My gardening trousers have gone through at the knee. It's always the left knee. Maybe it's something to do with being right handed that makes me kneel more on that knee than the other. If you are the sort of gardener who likes to get down close and personal with your soil, rather than poking at your weeds with a hoe from a standing position, physios and doctors will recommend the posture of going down on one knee as if making a proposal of marriage, and cultivating the areas you can comfortably reach. It places less strain on the lower back than kneeling on all fours to work. That's OK so long as you keep your weight evenly distributed between arms and legs, but you have to learn to resist the temptation to lean forward to get to the weeds that are just out of reach in front of you. And it is very tempting, once you've found somewhere to put both knees and a hand that isn't squashing anything, to do as much as you can before moving.
I am irritated about the trousers. Not surprised, since my gardening trousers always go at the knee, but cross at the idea of spending an hour sewing a patch on, or hard cash forking out on a new pair. It annoys me that nobody sells proper gardening trousers with reinforced knees in women's sizes. I've experimented with men's cargo trousers, sold as workwear, but they've been made out of light cotton that ripped at the first rose thorn. I've searched for army surplus combat trousers in a 28 inch waist but without success. There is a firm that advertises ladies' gardening clothes in the garden glossies, but I've eyed up their wares at Chelsea and thought they looked too flimsy. I don't want rose patterns and pink, I want an extremely heavyweight cotton twill with reinforcing patches over the knees.
So much of what is sold for gardeners is pretty crap. Badly designed, badly manufactured, and half the time marketed at rip off prices. Like my bronze four way distributor for the outside tap, which I bought because I was fed up with plastic ones leaking and then breaking. A year to the day after I bought the bronze one, the inlet sheared off. A manufacturing fault, said the Systems Administrator. So now I'm back to Hozelock, and to give them credit it isn't leaking yet, but I know it will, even if I bring it in for the winter to save it from frost. The sunlight will get to it, it will become brittle, and the drips will start, before one day there's a full blown jet shooting out and it's broken. That's how the last one went, and every plastic hose fitting I have ever owned. At least, and to give Hozelock some more credit, they haven't changed the design of the wall fitting since the last time I had one of their four way distributors, so the new one slotted straight on to the old bracket which was still screwed to the kitchen wall. And it came with two hose end fittings included in the price, which I wasn't expecting. So I am happier than I might be, but still not impressed at a world in which I have to regard four way hose distributors as a disposable item, to be replaced annually.
And gardening gloves. I have lost count of the number of pairs of gloves I've bought over the years that have dyed my hands either green or a lurid shade of tan by lunchtime. Not because I've got them soaking wet, or handled solvents, but just from the friction and sweat of normal wear. Don't the manufacturers test them? Do they think that amateur gardeners want their hands to look as though they were very badly made up for an extras role in Shaun of the Dead? And as for buying welding gloves in a size seven, forget it. Welding is clearly the exclusive preserve of big, strong men taking at least a size ten in gloves.
And the fruit cage. It was not the manufacturer's fault that I left the netting on mine one winter, believing it never snowed that much in Essex, but it was definitely their fault that when I came to replace the bent roof sections, or rather to try to replace them, the connectors joining the roof struts to the uprights had corroded immovably in place. The same thing happened to a friend, whose fruit cage was damaged not by snow but by wind, after she had queried with the manufacturers whether they had really sent all the parts she needed, or whether there should not have been some more bracing elements. They said she had all the necessary bits, then after the cage had bent in the wind admitted that she was right and there should have been some more struts. And by then, just like ours, the roof connectors were hopelessly stuck and impossible to remove.
The little cages for individual vegetable beds sold in garden centres are no better. At the plant centre we once assembled one, to show customers what they would get in their expensive box, and I watched as it gradually fell to bits, the plastic corners disintegrating. It didn't last more than a couple of years. By the time you'd factored the cost of crop protection into people's home grown vegetables, they might as well have saved themselves some work and simply ordered them from Riverside Organic.
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