Here we go (I hope) It’s the 25th March and this is the first day of my first blog, so you are very welcome. Moreover I admit that I have not got the first idea of what I am doing. The blog has been set up in response to advertising by the nice people who host the web site and urging by my long-lost albeit highly talented site designer. I have never in my life read a blog by anyone else and if you have opened this, well congratulations, because I have no idea how you got here and whether you can or will respond.
OK there is probably no point in introducing myself or the nursery because you have presumably already got all that off the web site so this is the subjective part of running Arne Herbs. I hesitate to say the “human” part, because Jenny is the acceptable face of Arne Herbs, indeed I told her the other day that in a crowd she makes me feel like Prince Charles when he was accompanied by Princess Di. So here I am, an awkward semi-retired (fat chance!) old man living with a lot of gluttonous semi-feral cats.
I tend not to open at week ends unless I know who is coming as too often visitors turn out to be those with incontinent grannies in the back of the car or those whose children “need to stretch their legs” but yesterday Mike Brown a fellow Medievalist turned up which was a genuine pleasure. It’s a good niche market to be in but the trouble with Medieval plus blog is that by definition there can’t be any “new” plants to publicise. I could have gone in the other direction I suppose and grown all the latest varieties of Basil most of which seem to be identical and taste rather disgusting and then there are all those mints supposed to possess the taste of every fruit you can imagine. If you want a banana, go and buy a banana for heavens’ sake, you don’t want to make it into a sauce to bung on your roast leg of lamb. Anyway your average Medieval materia medica consisted of about 700- 900 species, double that if you are a Chinese medieval specialist and add several hundred more if you are into folk American so I am sure there will be plenty to write about in the future.
Curious things happen at Arne Herbs, on Friday five mouse traps protecting the Echinacea angustifolia seeds all went off at mid day without catching a mouse. Jen ascribed this to the pressure of water droplets from the irrigation, but then today, Sunday, a dead mouse appeared beside the tray without any traps being sprung. I put this down to post traumatic stress disorder engendered by a trap going off besides its ear two days previously. Normally we empty the traps into the waiting mouths of the gluttonous pussies (they are banned from going into propagation because they are a bit dumb about recognising the true purpose of a seed tray) but this one, they refused to eat. Why?
And on Friday, the February 2005 sowing of Meum germinated. God knows how many hundreds of pounds worth of seeds we chucked away in the past before we realised that many, Umbellifers in particular, sit around for years before condescending to show us their happy little faces. Only when the nursery became too big for the 2.5 (yes it really does say 2.5 though since the three of us are part time, never starting before ten, that is probably a rather high estimate) of us to manage properly and we couldn’t tidy up the trays more than once every few years did we realise that this was A Good Thing. The result was that with so many more species successfully propagated, it takes even longer to get round to them, a vicious circle of ever-enlarging stock.
Gosh that was hard work. I’m not going to do this everyday, I have got a nursery to run, lectures to prepare and editors’ dead lines to meet but if you are very lucky people, you might get one of these things posted once a fortnight.. ….if not, I will wish you a happy Christmas now, while I am remembering.
Anthony