively new pest in the UK. The RHS magazine had warned that enquiries about it were rocketing up their league table of most asked about pests and diseases, so I suppose that like Hemerocallis gall midge it was only a matter of time before it found its way here.
I felt quite cast down anyway, a sort of Vissi d'arte gardening moment. Here I am trying to mind my own business and remain mostly harmless, diligently concocting cheese puddings out of stale bread and cheese to avoid wasting them, still wearing t-shirts that are a quarter of a century old because they have not actually dropped to bits yet, solemnly sorting out the recycling every week, and taking all my holidays in the UK instead of flying. Why does the ungrateful earth have to unleash a debilitating foreign fuchsia pest upon my garden when I have been decorating my particular altar with flowers with sincere faith?
It is a tiny, tiny mite, resistant to any pesticide available to amateurs, and in any case since fuchsia flowers are attractive to bees you wouldn't want the whole plant laced with pesticide. I threw out the two worst affected small plants, snipped off every dodgy looking shoot I could see on the others, and sprayed them all with an organic soap based treatment. The soap will kill those mites it envelops by physical smothering, but they are so small and tucked away in the crevices of the plants that it won't touch all of them. All I can do is keep trimming out visible damage and soap spraying at frequent intervals, and see if I can get on top of the problem. In the autumn I shall cut all the fuchsias down very hard so that I get rid of most of the infected material, and hope that they shoot back from ground level in the spring. Then I had better get going at once with soap spray, and if there are still mites then bin the fuchsias. That would be a great shame, as I am very fond of fuchsias and had just started to build up a little collection. It is sheer chance that I didn't buy more recently. I was all set to put in another order with Other Fellow Fuchsias when the variety I particularly wanted went out of stock and I decided to leave it for the time being.
On a happier note, the replacements arrived for the five primula that should have been orange but all flowered purple. As the driver hunted for the right box in the back of his van he said that the garden was lovely, he really liked the way we'd done it though it must be a lot of work. He sounded as though he meant it, and I was deeply touched. Somehow I hadn't expected a young man driving a white van to be interested.
Monday, 24 July 2017
potting on
I spent the day potting on various plants raised from seed, that were gently grinding to a halt in their trays or existing small pots. A dark red Gaillardia, Gaura, some white poppies, a few sad foxgloves, two varieties of wallflowers, sweet williams, and another species of long stemmed Dianthus for the gravel since the Dianthus carthusianorum worked so well. I'm pleased I finally remembered to sow some wallflowers at the right time, which is summer. There are so many other things to do in June that it's easy to forget about seeds, but early summer is the time to sow biennials.
I am very fond of wallflowers. I like the scent, the dusky colours, and the whole old-fashioned vibe. A couple of years ago I bought some bare root wallflowers by mail order, but they failed to make very satisfactory plants, remaining rather spindly. It was as if they had never got over the indignity of being posted. I don't understand why, when almost every other bedding plant under the sun is sold in a container, the tradition of bare root wallflowers persists. I read somewhere that wallflowers were not suitable for selling in pots as young plants because their rootballs didn't hold together, but the ones I potted on this afternoon had perfectly normal looking roots. They held together in the shape of their divided tray without seeming congested, and I have every hope they will do the same in small pots until the autumn when I can plant them in some of the containers currently in use for summer bedding. Seed company Thompson and Morgan advise on their website that biennials are usually sown in a nursery bed where they can grow undisturbed until ready for transplanting, and I wonder why? How many gardens nowadays have a nursery bed? If my young potted wallflower plants suddenly keel over, or gradually dwindle to nothing before the autumn, then I'll know that maybe I should have found a nursery bed for them, but as it is I fail to see why they can't be grown in little pots, like the young cabbage plants garden sold in garden centres and DIY stores to home vegetable growers.
Members of the cabbage family, including wallflowers, can suffer from club root, so one advantage of growing your own from seed instead of buying bare root plants is knowing that you are definitely not introducing club root to the garden. You would hope that no reputable mail order company would allow such a thing to happen, but you never know. And seed raised plants are cheaper, when a packet of seed costs a couple of pounds if it doesn't come free with a gardening magazine, while bare root mail order plants are forty or fifty pence each, and demand to be planted as soon as they arrive.
The Arctotis that got held up in the post and had gone yellow and mouldy by the time they arrived have finally filled their plastic nine centimetre pots with enough roots for me to be willing to move them on into five inch terracotta pots and stand them outside. Hayloft did refund me for one pack, which seemed about fair since all the plants survived in the end and I probably shouldn't expect to get two packs entirely for free. Let's hope that after all the trouble with them they survive the winter in the greenhouse, so that I get a full season out of them next year. In principle they should, indeed in theory I can multiply them by taking cuttings.
As I went to buy more potting compost and some larger pots for the Tithonia, I stopped at the Chatto gardens to buy a dark leaved, tiny flowered form of verbena, Verbena officinalis var. grandiflora 'Bampton'. It is fairly new introduction, though I have been eyeing them up covetously for a year or two and am going to try one in a pot with the other purple and dark red flowers. The Chatto gardens describe it as a particularly fine form, in contrast to other inferior versions which have been grown from seed, leaving me thinking that I ought to be able to take some sort of cuttings from that as well. I can feel a Google search for 'Verbena officinalis propagation' coming on.
I am very fond of wallflowers. I like the scent, the dusky colours, and the whole old-fashioned vibe. A couple of years ago I bought some bare root wallflowers by mail order, but they failed to make very satisfactory plants, remaining rather spindly. It was as if they had never got over the indignity of being posted. I don't understand why, when almost every other bedding plant under the sun is sold in a container, the tradition of bare root wallflowers persists. I read somewhere that wallflowers were not suitable for selling in pots as young plants because their rootballs didn't hold together, but the ones I potted on this afternoon had perfectly normal looking roots. They held together in the shape of their divided tray without seeming congested, and I have every hope they will do the same in small pots until the autumn when I can plant them in some of the containers currently in use for summer bedding. Seed company Thompson and Morgan advise on their website that biennials are usually sown in a nursery bed where they can grow undisturbed until ready for transplanting, and I wonder why? How many gardens nowadays have a nursery bed? If my young potted wallflower plants suddenly keel over, or gradually dwindle to nothing before the autumn, then I'll know that maybe I should have found a nursery bed for them, but as it is I fail to see why they can't be grown in little pots, like the young cabbage plants garden sold in garden centres and DIY stores to home vegetable growers.
