At last the shorts come out

Once again May arrived on time this year and it was time to slap on the shorts and drag the trusty old rotavator kicking and screaming out of it's winter hide away. A swift tankful of petrol later and it was a much happier bunny and almost looking forward to playing in the soil. We had a lot to do in a very short space of time this year as everything was running a tad behind schedule due to one thing and another. This basically meant that we had 8 afternoons to rotavate and stake out both greenhouses so that we could slap 600+ plants in the ground. So, without further delay, I fired up the rotavator and started meandering along flower beds.

This year we'd once again sterilised the beds to keep the weeds at bay, something that we didn't do last year, and regretted when the rains came ... and stayed for a while ... it ended up being to wet to pull the weeds out, without dragging out huge clods of soil, and the blanket of weeds kept the beds wet and stopped them drying out ... rock and a hard place springs to mind ... so this year we decided to kill the buggers before they got beyond the "I'm a seed" stage ... unfortunately this meant that all the beds needed an extra rotavation to make sure that the soil was turned over and the sterilising agent dispersed, we don't want to kill the plants before we even get going

A few days later

After several days and a few passes of the rotavator the beds are pretty much ready for staking out so that we can plant up. A few years ago Barry decided that he should knock all the stakes in as I'm incapable of knocking in any of the 600+ stakes in an upright manner ... I've done my best to make sure he continues with that decision ... so a tad later, with a knackered Barry stood beside me, we're looking at 12 beds fully staked up and ready for the plants ... it's a good moment ... especially since I'm not the knackered muppet

The next day started early ... 11^am is very early for me to be dragged off a pc huh? ... and was basically a production line involving Barry wheeling barrow loads of plants from the small greenhouse, where they'd been waiting patiently, and putting one by every stake. I got the job of shuffling along on my arse, in just my shorts, planting each one in it's new home, you should see how fast they'll grow now that they're in the soil. Eventually all the plants had been brought in and slapped by the stake that was gonna be their support for the next few months, so Barry started to help me plant up the last couple of beds. I gave Barry the glory of planting the last plant in the large greenhouse ... not because I'm generous, but because he finished his side of the row slower than me, he's getting on a tad huh?

From nothing to planted in 1 day

After the large greenhouse the small greenhouse is a doddle, it only holds about 120 plants so with a tad of effort it can be prepped up, rotavated and planted all in the same day ... unfortunately this time I'm the muppet that has to make the effort. The rotavator lept through the beds happily, knowing that it was one of the last times it would be used and could soon go back to it's winter home and sleep for the rest of the year. In next to no time the 3 beds were ready for the stakes to go in ... time to go remind Barry how crap I am at knocking them in straight ... thankfully he once again agrees with me.

It wasn't long before we were standing back and looking at a fully planted up small greenhouse. It's a good job really because he was off for a weeks holiday in a couple of hours time and Wendy would have killed him if it had been delayed. Now all that was left was for me to rescue our veg patch so that the rotavator could head off for its much needed rest until next year, but that's another story and another post ... for now we were just happy to finally see all of the plants in the ground as they're far happier when they get out of their pots and everything is much easier to water ... made even easier by the fact that we have an irrigation system in both greenhouses, although you still need to hand water to ensure that each plant gets enough without drowning them all.

With all that done I meandered off to console a lonely looking crate of beer. It seemed to cheer up when I offered to take it out to sit in the sun for a quiet evening

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I'm blonde, not stupid Here's me pretending to have dug the trenches

It's bloody cold in January

Our season began bloody early this year, I'd just about recovered from celebrating the new year when we started! After last years problems with the weather, when we almost lost a hundred or so plants due to the fact that it pissed it down for so long that people started buying plans for wooden boats and searching for pairs of animals that they liked. This year we were taking no chances and decided that we'd slap in a spanking new drainage system for the top beds. When I say "we" I mean the royal we, Barry just sat on his arse in a nice warm room playing with google Did I mention it was cold? Seriously, I had to wear a jumper that was thicker than a redneck convention.

