Compost Your Enemies

Readers possessed of a better memory than mine may recall the post I wrote 2 1/4 years ago, about the garden patch and what turned out to be a Gestetner stylus found therein. I say a better memory than mine, because I had forgotten that I wrote it.

It refers to an “enormous black bag of weed roots – now too heavy to lift” and when I say enormous, I do not exaggerate. It looked like this:

A large black plastic bag, full, with a white bucket lid on top.
That revolting brown thing is a fallen camellia flower. Why do they do that?

Do not be fooled into thinking that this is your common or garden black rubbish bag, vol. approx 60L. No, no. This black bag was about a metre by two metres when flat, and when full it was, as previously mentioned, too heavy for me to lift. I can lift a ten kilo sack and carry it on my head. In a previous job I used to lift twenty kilo sacks of popping corn (though I was not foolhardy enough to put them on my head). I can lift and carry a large tub full of hardwood logs for the fire. I could not lift this bag.

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The Nasty Secrets of Scientific Nomenclature

Of late I have been reading a good many gardening books, and a good many of them use scientific nomenclature for plants. This is to avoid confusion – or at least it would be if those in charge of said nomenclature didn’t keep changing the names between books. Still, once you have a bit of Latin (and occasionally Greek) under your belt, you have a nifty resource for extracting information about the plant in question.

The first part of the name is the surname or family name; and the second part is the specific species name. To give you an example, if I was a plant I would be Makarios deborah, or, if members of the family Makarios were the subject of discussion, just M. deborah.

Camellia sinensis, to give you an actual plant example, is a camellia from China, and is the plant that produces tea. Camellia japonica, on the other hand, is from Japan, and… also tea. If you like. It is said to be higher in caffeine and lower in tannin, so if you need to absorb iron but also stay awake all night, Camellia japonica tea may be for you.

You are going to need a bigger teapot.
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