Members of the cabbage family, including wallflowers, can suffer from club root, so one advantage of growing your own from seed instead of buying bare root plants is knowing that you are definitely not introducing club root to the garden. You would hope that no reputable mail order company would allow such a thing to happen, but you never know. And seed raised plants are cheaper, when a packet of seed costs a couple of pounds if it doesn't come free with a gardening magazine, while bare root mail order plants are forty or fifty pence each, and demand to be planted as soon as they arrive.
The Arctotis that got held up in the post and had gone yellow and mouldy by the time they arrived have finally filled their plastic nine centimetre pots with enough roots for me to be willing to move them on into five inch terracotta pots and stand them outside. Hayloft did refund me for one pack, which seemed about fair since all the plants survived in the end and I probably shouldn't expect to get two packs entirely for free. Let's hope that after all the trouble with them they survive the winter in the greenhouse, so that I get a full season out of them next year. In principle they should, indeed in theory I can multiply them by taking cuttings.
As I went to buy more potting compost and some larger pots for the Tithonia, I stopped at the Chatto gardens to buy a dark leaved, tiny flowered form of verbena, Verbena officinalis var. grandiflora 'Bampton'. It is fairly new introduction, though I have been eyeing them up covetously for a year or two and am going to try one in a pot with the other purple and dark red flowers. The Chatto gardens describe it as a particularly fine form, in contrast to other inferior versions which have been grown from seed, leaving me thinking that I ought to be able to take some sort of cuttings from that as well. I can feel a Google search for 'Verbena officinalis propagation' coming on.
Sunday, 23 July 2017
spud day
Today was the garden club Spud Day, when we took our competition potatoes to be weighed. The tubers were dished out at the start of the year, one each for everyone wanting to take part, to be grown in a builders' bucket, only I did not know the bit in the rules about it being a literal bucket, having not taken part before, and was growing mine in a large black pot left over from buying some tree or shrub. And I didn't get my tuber until March, since I missed the February meeting after poking myself in the eye the day before, and even then it spent several days sitting on the hall table while I kept forgetting to plant it. One way and another I was not optimistic about my chances in the potato competition, but it's the taking part that counts, and people told me that there was always a lovely tea.
The Programme Secretary who hosts the Spud Day in her garden said it didn't matter this time about the bucket, since I hadn't known, and advised me not to keep the potato in the greenhouse as it would get too hot. I ejected it from the greenhouse, and the top leaves were nipped by a late frost. I became marginally less optimistic than I was before. The potato grew some more leaves before the foliage started to yellow, and by early July the leaves had well and truly died down. I stopped watering it, having visions of my competition entry rotting unseen beneath the compost, but I did not think that having finished growing three weeks before judging put me in a favourable position.
In the Programme Secretary's garden volunteers were tipping the potatoes out of their buckets on to a tarpaulin and painstakingly raking with their fingers through the compost to find every last tuber, however tiny, because as the chap disinterring my pot told me as he winkled out another marble sized potato, it could come down to the last half ounce and every potato counted.
Actually I was quite pleasantly surprised at how many potatoes there were in the pot, at least a couple of meals' worth of ones large enough to be worth cooking, plus a scattering of tinies. I wasn't expecting to win, but it would have been embarrassing if there had still been just one potato. They weighed in at a moderately respectable two pounds three ounces, behind my friend from my Writtle who managed two pounds and six ounces, but quite a few buckets held only just over the one pound mark, and a few didn't make that. The winner came in at over three.
I think the potato competition goes to show that gardening skills are largely transferable, since the winner is a very keen gardener but had never grown a potato in a bucket before. Her specialist interest is snowdrops, which are not a great deal like potatoes. When asked how she did it she said she had added a little fertiliser to the compost at the start but no more since, and that she had watered the potato twice every day. Twice. Morning and evening. That's dedication for you. In second place was last year's winner, who clearly has a honed technique.
I showed my pot of potatoes to the Systems Administrator when I got home, with the request that we eat the larger ones. The SA looked mildly surprised, having obviously been infected with my pessimism about the chances of there being an actual crop of potatoes in the pot, and promised that yes, of course we could cook some of them, but could I not drop earth on the hall floor.
The main reason I grew my potato in a flowerpot was that I was too mean to drill holes in the bottom and spoil a perfectly good bucket, but my competitive potato growing juices are rising now I have had a taste of it and seen what can be done. I might enter again next year with a real, approved bucket, and if I could manage not to be ill and miss the first two meetings I could get the potato off to an earlier start, chitting it properly and everything. Perhaps I might remember to put the bucket in the greenhouse on nights when there was a risk of frost, and if I were more diligent about watering it in exceptionally hot spells the potato might keep growing for longer. It's a whole new area of horticulture to explore.
The Programme Secretary who hosts the Spud Day in her garden said it didn't matter this time about the bucket, since I hadn't known, and advised me not to keep the potato in the greenhouse as it would get too hot. I ejected it from the greenhouse, and the top leaves were nipped by a late frost. I became marginally less optimistic than I was before. The potato grew some more leaves before the foliage started to yellow, and by early July the leaves had well and truly died down. I stopped watering it, having visions of my competition entry rotting unseen beneath the compost, but I did not think that having finished growing three weeks before judging put me in a favourable position.