We started off with a trench that extended almost the full length of the large greenhouse, thankfully I wasn't the one who had to dig it. It ran from the existing drainage system, which is about a quarter of the way up, all the way to the very top of the greenhouse. Each of the other three top beds also had trenches dug along there full length, we're not taking any chances, and all four were connected by a cross trench. Did I mention that I'm glad that I wasn't the muppet that had to dig them? It looks like a lot of work, although the guy who dug them managed it in a long morning!

You wouldn't believe this was buried a few years ago

Now it's my turn

So, in I bimbled, shivering my poor nuts off, on a very cold January day, to find all our flower beds sitting on the paths and looking in a smidge of a sorry state. It's a tad weird looking at them from the under side. There was also a huge mound of stones and a coil of pipe lurking maliciously in the corner next to the wheel barrow and shovel ... so I went into the office to see Gary and grab a coffee, I'm not a cold weather person .... if it can't be done in shorts then it should be done by someone else huh? .... several coffees later, none with brandy in .. the stingy sod .... I gritted my teeth and stepped out into the cold .... after several days of acclimatising myself to the weather in this manner I started on the task of turning all the pipe, stones and soil into flower beds with a drainage system.

The first thing to do was to slap a thin layer of stones in all the trenches for the pipe to sit on, eventually it'll be wrapped in stones to stop soil clogging it up. It was interesting to see the exposed cross-section of the existing drainage system as you could see just how effective the stones were at keeping the soil away from the pipe, they looked as clean as the day that we ... that'd be the royal "we" again ... put the system in a couple of years ago. With that done I decided that enough was enough and meandered off to find a warm place and a crate of beer ... Eventually I ran out of beer so I had no excuse to not go and play with a hacksaw and some blue pipe.

Take one spade, a huge length of pipe and a bloody big pile of clay and soil

The pie eyed piper

Once the layer of stones was in .... and the beer finished .... it was time to start cutting the pipe to length and joining all the various sections together. The most important joint being the junction between the old and the new as it's pretty pointless draining all the beds and giving the resulting water no place to go ... kinda defeats the object. Although this was a simple task ... I'm blonde, I only do simple ... it's a smidge time consuming and playing with a hacksaw with frozen hands is not my idea of a fun day. Luckily the only arteries I cut we're all to do with drainage system. At this point I called it a day again, I used the excuse that it goes dark early, and once again went to hunt out a warm place and a crate of beer.

The next task involved a wheel barrow, a shovel, a few tons of stone and a lot of man power .... all provided by one man ..... As all of the pipework needed to be surrounded in a cosy coat of stones ... they're cosy to a pipe .... as I mentioned earlier, these act as a kind of filter and stop the soil from clogging the holes in the pipe, if you forget them then you might as well not bother digging the hole in the first place ... not that I dug the hole of course, but you get the point ... It gets pretty boring filling a barrow with stones and meandering it the length of the field, just to empty it into a hole, and then start again ... so once again I blamed the lack of sunshine and went to see if there was any beer left in the crate that was sat in a nice snug room at home.

It's a little weird seeing our irrigation system floating above our drainage system

Putting the beds back

At last the pile of stones was lower than a snakes neck tie and all of the pipes were covered with a good layer, so it was time to start putting the flower beds back where they were expected to be. This was a smidge easier than playing with the stones because at least the soil was beside the holes that it was expected to be in. However, when you're talking tons of soil, I shudder to think of just how many tons, there is no such thing as "an easy day". Once again it was just a matter of grunt work with a shovel and was more boring than watching England play cricket with ... well, just about anybody ... although the end result would be faster. Eventually all the soil was back where it was before we started and I was able to see the paths again for the first time in many a week, so I took my aching and frozen body off to accost a crate of beer.

Was it worth it?

