It has been a long time since I posted, having been away for almost a week to a dog trial and a dog training seminar, then trying to catch up since I returned. I actually did write a post the day before I left. Just as I was about to hit 'save' the electricity went off, and I lost the entire post. I had also been meaning to replace my battery backup. Oh, well. We had no electricity for the entire day, which also meant I lost a day of shipping bulbs, then I left the next morning.
My dogs did brilliantly at the dog trial, and we brought back 28 ribbons (you get two ribbons for each successful run). We had a great time, and the rest of the trip was filled with adventures, not all of them wonderful, but definitely memorable, like the motel I stayed in, where from about 11pm to 3am it was party time, with boom-boxes, car alarms, screaming and yelling, fights, doors slamming, etc. etc. When you travel with dogs, your options are limited.
Our first rain of the season arrived. The day before the front moved in the dawn was magnificent, the mountains to the east rimmed with fire from the rising sun, the sky with just enough cloud to add to the drama. Slowly the sky turned to mother-of-pearl as the sun made its appearance, with the long slanting rays illuminating the trees and horses, as though a spotlight had picked them out. The next morning was dark, and I awoke to the soft pattering of raindrops.
The swallows are gone. One day they were wheeling around the barn in great flocks, the next day there were none and the air seemed empty without them. My office is in the hayloft of my barn, and they are a constant presence in summer, skimming and dipping over the fields around me, then returning to their nests on the barn and house where I can watch tiny heads appear over the rim of the nest when the adults swoop in with food.
On my morning walkabout last week I was greeted with a welcome surprise -- my first Brunsvigia in bloom. I have been growing all my Brunsvigias from seed, and it certainly requires patience. Brunsvigia minor has bloomed after eleven years from seed. It is a small one (as you can tell from the name), so blooms sooner than the others, which can take up to 20 years to bloom.
The beginning of the rainy season marks the time in the nursery for repotting, and I started repotting my large Oxalis collection. This involves about 300-400 five inch pots. They are starting to sprout now, so I can no longer ship them to other countries, since they will not pass inspection if they have sprouts. Most of the pots need new labels, and this is a task I do not enjoy, but it is most necessary. One of the banes of a bulb nursery is lost labels or labels that have faded to nothingness. I use very large labels, about four inches by three inches, so that I can read the label from a distance without having to bend over, or (horrors!) pull it out of the pot. I put all the important information on the back, such as date of sowing, source of seed, any data on repotting, etc.
If the pots are outside, the labels can snap off in high winds, so I push them well down in those pots. It is also beneficial to bury a label in the pot with essential data, so that if you do lose the label, or if it has faded beyond recognition, you can still identify the bulbs. Dormant bulbs look like dormant bulbs, and it is easy to get them mixed up, especially when you have literally thousands of different species all growing together, like I do. The labels last about two years, even in the greenhouses, then they must be replaced, and I use a special pen for labels (not Sharpies, which fade after about a year).
I have my work cut out for me, what with repotting, organizing the greenhouses for the seed-sowing season and continuing to ship bulbs. I came back from the seminar filled with ideas for training and retraining my dogs, and am anxious to get started. My dogs are doing well, but as we move up through the different categories from novice to expert, the courses get much more difficult, and flaws in training start showing. Hannah won seven of her ten runs. I made a mistake in one with my timing, so we placed third. In two runs she was beaten by a few tenths of a second by a poodle. Beaten by a poodle!!! We'll have to work on that!
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