In the Programme Secretary's garden volunteers were tipping the potatoes out of their buckets on to a tarpaulin and painstakingly raking with their fingers through the compost to find every last tuber, however tiny, because as the chap disinterring my pot told me as he winkled out another marble sized potato, it could come down to the last half ounce and every potato counted.
Actually I was quite pleasantly surprised at how many potatoes there were in the pot, at least a couple of meals' worth of ones large enough to be worth cooking, plus a scattering of tinies. I wasn't expecting to win, but it would have been embarrassing if there had still been just one potato. They weighed in at a moderately respectable two pounds three ounces, behind my friend from my Writtle who managed two pounds and six ounces, but quite a few buckets held only just over the one pound mark, and a few didn't make that. The winner came in at over three.
I think the potato competition goes to show that gardening skills are largely transferable, since the winner is a very keen gardener but had never grown a potato in a bucket before. Her specialist interest is snowdrops, which are not a great deal like potatoes. When asked how she did it she said she had added a little fertiliser to the compost at the start but no more since, and that she had watered the potato twice every day. Twice. Morning and evening. That's dedication for you. In second place was last year's winner, who clearly has a honed technique.
I showed my pot of potatoes to the Systems Administrator when I got home, with the request that we eat the larger ones. The SA looked mildly surprised, having obviously been infected with my pessimism about the chances of there being an actual crop of potatoes in the pot, and promised that yes, of course we could cook some of them, but could I not drop earth on the hall floor.
The main reason I grew my potato in a flowerpot was that I was too mean to drill holes in the bottom and spoil a perfectly good bucket, but my competitive potato growing juices are rising now I have had a taste of it and seen what can be done. I might enter again next year with a real, approved bucket, and if I could manage not to be ill and miss the first two meetings I could get the potato off to an earlier start, chitting it properly and everything. Perhaps I might remember to put the bucket in the greenhouse on nights when there was a risk of frost, and if I were more diligent about watering it in exceptionally hot spells the potato might keep growing for longer. It's a whole new area of horticulture to explore.
Saturday, 22 July 2017
mobile issues
I read in the paper about a mobile app that would let you make lists that you could update from your phone or tablet and share with your nearest and dearest, so that when you thought of something needing doing, like Buy more cornflakes, or Book cats into vet for vaccinations, you could add it to the list at that moment, and whoever next happened to be in a suitable shop could buy the necessaries instead of getting home and being told, Oh if I'd known you were going to the supermarket I'd have asked you to buy cornflakes. For a moment it almost seemed like a good idea, but the Systems Administrator objected that then he would have to take his phone with him to the shops.
Our current system is lower tech. On my desk is a small box of old pages torn from my page-a-day Zen desk calendar, and we pin one to the board in the hall, with a pencil propped on top. When either of us notices that we are running out of cornflakes, or sunflower oil, or cat biscuits, we write it on the list. Whoever is going shopping takes the list with them. Then we start again with a new list. The system only breaks down if we forget the list, or if anything on the list is out of stock, in which case we need to remember to transfer it to the new Zen page. But with the app based system we would have to go through the list deleting things when we bought them, at least until such a time as the app can seamlessly interface with the supermarket till receipt, which will no doubt come. Going through the app each time you went shopping deleting the things you'd just bought, particularly if the list was all mixed up with reminders to book the cats into the vet or arrange to have the boiler serviced, would surely take ages. The SA said yes, but people had to have something to do while they were drinking their six pound cups of artisanal coffee in their bicycle repair cafes.
Using mobile technology seems to take ages as it is. I got a text today to say that my phone bill was ready, which this month would come to £12.82. That was nearly a third more than I was expecting so I logged into my account and found that my tariff had risen without explanation. The next twenty minutes were spent in an online dialogue with somebody whose approach to answering the question of why has it gone up so much? was to repeat back what I'd just told them as a question, and I began to feel as if I might be dealing with Dead Ringers' version of Hilary Mantel. You say that you took this mobile phone contract out in the past? After being told that my Loyalty Bonus had expired, the first I'd heard about even having a Loyalty Bonus, and then that I had upgraded my phone the previous day, news to me since I hadn't been in contact with O2 at all, I gave up and rang to speak to a human being instead.
The human being insisted that I had had a Loyalty Bonus in operation, it was just that the sales person in Colchester must have failed to tell me about it when I bought the phone, and that if I texted LOYALTY in upper case letters to the number he gave me it would probably be reinstated. After I grumbled a bit about how this was no way to treat a loyal customer, and why had they taken it away when I more loyal now than I was last year when I bought the phone, he said that I could have the same package of texts, minutes and data for £7.50 a month which would be less than the £9.82 I had been paying before the expiry of the Loyalty Bonus. And that he would credit ten pounds to my account to make up for the aggravation. Then I spoke to another human being in sales, who said they could give me the same package for ten pounds a month. When I said that the previous human being had just said seven pounds fifty, he countered with six, with no Loyalty Bonus included so it would not jump in twelve months time, merely rise in line with inflation.
I settled for six, but I despair of UK business, or rather the mobile industry in general since my supplier is actually a subsidiary of Telefonica. They could have kept me on £9.82 plus inflationary increases if they'd left me alone. If they'd told me in advance I needed to text LOYALTY to them I'd probably have sighed and done it, and they'd still have had me on £9.82. Now they've bothered me enough to spend three quarters of an hour thinking about my phone contract they have me on six pounds a month which is less than two thirds of what they were getting before. I suppose they rely on all the people who don't bother to look at their monthly bill or can't be bothered to query it, but it seems a mad way of doing business.