So far the system seems to be performing as expected but until we take the roofs off the greenhouse, and have a bout of torrential rain, it's a bit hard to judge. I do know that the beds were in a far better state when we came to prepping them up ready for planting, but that's another story and another post We're pretty confident that we won't have any problems with them flooding like they did last year, of course this now means that we'll have problems keeping them watered enough for the plants to grow, but it's easier to turn a tap on than it is to turn the weather off huh? ... anyway, I've just spotted a lonely looking crate of beer so I think I'll just go keep it company.

Have fun
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Rain stops play

I've hardly made a single post about the field this year, this was mainly because we had such a crap start to the season that we almost retired for life in June! This year has got to have been the wettest year I've seen for a long time, it basically rained from the end of April until most of the way into August. Now whilst dahlias like to be watered they kinda take umbrage to being drowned for months on end! The worst of it was that the weather was to bloody lousy to allow us to put the roofs on the greenhouses so that we could keep the rain out.

Luckily the weather broke for a tad, and we managed to rebuild the top end of the large greenhouse which had been ripped apart by the winds in winter. With a sigh of relief we then slapped the roof on, and not a moment to soon because most of the plants at that end we're pretty close to death by root rot ...... and then it started raining again. Due to the sheer volume of water that decided it no longer wanted to fly we got flooded, again, and the plants which had just started to recover were knocked for six. We were a tad upset as all we could do is wait and hope that we didn't end up losing almost 100 plants.

Here comes the sun

Eventually somebody informed the sun that it was meant to be summer and if it didn't make an appearance then we were gonna sue it for failure to fulfil it's duties. So it made a brief appearance which allowed us to throw the rest of the roofs on and finally we could concentrate on actually growing flowers as opposed to teaching them how to scuba dive. Apart from the fact that we now had several dozen very sick plants that probably wouldn't survive until the showing season, all of the other plants were quite a bit behind because of the lack of sunshine. Unlike a garden we time our flowers to come out and be in perfect condition for very specific dates, and a delay of even a week could throw the whole of our season out of the window. Having eight months of effort pissed away by the weather is not a nice feeling.

Of course, all of the other growers were in exactly the same boat, so to speak, so if we could get to a show then we'd still stand a chance of winning. Unfortunately our plants were so far behind we couldn't even enter the first couple of shows of the season. Well, we could have, but the judges would probably take a dim view if we turned up with a couple of daisies, which was about all we had.

Blooming marvellous

Finally we have flowers and we can start showing and boy, did we show some beauties! One day they're gonna get fed up with us walking off with all of the trophies, but until then we're just gonna keep on winning. This year, we not only took nearly every championship that we entered but, for the first time in history, we won the grand-slam and took all three national trophies! How cool are we? Whilst other people may do the grand-slam in the future, they'll never be the first to do it so they'll just be playing catch up. Mind you, we are the reigning world champions, so it's not so surprising that we did it.

Barry's promised to get me a copy of all of the pictures that he took at the shows, including all of our winning entries, but he's been busy playing with google since the shows finished, so I haven't got them yet. In the meantime, here's some pictures that Ash took on one of the few sunny days that we had. As you can tell, I need to lose some bloody weight

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Yaaaaaaaay the 2007 bimbling season has begun, at last I have the opportunity to break out my shiny new shorts, bring on the sun and lets plant some dahlias.

Everything started a tad late this year as I spent a month being a smidge on the blind side of sighted, which doesn't help when you need to bimble around behind the trusty old rotavator. It got even worse because when I could finally see the only thing in sight were grey bloody clouds, gotta love England. Anyway, the weather finally realised that the sun was meant to be visible, what with it being almost June, and the clouds scurried off for long enough to allow us to put in a couple of weeks of power bimbling.

We'd had a tad of a windy winter this year and due to the fact that an unnamed blonde bimbo forgot to reattach a couple of crucial brackets to a few pieces of wood we lost one end of the big greenhouse ...... well, we didn't exactly lose it, although we did lose the roof, it was just ripped apart and dumped on the flower beds. We also lost the roof off the center section of the same greenhouse, due to the same winds, but this time it wasn't the bimbos fault ...... ah well, we wanted to replace them this year anyway, and it saves us from having to remove them manually.

