Now the weather's warming up (not to mention the wind blowing half a gale) the hoses are coming back into commission. In the winter I water the pots by hand when they need doing. It's not that many trips with the watering can because the plants' water needs drop right back, and it's easier to avoid overwatering things if you aren't splashing a hose everywhere. Plus, I learned from the year I left the spray attachments in situ attached to the hoses and they must have had water in them because one cold night they split like unlagged pipes in the frost. Nowadays I know to take them off at about the same time as I move the pelargoniums and Geranium maderense back into the greenhouse, and the white holey stone and glass danglers into the spare room for the winter.
One of the spray guns worked perfectly when I tried it, but the other didn't. They are rather over-engineered for my purposes, having heads you can rotate to give a variety of spray patterns, when most of the time I only want the one marked 'shower', that produces a diffuse but not too wide spread sprinkle like a watering can rose. Sod's law dictated that the rest of the spray settings worked beautifully, the overly fierce jet, the fine mist, the flat jet (who on earth does use that?) and all the other patterns that some designer dreamt up, but not the one I wanted. When I set the head to 'shower' lumps of water fell out of every joint in the gun, dribbling on my trousers and other places where I didn't want it.
Thinking about it logically it seemed likely that it was not actually a case of sod's law, but the holes in the head I used regularly having got clogged up with use. I'm not sure if our water technically counts as hard, since we aren't in a chalk area, but mineral deposits rapidly collect on the kettle, the taps, the draining board and everything else it comes into contact with. It seemed extremely likely it would be capable of blocking the channels in a spray gun, and one thing I learned working in the plant centre is that as soon as the water in a lance stops flowing quickly through the holes it was designed to flow through, it starts dribbling out everywhere else.
I could have started messing around with lime scale remover, but had a hunch that vinegar would do the trick. Vinegar was what butlers used to use to clean decanters that were marked with mineral stains. I remembered that from our guided tours around various stately homes servants quarters, and Margaret Powell probably mentions it in Below Stairs. I didn't even have to dunk the whole end of the gun in vinegar, after the Systems Administrator showed me that the rotating part of the spray head unscrewed. The only trouble with cleaning with vinegar is that it makes your house smell powerfully of nothing else, and after about five minutes I put the bowl in the porch. Twenty-four hours later I remembered it, fished out the end of the spray head, gave it a good rinse and screwed it back in place. It worked perfectly. No dribbles, no mess.
I was rather gratified. The Systems Administrator picked up the current spray heads in Tesco a couple of summers ago, for a ridiculously small amount of money, but they no longer seem to be doing them, or maybe it is too early, while B&Q were charging between twelve and twenty quid. To have actually succeeded in mending a mechanical device, and saved myself a meaningful amount of money in the process, is a rare and sweet pleasure.
Addendum The box of orchids ended up spending the night shut in the downstairs loo before being safely removed to the conservatory, as I had a sudden horrid vision of Our Ginger deciding to sleep in the box. They are mysterious little things. I truly have no idea whether the long green growths coming up from one of them are roots or shoots.
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