the days are lengthening

Now that it's April, we finish work at 6.00pm, and will for the next three months.  That's a long working day.  The amount of hand watering is increasing, too.  Our main display beds for trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants have overhead irrigation systems, but there are many odd corners that have to be done by hand, including the display tables, the large specimen shrubs that won't fit on the shrub beds, the areas where we keep plants that have been reserved for people, and the deciduous Euonymous, which for some reason are martyrs to fungal diseases if they sit on mypex fabric and get even a tiny bit too wet.  The hoses are one inch diameter (I think.  Don't think they've gone metric yet), which is a smaller bore than the hoses we used to have when I first started there, but they are around 50m long, and heavy to pull around the plant centre when full of water.  We can't even lift them, but drag them section by section so that we aren't attempting to move the entire hose at once.  Our hand watering routine is not yet as slick as it will be in a few weeks' time, as it is easy over the winter to forget the best routes around the plant centre and the optimal order to do things in, and odd plants have been put down on corners where they turn out to get in the way, when you are trying to drag a large hose about.  All of this will be refined and improved with practice.  By the height of summer, in really hot spells, we can be hand watering from 8am until 10.0am or 10.30am, and then start again by 4.30pm and go on until 6.00pm.

We get a few customers who have worked out that although we don't open until 10.00am, the staff are there from 8.00am onwards.  They try to come early so that they can catch us 'when we are less busy'.  What they refuse to see is that we are busy, with the watering, and that we don't want them falling over the hoses while we do it.  The prospect of being caught by the automatic irrigation system puts some off, otherwise we have to be firm with them.

A couple of customers appeared in the plant centre at one minute to six.  I suppose that serves us right for not shutting the gate from the car park at 5.00pm when we closed.  They knew that we had closed an hour previously, but smiled at us with goofy nervous smiles and a hopeful air that as we were still there we might serve them.  I rather wish people wouldn't do that.  Although the plant centre staff are absolutely not on commission, we are commercial enough that we would rather have a sale than not.  Plus we are all moderately kind and polite people.  But it is a long day, and even shop staff have other stuff to do when they get home.  I explained (moderately politely) that we did shut at five and that I was going to cease being paid in one minute's time, and I would help them if they knew what they wanted.  It turned out they wanted a rose, which was fairly quick, but then they wanted a camellia as well.  The manager offered to stay to sort them out, which was noble of him.  Reader, if you insist on going into a small business an hour after they shut, remember that the staff may have already been there for ten hours and may be tired.  And if it is a hot day they may have another hour's watering to do in their own garden when they got home, or, as in my case this evening, be planning to go out.