Our current system is lower tech. On my desk is a small box of old pages torn from my page-a-day Zen desk calendar, and we pin one to the board in the hall, with a pencil propped on top. When either of us notices that we are running out of cornflakes, or sunflower oil, or cat biscuits, we write it on the list. Whoever is going shopping takes the list with them. Then we start again with a new list. The system only breaks down if we forget the list, or if anything on the list is out of stock, in which case we need to remember to transfer it to the new Zen page. But with the app based system we would have to go through the list deleting things when we bought them, at least until such a time as the app can seamlessly interface with the supermarket till receipt, which will no doubt come. Going through the app each time you went shopping deleting the things you'd just bought, particularly if the list was all mixed up with reminders to book the cats into the vet or arrange to have the boiler serviced, would surely take ages. The SA said yes, but people had to have something to do while they were drinking their six pound cups of artisanal coffee in their bicycle repair cafes.
Using mobile technology seems to take ages as it is. I got a text today to say that my phone bill was ready, which this month would come to £12.82. That was nearly a third more than I was expecting so I logged into my account and found that my tariff had risen without explanation. The next twenty minutes were spent in an online dialogue with somebody whose approach to answering the question of why has it gone up so much? was to repeat back what I'd just told them as a question, and I began to feel as if I might be dealing with Dead Ringers' version of Hilary Mantel. You say that you took this mobile phone contract out in the past? After being told that my Loyalty Bonus had expired, the first I'd heard about even having a Loyalty Bonus, and then that I had upgraded my phone the previous day, news to me since I hadn't been in contact with O2 at all, I gave up and rang to speak to a human being instead.
The human being insisted that I had had a Loyalty Bonus in operation, it was just that the sales person in Colchester must have failed to tell me about it when I bought the phone, and that if I texted LOYALTY in upper case letters to the number he gave me it would probably be reinstated. After I grumbled a bit about how this was no way to treat a loyal customer, and why had they taken it away when I more loyal now than I was last year when I bought the phone, he said that I could have the same package of texts, minutes and data for £7.50 a month which would be less than the £9.82 I had been paying before the expiry of the Loyalty Bonus. And that he would credit ten pounds to my account to make up for the aggravation. Then I spoke to another human being in sales, who said they could give me the same package for ten pounds a month. When I said that the previous human being had just said seven pounds fifty, he countered with six, with no Loyalty Bonus included so it would not jump in twelve months time, merely rise in line with inflation.
I settled for six, but I despair of UK business, or rather the mobile industry in general since my supplier is actually a subsidiary of Telefonica. They could have kept me on £9.82 plus inflationary increases if they'd left me alone. If they'd told me in advance I needed to text LOYALTY to them I'd probably have sighed and done it, and they'd still have had me on £9.82. Now they've bothered me enough to spend three quarters of an hour thinking about my phone contract they have me on six pounds a month which is less than two thirds of what they were getting before. I suppose they rely on all the people who don't bother to look at their monthly bill or can't be bothered to query it, but it seems a mad way of doing business.
Friday, 21 July 2017
jobs done and half done
Running along the bottom of Hyde Park from the Albert Memorial to the top of Kensington High Street is The Flower Walk. Wide borders on each side, it has a sign at the end forbidding dogs and a little gate to keep them out. The planting is pretty good, in big blocks, with plenty of colour. Many of the flowers would be attractive to insects, and there are some nice trees. We walked along it yesterday, and as we reached the Kensington High Street end I made a discovery that was chastening or enlightening depending on your point of view. There was a large patch of Tithonia, and I saw what Tithonia look like when they are happy. The ones growing in Hyde Park are an awful lot better than mine, bright fresh green with scarcely any browning leaves, with well-developed, long, strong, flowering side shoots. The side shoots on my plants are still vestigial stubs, all the flowers are at the top, and I keep having to trim dead leaves off them. Now I know what I am aiming at, and the problem is not that Tithonia always make rank, horrible plants, but that I am not growing them right.
This morning I moved a couple of the plants on the terrace (or patio) into larger pots. Their roots were not congested and I was not sure if lack of root run was the main problem, but they have been drying out quickly, and if I can stop them doing so it might help. But perhaps they are going brown because of the wind, and there's nothing I can do about that. And I did not have enough pots, because I needed to move the Nicotiana mutablis into larger containers as well to stop them blowing over by the front door. Hyde Park's Flower Walk had them too, and I took some consolation from the fact that at least my Nicotiana were measuring up relatively well. For anybody who is considering repotting either species I can report that the Tithonia slid out of their machine made, terracotta pots very easily, but the Nicotiana hung on and I had to slide the bread knife around the outside of the rootball to loosen it.
After losing the first half of the morning messing around with pots I didn't feel like spending the other half going to the garden centre to buy more, and returned to the gravel. I finished planting out the tray of red leaved sedum, and the pots of Aethionema schistosum, and spread a couple more barrow loads of gravel which emptied the bag. Eyeing up the amount of railway garden there was still to go, and the bald patches in the drive, I had to acknowledge that I really needed two more bags. The aggregates company took so long to answer their phone I checked that I was not calling a random wrong number, and when I finally got through they told me that their computer had been down all day and that they could not take any orders over the phone.
Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator managed to mend the showers in the ensuite bathroom and the other bathroom that would be described as the family bathroom in estate agent's details, neither of which would work this morning, by dint of bleeding the system and soaking the limescale off both shower heads and the insides of one of the valves. It is never entirely satisfying to have got something to work without knowing exactly what was broken before or what you did to fix it, since doubt always lurks that it might stop working again, like an unidentified intermittent electrical fault on a car, but at least they are working now, and the SA has looked up all sorts of part numbers and is primed with theories of what to try next if they stop working again. I was impressed, since if the problem had been left to me to sort out I'd have been on the phone to the bathroom company at five past nine this morning.
This morning I moved a couple of the plants on the terrace (or patio) into larger pots. Their roots were not congested and I was not sure if lack of root run was the main problem, but they have been drying out quickly, and if I can stop them doing so it might help. But perhaps they are going brown because of the wind, and there's nothing I can do about that. And I did not have enough pots, because I needed to move the Nicotiana mutablis into larger containers as well to stop them blowing over by the front door. Hyde Park's Flower Walk had them too, and I took some consolation from the fact that at least my Nicotiana were measuring up relatively well. For anybody who is considering repotting either species I can report that the Tithonia slid out of their machine made, terracotta pots very easily, but the Nicotiana hung on and I had to slide the bread knife around the outside of the rootball to loosen it.
