Quaint but not Quiet

Fascinating Musings

Season 1 – Friday – 21/04/23

Medieval justice was a quaint thing.
Frederick Pollock

Music – Rain

The Butchery [Lane] photograph taken June 2021 – our client’s property is sited next to the Tudor on the corner and down the lane on the left. You can just see the hanging baskets.

Front of house pot lineup from February 2023…

The painfully slow process of replacing old pots with new pots, mixing new free draining soils and then having to prune back and cut to attempt to rid the infestation. BUT is this approach cost effective?

19th April 2023

Friday morning, l was sitting watching the rain showers outside the window. The weather broke yesterday, and light showers began. I could still work with them initially, as they were light rains. But.

Thursday was a long day. Well, every day from last Saturday has been a long day. Today will also be a long day because of retiring to bed just before ten pm last night and waking up dead tired physically at four am and unable to get back to sleep due to my mind being wide awake and eventually rising at six. I guess l’ll be tired until l retire tonight and hope l can get some balance.

Yesterday morning Suze and l were at the allotment from nine till half eleven. When we returned, Suze went to the Butchery to work on the other viburnum after lunch, and l started work on the first of the smaller worm farms harvesting off vermicast and emptying it off in preparation for moving down to the allotment. The latter is a post in itself. The afternoon was gradually getting greyer and greyer until the light rains began at around four.

We continued our tasks until the rains got heavier at around five, when we had to stop. I had, however, finished the farm and was working on tidying up other parts of the garden and finished around half six.

With the weather as good as it was initially at the start of the week, we were trying to get as much done as possible. The forecast for the week on Monday was better than it is now, with the weekend looking somewhat bleak. I have another small farm to try and harvest off today. Then l have to find the time this weekend to tackle the big one and all the other pressing jobs we have.

This week’s main frustration has been attempting to sort out the problems with the Butchery garden’s front-of-house growing pots which have had issues for the last few months anyway. If not one thing, there has been another.

Hebes don’t have the best reputation as it is for doing well in pots. They prefer to be in the soil, but there have been problems with these plants for the last six months, long before we started the garden – mostly blight or poor drainage. So Suze and l are inheriting these issues and endeavouring to sort them out. This is proving difficult now because of the significant tortrix infestation they are suffering from. Tortrix is a moth, and the current situation is troubles from the larvae and the caterpillars.

Ultimately if we can’t resolve the infestation, the answer might be to cut the losses on these plants and destroy and look for shrubs more suitable to the conditions of the environment. However, the client might disagree with that assessment. Finding a compromise is the best way forward. I know what our client is after. Her house externally is typically medieval and is a listed property in Sandwich.

The Butchery is an old part of the town, and the client wants a very pretty look given the house style and location. I get that. It’s not that that style can’t be had. It can. Just not with the Hebes and the Viburnums the way they are. Given how the lane is quaint but not quiet, we may need to examine what is more accommodating to that environment. The lane is one of the town’s busiest, with cars and people. It is used as a rat route, and Sandwich Town Council should close it off. So this has been causing a few headaches this week, and many hours have already been spent trying to sort it all out.

Then the poor weather, on top of everything else, makes things very awkward because we have so much to do. These plants have been awarded fifteen hours with the current issue this week alone. That is ten hours too long already, and we still need to finish, so we need to address the cost-effectiveness of the job this afternoon.

It may be more economical to destroy the plants, given the required treatment regime and pot something else. So l need to look at that today and work that new plan into the whole project and review hanging baskets that are wanted to compliment everything.

Suze and l still have so much of our stuff that needs to be done on the allotment. We still have seeds to sow in and bulbs and plants to sow direct to soils, a polytunnel to erect, a water station to be built, the worm farms to be finalised, the composts ready to be sieved, various areas to be continued to be dug over.

It’s never-ending when you have to battle poor weather time and time again and then find the time to do the things that require your attention at home, look for new business and marketing, advertise that concept, study, or write for the blog. Things have to take a back seat and be prioritised differently. Does this need to be done this way, or will that way suffice? It’s not cutting corners. It is all about getting things in the proper order of importance.

April is already past the midway mark of the month, and we are still trying to catch up from being behind in March. At this rate, we must hit May running at top speed and only look at applying the brakes in November, l reckon.

Oh, it’s starting to brighten up – time to crack on!