Tuesday 15 July 2014

issues of scale

When you move from a relatively small suburban garden to a large country one then unless you have been brought up in a garden that's measured in acres rather than yards, and most of us aren't, you begin the process of learning by trial and error how to manage things on a bigger scale.  It's a topic that's scantily covered in magazines and books, and so hard to find out except by doing it. Magazines that look at practical gardening techniques tend to be aimed at people with smaller plots, which is fair enough, since that's probably the bulk of their readership, while the aspirational glossies tend to focus on the design aspects, and a fair few of the gardens featured employ gardeners to supplement the efforts of the owners.  Giving out nuts and bolts advice about how to maintain all this stuff is not what they are about.

We worked out pretty quickly that we needed a lawn tractor.  The bargain ride-on mower bought second hand soon died, choosing the most downhill point from the drive it could to do it, and was replaced by a new one which actually worked.  Realising that you need a lawn mower commensurate to the task is not hard.  Discovering that you need a large trailer, so that you will not spend half your life carting wheelbarrow loads of prunings to the bonfire site, and a proper scaffold, so that you can cut hedges without risking your neck spending hours wobbling on a stepladder, can take longer.  As can understanding the scale on which you need to build compost heaps.  Some things you only learn when it is too late to do anything about them without major upheaval, like leaving space for loose loads of gravel and mulch to be tipped where they can stay without causing an obstruction until you can finish spreading them.  Or indeed leaving enough space for modern delivery trucks to get in and out easily.

Watering is one such task.  In my old house I watered things in pots with a watering can.  It was only three or four steps across the patio to get to all of them, and if something recently planted needed a drink, that was only another three or four steps.  The distances in the new garden were too far for carrying cans around to be a sensible solution, though I did a fair bit of it in the early years when I had lots of newly planted shrubs, savage summer droughts, no mains water supply and practically no water pressure.  A hose was clearly the thing to have.

Twenty years on the hoses (plural) are far better organised than they were at the start.  One runs from the outside tap to the conservatory at the back of the house, where it lives permanently coiled inside a large terracotta pot when not in use.  It is exactly long enough to reach across the lawn to the collection of Hamamelis in pots on the far side, plus every pot in and outside the conservatory. It has a spray gun fitting at the business end, so that it can be turned on and off there as well as at the tap.  It's a reasonably meaty fitting, able to fill a full sized Haws can in about the time it would take me to count to seventy.

In the front garden is another hose, which will reach to the greenhouse and the pots by the formal pond and on the terrace (or patio).  This isn't normally uncoiled to its fullest extent, but if extended to its full length will reach to the furthest corners of both the front and the back garden, so that in dry spells I can go round the borders watering anything recently planted, and in ultra dry periods I can give the really bad areas a soaking.  After years of practice I have preferred routes round the garden that minimise the amount of backtracking and laborious manoeuvring  of the hose around corners.

A third hose leads to a subsidiary tap up in the meadow and is permanently plumbed in, while a further collection of hoses connected together will if necessary reach from that tap to the furthest end of the meadow.  I only need that when I'm planting up there, which I haven't been for the past couple of years, though I live in hope that I'll have time to make another push this autumn.

A fourth hose, only six feet long, is for filling watering cans to save having to hold them under the tap.  And we have a four way distributor at the tap so that all four hoses can be left plumbed in at once.  This sounds like a small thing, but makes a big difference, compared to the dampness and hassle of regularly having to disconnect the conservatory hose to fill the watering can, followed by confusion over which end belongs to which hose, as you reconnect what you think is the back garden hose, trot down to the conservatory, and find you've got no water, so whatever you plumbed in it wasn't that one.

Today, after months in which the knobs of the old Hozelock distributor got stiffer and stiffer and more and more difficult to turn, to the point where it became a three way distributor and then a two way, because I could no longer turn two of the valves at all, today the Systems Administrator fitted a new distributor.  A brass one.  When it arrived the knobs were so tight they wouldn't turn at all, but they loosened up with some grease.  It was, according to the Systems Administrator, a complete bastard to fit to the wall, being very badly designed, but now that it's up it is marvellous, giving a controllable water supply to conservatory and greenhouse with one turn of a little knob.

It all sounds very obvious, but it took years of experiment, trial and error to get to an efficient arrangement of hoses.

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