After losing the first half of the morning messing around with pots I didn't feel like spending the other half going to the garden centre to buy more, and returned to the gravel. I finished planting out the tray of red leaved sedum, and the pots of Aethionema schistosum, and spread a couple more barrow loads of gravel which emptied the bag. Eyeing up the amount of railway garden there was still to go, and the bald patches in the drive, I had to acknowledge that I really needed two more bags. The aggregates company took so long to answer their phone I checked that I was not calling a random wrong number, and when I finally got through they told me that their computer had been down all day and that they could not take any orders over the phone.
Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator managed to mend the showers in the ensuite bathroom and the other bathroom that would be described as the family bathroom in estate agent's details, neither of which would work this morning, by dint of bleeding the system and soaking the limescale off both shower heads and the insides of one of the valves. It is never entirely satisfying to have got something to work without knowing exactly what was broken before or what you did to fix it, since doubt always lurks that it might stop working again, like an unidentified intermittent electrical fault on a car, but at least they are working now, and the SA has looked up all sorts of part numbers and is primed with theories of what to try next if they stop working again. I was impressed, since if the problem had been left to me to sort out I'd have been on the phone to the bathroom company at five past nine this morning.
Thursday, 20 July 2017
from the banks of the Serpentine to Kensington High Street
I took a day off from spreading gravel and went art gallery visiting in London, starting at the Serpentine Galleries where they are showing The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! That is what Grayson Perry called it, and it is his exhibition. The friend I went with is another diehard Grayson Perry fan, and we were not disappointed. He is a great cultural commentator. He is funny. He makes stuff himself. He is skilled across a range of media. He combines a sharp intellect with a kind heart, a much more useful combination than possessing an abundance of one in the absence of the other. He is well on track to become a National Treasure if he is not one already. He is a transvestite potter and thoroughly good bloke. Really, what's not to like? My personal highlight of today's show was the large (computer woven) tapestry showing an English landscape of considerable bleakness, except for the rainbow mysteriously arcing across it. The bronze skull of The Fallen Giant looked at first and second glance like a scaled up model of the sort of thing they sell in Whitby Goth souvenir shops, until I looked a third time and began to see that it was studded with images of England, telephone boxes, acorns, Nelson's column, a double decker bus.
The Serpentine Gallery does not open on Mondays. We found this out last year when we tried to go on a Monday, and had to make do with the summer pavilion. This year's is the first by an African architect, four curving walls of blue painted blocks partially enclosing the space under a circular roof sloping down to a central open air circle. According to the review in the Guardian it was inspired by a tree in the architect's home village in Burkina Faso which acts as a meeting place. Rereading Oliver Wainwright's article I see the phrase for the roof I was groping for was funnel shaped roof. Today it was not funneling quite perfectly as there was one drip, and enough of a wind to blow the Caution Wet Floor sign over, but it is a delightful pavilion, and although it has a coffee stand nobody told us we couldn't eat our Pret sandwiches in there. It is a good place to sit, half inside, half outside, with views of the trees but protected from the rain, as long as you avoid the drip.
The rain was followed by brilliant sun and so I began to fret slightly about the greenhouse as we set off across the park for Kensington, and to wish I had worn a better sunhat instead of the one I was wearing, which was too small and had earlier blown off into a puddle. We found ourselves passing near the Albert Memorial so took a small detour to look at it. I had never actually been up close to it before, only seen it from across the road outside the Albert Hall. It is very large, when you get right under it, and much brighter and shinier than it used to be when I used to go to the Albert Hall. I think it has been refurbished. Guided tours are available on Sundays and I thought that if I were ever in Hyde Park on a Sunday, which I'm not, they would be quite interesting and one might find out who all the great number of people sculpted around the base of the memorial were. As it was they had pigeons sitting on their heads, hastening the day when the memorial will need cleaning again. We departed back across the park towards Kensington High Street, having learned merely that Albert was greatly beloved and dead. It is an extraordinary monument, amazingly ugly in the way that St Pancras is ugly, so ornate that it is fun to look at, and you certainly wouldn't want it torn down, but ugly all the same.
Our target in Kensington was the Leighton House Museum, the home and studio of Frederick, Lord Leighton, former President of the Royal Academy. His house had been on my cultural radar since first reading about it several years ago, and at the moment it is hosting an exhibition of the paintings of Laurence Alma-Tadema, one of those Victorian painters I had vaguely heard about without knowing much about. The house, I had read, was an opulent confection of Moorish influences, with only one bedroom because Lord Leighton hated having people to stay. Or at least that is what I remembered. I still can't say about the bedrooms, because we never saw any, but the hall and staircase were fabulous, hung with decorated Islamic tiles which I guessed Lord Leighton had imported, surrounded by shinier deep blue tiles which I guessed were England's finest. I am still guessing, because there was remarkably little visitor interpretation on offer, or room guides, so now I have seen the interior I shall have to read up on it. At any rate the tiles were beautiful, and by the time you'd added the perforated screens, the gold mosaics, the stained glass, and the fountain the effect was quite overwhelming. There was a lot of Iznik pottery scattered through the house as well, on loan from a private collector. I said, How nice of them to lend it, and my friend suggested it was probably one of those arrangements where to save tax you have to make art works available to the public. Whichever way, I am extremely fond of Iznik pottery.
