Monday 1 July 2013

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There’s a glitch with the Blogspot website, which isn’t letting me save posts at the moment, so I am writing this in Word with the intention of copying it over before midnight, or before I go to bed, whichever is sooner.  If I don’t manage to do that then there won’t be a post for 1 July.  I don’t mind taking a blog holiday on my terms, but it would be a pity to start missing posts due to systems failure.  Still, there’s nothing I can do about it, and use of the site is free.

There was a long wheel based transit van already parked up when I arrived at work, which turned out to belong to the contractors who had come to re-skin the polytunnels on The Other Side.  They’d driven all the way from Maidstone, leaving at five-thirty.  According to the manager you are supposed to renew the covers on polytunnels every six years, and one of ours has lasted longer than that, but still I found it vaguely reassuring that my employers had decided to make the investment, in the current economic climate, rather than deciding that the tunnel would do another year.  I should have liked to see how they attached the new plastic skin to the metal frame, since large commercial tunnels aren’t like domestic ones, where you simply bury the edges of the plastic, but I wasn’t working over The Other Side, so can’t tell you.

The watering took three of us until ten o’clock.  The manager needed to run all the irrigation on The Other Side to get the plants watered ahead of the contractors working in the tunnels, so we ended up with too many things running at once, and low water pressure in the plant centre.  This had the unfortunate side effect of rendering the seal between the end of the hose and our lances ineffective, since normally it is the pressure of the water in the system that presses the lance down into its rubber seating.  This morning they dribbled and leaked over our trousers, and watering took longer than usual, because we only had the flow to cover a small area at a time.  The automatic irrigation didn’t work very well either, and after it had run there were still dry patches among the shrubs and in the tree line.

Looking on the bright side, I did not pick up a hose and find that the section I had grasped was covered with peacock shit, as happened yesterday.  It was a waste that we had two girls from the village in that day to run the café, as otherwise the horizontal streaks of what might have been compost but was probably bird crap on my uniform shirt would have provided the perfect excuse not to work with food.  Today I had a narrow escape, as somebody wanted refreshments while our usual conscript was at lunch, but I called the manager and then her companion declared that she didn’t want anything, and the woman who had wanted something from the café requested a sandwich.  We don’t do sandwiches.

Takings for the day were boosted by a customer spending over six hundred pounds on trees and three trolley loads of plants.  She had chosen them all herself, except for the trees, and while she asked for advice on those I think she essentially knew what she wanted.  Sometimes people don’t want advice, even when they think they do, so much as a sounding board while they talk themselves into doing whatever it is they want to do anyway.  We arranged to deliver the trees, but she managed to pack everything else into her car, which was larger than mine, but not that large.  She was accompanied by a cheerful and well-behaved baby, and as she painstakingly loaded the final three Stipa gigantea, complete with 2 metre flower spikes, I couldn’t see where the baby’s buggy was going to fit, but it must have gone in somewhere as we didn’t find the infant in the car park after she’d gone.

As we were about to close I answered the phone to a panic stricken regular customer, who wanted to know whether there were Muntjac in the area, as something had bitten through the stems of several shrubs in her garden.  It sounded like classic deer damage, and again she knew the answer already.  I commiserated and talked her through the basics of life with Muntjac.  Yes, they can jump three feet.  If your garden fence is already that high you could run extra strands of wire above the top of it.  Yes, I have seen them, the last one lying dead in the road.  The only way to kill them, apart from running them over, is to shoot them with a rifle.  Even if you know somebody with a rifle, or hire a pest controller, there are legal safety limits on where they can use a rifle, to do with proximity to roads and neighbours and so on.  Muntjac are primitive deer.  They bark.  They have tusks.  They do not come every night, but pass through.  You could get a lot of damage, set night cameras to see where they are coming in, and not see another for a week.  Their numbers are growing rapidly in the UK.  They are a curse for gardeners and woodland owners.  Not good news.  Sorry.

Addendum  The site relented and let me post at half past nine.  Obviously.



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