We Are Not A Garden Centre...

Part of my daily routine is to check the weather forecast on the BBC website. I don't know why. It is rarely correct and even the 24-hour forecast disagrees with the daily summary, which always seems to take the most pessimistic view possible. It has certainly been a lot hotter than they predicted.

So on Sunday afternoon I had the roof down on the car on the way to Jean's for our postponed trip to the fuchsia nursery. A friend of Jean's had told her she had been disappointed on her visit but we weren't. There was a small tea shop, some tables out the front with fuchsias and a few other plants and in the back a much larger selection of, surprise surprise, fuchsias. The proprietor was quite helpful - Jean is not backward in coming forward and had collared him. We both bought one and then continued on to Edrom nursery.

Edrom nursery used to be in Edrom but is now located on the road out of Coldingham to Coldingham moor. I had my first (of usually half a dozen) cars stopping on Saturday when I was gardening to ask me where it was...

We were like kids in a sweet shop. I stopped myself going too mad as I do not intend to plant up LB7 until next year. I am guessing that many of the problems in the long bank are due to it being planted before the nettles/ground elder were eradicated.

We had both been adding plants to our baskets and were 'just going to have a quick walk around the greenhouse on the other side of the road' when an elderly lady came out the gate and crossed the road towards us. It was not open to the public - so is presumably where they propagate the plants. Just as well as we already had more than we had planned. I ended up buying three different varieties of pulmonaria (the ones I brought up with me seem to absolutely thrive here), an allium (hopefully actually about five in the pot - I will find out at some point) and another dwarf rhododendron. Jean bought a lot more. I will certainly be back next year - for plant lovers it as an absolute dream of a nursery.

We followed her in to the wooden hut to pay. I noticed the gold medal from this year's Gardener's World Live. We got chatting and she has given us both one of the mail order catalogues, where I see they won Best in Show at Harrogate last year. Whilst we were paying a car pulled in with some tourists who asked if it was a garden centre as they wanted to buy a heather. You could hear the disdain in the voice when she replied that 'No it was not' and that the garden centre at East Ord would sell that kind of thing.

I spent yesterday going back over the section of LB7 that I had 'cleared'. The dogs were very well behaved in my absence despite me being late for all their appointments.

So I have now lined the edge with large cobble stones gleaned from the building site, dug over the area with a fork, removing a lot more nettle roots, and started putting in stepping stones at strategic places. (Jean had mentioned some fancy foot-shaped ones at the Kelso show but one thing I do not need to spend money on here is stones). The slate I have been digging out is being pushed back in to make small planting areas and will hopefully keep the bank fairly stable.

I have various splinters in my fingers but only a couple are sore when I knock them, and I seem to have insect bites of varying degrees of itchiness in a variety of places :(