Alma-Tadema is somebody else I will read more about now I've seen the paintings. They are very Victorian, mostly of middle class Victorian manners playing out in Greek or Roman costume against a backdrop of classical architecture. They are delightful fluff, and beautifully done. He was really good at fabric, and his second wife and daughter were pretty decent painters as well. His major artistic legacy appears to lie not in the world of painting but in film, as one room was running a series of clips from Cecil B de Mille through to Gladiator, next to the Alma-Tadema painting each most closely resembled, and you realised it was all there in the films, costumes, buildings, pools, columns, furniture, the lot.
The Serpentine Gallery does not open on Mondays. We found this out last year when we tried to go on a Monday, and had to make do with the summer pavilion. This year's is the first by an African architect, four curving walls of blue painted blocks partially enclosing the space under a circular roof sloping down to a central open air circle. According to the review in the Guardian it was inspired by a tree in the architect's home village in Burkina Faso which acts as a meeting place. Rereading Oliver Wainwright's article I see the phrase for the roof I was groping for was funnel shaped roof. Today it was not funneling quite perfectly as there was one drip, and enough of a wind to blow the Caution Wet Floor sign over, but it is a delightful pavilion, and although it has a coffee stand nobody told us we couldn't eat our Pret sandwiches in there. It is a good place to sit, half inside, half outside, with views of the trees but protected from the rain, as long as you avoid the drip.
The rain was followed by brilliant sun and so I began to fret slightly about the greenhouse as we set off across the park for Kensington, and to wish I had worn a better sunhat instead of the one I was wearing, which was too small and had earlier blown off into a puddle. We found ourselves passing near the Albert Memorial so took a small detour to look at it. I had never actually been up close to it before, only seen it from across the road outside the Albert Hall. It is very large, when you get right under it, and much brighter and shinier than it used to be when I used to go to the Albert Hall. I think it has been refurbished. Guided tours are available on Sundays and I thought that if I were ever in Hyde Park on a Sunday, which I'm not, they would be quite interesting and one might find out who all the great number of people sculpted around the base of the memorial were. As it was they had pigeons sitting on their heads, hastening the day when the memorial will need cleaning again. We departed back across the park towards Kensington High Street, having learned merely that Albert was greatly beloved and dead. It is an extraordinary monument, amazingly ugly in the way that St Pancras is ugly, so ornate that it is fun to look at, and you certainly wouldn't want it torn down, but ugly all the same.
Our target in Kensington was the Leighton House Museum, the home and studio of Frederick, Lord Leighton, former President of the Royal Academy. His house had been on my cultural radar since first reading about it several years ago, and at the moment it is hosting an exhibition of the paintings of Laurence Alma-Tadema, one of those Victorian painters I had vaguely heard about without knowing much about. The house, I had read, was an opulent confection of Moorish influences, with only one bedroom because Lord Leighton hated having people to stay. Or at least that is what I remembered. I still can't say about the bedrooms, because we never saw any, but the hall and staircase were fabulous, hung with decorated Islamic tiles which I guessed Lord Leighton had imported, surrounded by shinier deep blue tiles which I guessed were England's finest. I am still guessing, because there was remarkably little visitor interpretation on offer, or room guides, so now I have seen the interior I shall have to read up on it. At any rate the tiles were beautiful, and by the time you'd added the perforated screens, the gold mosaics, the stained glass, and the fountain the effect was quite overwhelming. There was a lot of Iznik pottery scattered through the house as well, on loan from a private collector. I said, How nice of them to lend it, and my friend suggested it was probably one of those arrangements where to save tax you have to make art works available to the public. Whichever way, I am extremely fond of Iznik pottery.
Alma-Tadema is somebody else I will read more about now I've seen the paintings. They are very Victorian, mostly of middle class Victorian manners playing out in Greek or Roman costume against a backdrop of classical architecture. They are delightful fluff, and beautifully done. He was really good at fabric, and his second wife and daughter were pretty decent painters as well. His major artistic legacy appears to lie not in the world of painting but in film, as one room was running a series of clips from Cecil B de Mille through to Gladiator, next to the Alma-Tadema painting each most closely resembled, and you realised it was all there in the films, costumes, buildings, pools, columns, furniture, the lot.
Wednesday, 19 July 2017
still spreading gravel
As I spread more gravel around the planting by the garden railway I realised with a sinking heart that I was going to have to order another bag. I am so far down the current one that I can see the bottom, so there can't be more than three or four barrow's worth left in it. That is not going to be enough to cover all the remaining thin patches. Hey ho. It would be tempting to leave it until later, but by now I have an I've started so I'll finish feeling about the railway garden. I would like to be able to look at it and think Right, that's done, and tick it off the list. The gravel on the drive near the entrance has got bald patches as well, where the ancient tarmac shows through, so some of an extra bag could go on those. And that bit would be quite quick to do, because I wouldn't have to push the wheelbarrow very far and it would be on a solid substrate.
Gravel is not to everybody's taste. For wheelchair users it is hell. But it is about the cheapest way of covering shabby tarmac. The plant centre used it throughout the plant display area and the car park, and some would-be customers were not happy with it, and I could see their point, only installing any kind of block paving over the whole area would probably have cost more than the plant centre made in profits in its entire history. Descriptions of gardens in the NGS Yellow Book are careful to say whether gravel is used, and through how much of the garden, along with whether there are steps or steep slopes, to give potential visitors an idea of accessibility. Our garden would come off badly: gravel, grass slopes, steep steps without handrails, but we are not open to the public.
I have not seen buying two or three large builders' bags of gravel and then shovelling it into a wheelbarrow and pushing it up a slight slope on more gravel laid on earth before shovelling it back out of the wheelbarrow recommended as a form of load bearing exercise to encourage ladies' ageing frames to hang on to the calcium in their bones, but I daresay it will do as well as going to the gym. And you do not have to pay a gym membership fee, and you end up with some gravel spread where you wanted it.