As always the season began by rotavating the main greenhouse, a task that normally takes a week and a bit all by itself. This year we pulled out all of the stops and got it done in just under 4 days, trust me when I say that it was hot & sweaty and approached being called hard work ..... yeah yeah, pick yourselves off the floor, I promise not to swear again in this post ...... due to the lack off roofs the majority of the big greenhouse was knee deep in weeds, thankfully Barry had the task off clearing them away, and I had the pleasure of using a flame thrower to kill any seeds that were left behind.

In an attempt to catch up with lost time we decided that we'd plant up over the weekend, not only because the dahlias were screaming to be let out of their pots, but because it's far easier to look after them once they're slapped in the ground. So, roll on Saturday, throw on a new pair of shorts ...... did I mention that I have several new pairs of shorts? ...... and lets start planting. Five hours of extreme power bimbling later we'd marked up 10 of the 12 beds and I'd watched as Barry hammered over 400 stakes in the ground ...... somebody has to supervise huh? ...... and we had all 10 of the beds planted up, damn they look good when they're full of plants ...... as you can imagine I had a fair few beers to celebrate.

By the second week we were pretty much back on schedule, so we were able to take things at a smidge of an easier pace. We finished off the last two beds in the main greenhouse, staked them up and planted them, and then wandered over to the little greenhouse to get that one ready for planting as well ...... another hundred and a bit stakes for Barry to vent any pent up frustrations by hammering them into the ground and a couple of hours of planting later and we had that one resembling a real greenhouse full of flowers as well.

The last bit off the week was spent taking the roof off the little greenhouse and bringing home the odd spare flower or two for the Mighty V ...... you should have seen the smile on her face when she came home to well over 400 spare plants and the odd bag of chicken shit for her own garden ..... instant "in good books" material, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants some instant karma Of course this meant I hardly got to see her for the next few days as she wandered around donating dahlias to all the neighbours who'd been waiting with bated breath for there annual arrival, and then started planting all of her favourite ones in our own little patch of soil.

During the odd spare moments from planting up the greenhouses we also managed to get our own little corner of the field cleared and rotavated and we spent a sunny afternoon planting all the veg that had been sat in our tiny lil greenhouse waiting for us. Damn they're gonna taste good when we get to eat them. Due to the fact that we had a tad more time to plan we've got some great stuff planted and should be eating our own food within weeks. We've also planted some more veg in our tiny little back garden ...... and in a few pots ..... and we even have some strawberries in one of the hanging baskets.

Anyway, the sun's made an appearance so it's time for me to throw my shorts on again and go and give all of the dahlias a tad of water whilst I water myself with the odd beer and soak up some rays ...... it's a hard life, but somebody's got to do it huh Gary?
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Seeing as it's february, and contrary to popular opinion England really can get wetter than it does in what it optimistically calls "summer", there's pretty much a lack of bimbling opportunities, bitch huh? The bright side is that it saves me having to work out how to get dressed when I wake up ..... I just sleep until may

Anyway, since I get bored easily, and having been relieved of the need to think about my attire for the next few months, I decided to waste a few hours with adobe. So, several hours later and I've managed to work out how to get it to run, and I even managed to work out where my hardrive was and load a few of the pictures from the sunnier (comparatively) part of last year ..... and these are the results.

For those of you who are now shaking yer heads with "what? Is that it? 3 bloody pictures" I'd like to remind you that my hardrives can store far more than my poor brain ( hell, even my A drive has a higher capacity ) so it took me a while to find the originals ....... and keeping the bloody bee still whilst I coloured it in was a tad challanging

Anyhow ...... I think it's time I went back into hibernation mode

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If a picture says a thousand words here's 81,000 words