Winter evenings

This blog is in danger of ending up like many of my diaries from my teens - completed regularly for the first few weeks, then getting forgotten for a couple of days and filled in with the prosaic "not much happened today", then blank pages for days on end, finally running out of steam in mid March never to be picked up again.

It's not a great time for gardening, November, even when it's been milder and drier than usual, and unsurprisingly I have not been run off my feet with demand for the gardening service.  In fact, apart from a request to help an elderly lady renovate her orchard (a project on hold for the trees to properly shut down for the winter), it's been all quiet.

The farm shop collaboration isn't looking promising.  I was paid for the pears which sold at, I suspect, about 50% of their retail price - but that's a gain over regretfully composting the over-ripe surplus, like last year.  Depressingly, they had sold just one of the herb plants and killed four of the remainder through neglect then over-watering, so that settles it as far as further deals for live plants are concerned - no chance!  But interest was shown in surplus Jerusalem artichokes, and as again any return for these is an advance on putting them in the recycling, a deal may be done.

So while the plants and gardening business fails to grow, I've been putting my efforts into my winter project - painted canal ware, with a craft fair in just over a week's time.  If I can find some suitable small plant pots to decorate, I may even smuggle a few herb plants onto the stall!

Herbology

When I decided that I could do with a change of direction, and that it might be possible to turn my love of gardening into my profession, I considered investing my redundancy settlement in a full-time degree course I had seen was available at Reaseheath College - Historic Garden Restoration and Management.  There are a large number of historic houses and gardens close by, and I particularly enjoy looking at their kitchen gardens, and growing "heritage" vegetables myself. 

But you need to learn to walk before you can run, and the advice from the college was to start with the RHS Level 2 Princples of Horticulture part-time course.  It was possible to join this at the half-way stage, while I was still in my last couple of weeks at work, but I couldn't make the first session due as I had a tribunal to represent at that day.  But I could reshuffle my remaining working days, and early in March found myself back in education.

In addition to classroom-based lessons, my first day included a tour of the college greenhouses.  These include a tropical house and several for raising plants commercially for sale, plus the "hydroponics" house.  This was a revelation, as already the pepper plants inside were carrying large fruits, from flowers pollinated by a resident hive of small bees.

Returning to work the next day, I enthused about everything to my colleagues, particularly the hydroponics house and visit to the greenhouses.  Steve asked whether we'd had to repot mandrakes, and if so, whether I'd had to wear ear-defenders - and so it became accepted around the office that Sarah was doing "Herbology at Hogwarts"!

Which would seem pretty daft, if we didn't have one tutor who frequently tells us that plants are "magic"!

The tutor in question is something of a college legend.  I have no idea how long Harry Delany has been teaching at Reaseheath, but his career in horticulture stretches back many decades by his own admission.  Despite great knowledge and experience, and "Master of Horticulture" RHS qualification he has the humility to state regularly that he is "still learning", and such boundless enthusiasm for his subject that it's impossible not to be inspired, even when he has wandered well away from the "learning outcomes" into tales of Victorian plant hunters or marvelling at the fact that a whole new plant can develop from a root cutting.

Actually, there is something magic about that!