Meanwhile, I was telling you about the summer pots last night when supper was ready before I had got to the set that hasn't worked, leaving the worst until last. The pale yellow and blue scheme did not really come off at all. The flowers of the blue Convolvulus sabatius turned out much more purple than I was expecting. This showed up badly next to the blue of the Salvia patens 'Cambridge Blue' which really was a true, pale sky blue. The pale yellow Cosmos barely grew, and made such weedy little plants that I ended up moving their pots off display back to the hard standing outside the greenhouse. The yellow Argyranthemum overwintered from last year refused to make any fresh growth, despite watering, feeding, and checking the roots for root aphid (there wasn't any). The pale yellow dahlia was OK but not as pale as I'd hoped, and now keeps blowing over because the wind turns out to whistle round the corner of the patio (or terrace) and hit that group of pots with peculiar violence. I believe it is traditional on Facebook and Instagram to offer up an edited, idealised version, but on cardunculus you get the unvarnished truth about gardening. This particular effort was rubbish.
Gravel is not to everybody's taste. For wheelchair users it is hell. But it is about the cheapest way of covering shabby tarmac. The plant centre used it throughout the plant display area and the car park, and some would-be customers were not happy with it, and I could see their point, only installing any kind of block paving over the whole area would probably have cost more than the plant centre made in profits in its entire history. Descriptions of gardens in the NGS Yellow Book are careful to say whether gravel is used, and through how much of the garden, along with whether there are steps or steep slopes, to give potential visitors an idea of accessibility. Our garden would come off badly: gravel, grass slopes, steep steps without handrails, but we are not open to the public.
I have not seen buying two or three large builders' bags of gravel and then shovelling it into a wheelbarrow and pushing it up a slight slope on more gravel laid on earth before shovelling it back out of the wheelbarrow recommended as a form of load bearing exercise to encourage ladies' ageing frames to hang on to the calcium in their bones, but I daresay it will do as well as going to the gym. And you do not have to pay a gym membership fee, and you end up with some gravel spread where you wanted it.
Meanwhile, I was telling you about the summer pots last night when supper was ready before I had got to the set that hasn't worked, leaving the worst until last. The pale yellow and blue scheme did not really come off at all. The flowers of the blue Convolvulus sabatius turned out much more purple than I was expecting. This showed up badly next to the blue of the Salvia patens 'Cambridge Blue' which really was a true, pale sky blue. The pale yellow Cosmos barely grew, and made such weedy little plants that I ended up moving their pots off display back to the hard standing outside the greenhouse. The yellow Argyranthemum overwintered from last year refused to make any fresh growth, despite watering, feeding, and checking the roots for root aphid (there wasn't any). The pale yellow dahlia was OK but not as pale as I'd hoped, and now keeps blowing over because the wind turns out to whistle round the corner of the patio (or terrace) and hit that group of pots with peculiar violence. I believe it is traditional on Facebook and Instagram to offer up an edited, idealised version, but on cardunculus you get the unvarnished truth about gardening. This particular effort was rubbish.
Tuesday, 18 July 2017
summer pots
In a brief interlude from weeding the garden railway and spreading gravel I deadheaded the dahlias and Cosmos, while thinking that that was the sort of ladylike gardening people are supposed to do in the middle of July. Why, I could even do it while floating about in a floral print dress and sandals, and a wide brimmed straw hat with a ribbon tied round the crown. I tried to imagine this delicate vision of horticultural loveliness in the face of the reality of patched elasticated waist trousers of a cut so unflattering that they got one star on the Cotton Traders website, a checked shirt of dubious vintage, a disintegrating Tilley hat, half length wellingtons and dirt under my finger nails, and gave up.
The medley of pink and purple dahlias, pink Cosmos, two sorts of Zinnia, and purple leaved Ricinus communis is working very well. I'm happy with that scheme. Good colour mix in the flowers, reasonable interest in the foliage with the feathery bright green of the Cosmos to enliven the dahlia leaves, which can be stodgy, and the Zinnia leaves holding up much better than last year. Zinnia have a reputation for being tricky, and I have been very careful this year to try not to over water them.
The orange corner is working fairly well too, with some reservations. This is the first year I have succeeded in growing Tithonia, at my second attempt. They have started to flower in a shade of orange so bright it is positively startling, and which I like, but the foliage is a bit rank. It remains to be seen if the ratio of flowers (good) to leaves (so-so) will end up in the Tithonia's favour. There again, I may not be growing them very well yet. This year's Zinnia have made much nicer plants than last year's ever did, so it doesn't always do to write things off at the first attempt.
In the ancestral pot by the front door the pink miniature petunias have not thrived at all, and I don't know why not. I've grown them in that pot before and they were fine, spilling down the sides of the pot and flowering for months. This lot have made little growth and few flowers. They are sharing the pot with pink trailing verbena, which is a combination I've used before, and the verbena were doing perfectly well until snails began to graze on them, and are managing to make new buds since I applied a sprinkling of blue slug pellets. This is a case where I really don't think a few pellets are going to harm the local wildlife, since I can't see the thrushes coming and picking snails out of a pot right next to the front door. The non-performance of the Calibrachoa is a disappointment, since I like them.
The Nicotiana mutablis are starting to flower on tall spikes, opening white and gradually darkening to pink. So far they have only got to shell pink, but from memories of seeing them on the Avon Bulbs stand at the Chelsea Flower Show they will eventually go quite dark, giving a multi-coloured effect on the plant as more buds open. The only problem is that the snails have been nibbling their leaves as well. The fuchsias are not making as much new growth as I'd hoped for, so that while they are flowering it is mostly on rather sparse bushes. I'm not too sure what to do about them either. They had a dose of Vitax Q4 when they came out of the greenhouse for the summer, and I have fed them again since, but am nervous about feeding them too often. Lack of food can leave plants stunted, but excess can be toxic.
If only it was as easy as wafting around in a nice frock snipping at dead heads and spraying everything with some kind of one-size-fits-all fertiliser that would make everything in the garden bloom wonderfully over immaculate foliage.
The medley of pink and purple dahlias, pink Cosmos, two sorts of Zinnia, and purple leaved Ricinus communis is working very well. I'm happy with that scheme. Good colour mix in the flowers, reasonable interest in the foliage with the feathery bright green of the Cosmos to enliven the dahlia leaves, which can be stodgy, and the Zinnia leaves holding up much better than last year. Zinnia have a reputation for being tricky, and I have been very careful this year to try not to over water them.
The orange corner is working fairly well too, with some reservations. This is the first year I have succeeded in growing Tithonia, at my second attempt. They have started to flower in a shade of orange so bright it is positively startling, and which I like, but the foliage is a bit rank. It remains to be seen if the ratio of flowers (good) to leaves (so-so) will end up in the Tithonia's favour. There again, I may not be growing them very well yet. This year's Zinnia have made much nicer plants than last year's ever did, so it doesn't always do to write things off at the first attempt.
In the ancestral pot by the front door the pink miniature petunias have not thrived at all, and I don't know why not. I've grown them in that pot before and they were fine, spilling down the sides of the pot and flowering for months. This lot have made little growth and few flowers. They are sharing the pot with pink trailing verbena, which is a combination I've used before, and the verbena were doing perfectly well until snails began to graze on them, and are managing to make new buds since I applied a sprinkling of blue slug pellets. This is a case where I really don't think a few pellets are going to harm the local wildlife, since I can't see the thrushes coming and picking snails out of a pot right next to the front door. The non-performance of the Calibrachoa is a disappointment, since I like them.
The Nicotiana mutablis are starting to flower on tall spikes, opening white and gradually darkening to pink. So far they have only got to shell pink, but from memories of seeing them on the Avon Bulbs stand at the Chelsea Flower Show they will eventually go quite dark, giving a multi-coloured effect on the plant as more buds open. The only problem is that the snails have been nibbling their leaves as well. The fuchsias are not making as much new growth as I'd hoped for, so that while they are flowering it is mostly on rather sparse bushes. I'm not too sure what to do about them either. They had a dose of Vitax Q4 when they came out of the greenhouse for the summer, and I have fed them again since, but am nervous about feeding them too often. Lack of food can leave plants stunted, but excess can be toxic.
If only it was as easy as wafting around in a nice frock snipping at dead heads and spraying everything with some kind of one-size-fits-all fertiliser that would make everything in the garden bloom wonderfully over immaculate foliage.
Monday, 17 July 2017
more gravel gardening
Metric measurements have not really entered the English language. I was about to type that inch by inch I am working my way up the railway garden, weeding, adding shovelfuls of fresh gravel, trimming the overgrown ivy hedge and picking dead ivy leaves out from its base, and it occurred to me that nobody would say centimetre by centimetre they were making progress, or Give him a centimetre, he'll take a kilometre. Inching is a verb, but centimetreing is most definitely not.
I am slightly nervous about planting anything at this time of year. Who is to say how hot it will be between now and mid September, or if we will get any more meaningful rain? Especially when you are filling in odd gaps in a mature garden it can be difficult to remember where you put new plants, and if it doesn't rain and they need watering it is hard work trudging round with cans or laboriously hauling the hose across lawns and round corners without scything across the edges of any of the beds.
I might make an exception for my seed raised new plants for the gravel. It would make sense to plant them before using up any of my stock of clean gravel top dressing the area, and they were chosen to be drought tolerant so will be better off in the free drainage of the gravel garden over the winter than sitting rotting in plastic pots. One is a spring flowering member of the cabbage family called Aethionema schistosum and the other a close relative of thyme called Acinos alpinus. The latter are flowering now in their little seven centimetre pots*, and are supposed to go on until September. If they do that would extend the flowering season usefully after the thyme had finished. Seeds of both came from Chiltern Seeds, who are a good source of unusual things.
I also have a tray of prostrate sedum cuttings to go in, a very good red leaved form whose name I have unfortunately lost. It is almost idiotically easy to propagate, nip the ends of twenty-four shoots and poke them into a divided tray and in due course you will have twenty-four new sedum plants. A friend who is not a keen gardener once admired it growing in a shallow pot on the low wall by the terrace, and I gave her half a dozen cuttings in a plastic bag and promised her that they were terribly easy to make grow, but I am not sure she had the confidence to try.
*Having said that English was still not really metric, seven centimetre pot sounds fine and less pedantic than two and three quarter inches.
I am slightly nervous about planting anything at this time of year. Who is to say how hot it will be between now and mid September, or if we will get any more meaningful rain? Especially when you are filling in odd gaps in a mature garden it can be difficult to remember where you put new plants, and if it doesn't rain and they need watering it is hard work trudging round with cans or laboriously hauling the hose across lawns and round corners without scything across the edges of any of the beds.
I might make an exception for my seed raised new plants for the gravel. It would make sense to plant them before using up any of my stock of clean gravel top dressing the area, and they were chosen to be drought tolerant so will be better off in the free drainage of the gravel garden over the winter than sitting rotting in plastic pots. One is a spring flowering member of the cabbage family called Aethionema schistosum and the other a close relative of thyme called Acinos alpinus. The latter are flowering now in their little seven centimetre pots*, and are supposed to go on until September. If they do that would extend the flowering season usefully after the thyme had finished. Seeds of both came from Chiltern Seeds, who are a good source of unusual things.
I also have a tray of prostrate sedum cuttings to go in, a very good red leaved form whose name I have unfortunately lost. It is almost idiotically easy to propagate, nip the ends of twenty-four shoots and poke them into a divided tray and in due course you will have twenty-four new sedum plants. A friend who is not a keen gardener once admired it growing in a shallow pot on the low wall by the terrace, and I gave her half a dozen cuttings in a plastic bag and promised her that they were terribly easy to make grow, but I am not sure she had the confidence to try.
*Having said that English was still not really metric, seven centimetre pot sounds fine and less pedantic than two and three quarter inches.
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