gone to pot

Today I was mostly potting.  I rather thought I might be, given that I knew there was some potting left over from last week, and went dressed accordingly, wearing two pairs of socks and thermals over my thermals.  The boss didn't allow us to pot over the weekend, as we had to be supervised by the manager.  I don't know if the boss realises that the extent of the manager's supervision is to ask us how those hemerocallis or hostas looked, so that he can write it on his records.  Today's plants were from the Netherlands, and were mostly pretty good, though there was one bag of Tradescantia roots that were five plants short.

There was a potting hiatus in the middle of the day, as we ran out of labels.  The labels are stapled to the sides of the pots for herbaceous plants, and you really do need to staple them to the rim before filling the pot up with compost.  It is possible to retro-fit them, but fiddly and time consuming, and impossible to do without spilling compost.  Plus the finished potting is stood in large blocks so that you couldn't reach most of the pots to label them.  Plus you would be practically bound to lose track of which varieties were in which pot.  The hold-up with the labels occured because they were varieties that we hadn't sold before, so the boss had to write the descriptive blurb for each one before we could print them.  Writing the descriptions is a task that the boss refuses to delegate, and he was supposed to have done it this morning, but it is half term and he took the children out riding instead.  The manager, who had managed to prise both gardeners out of the garden to help, and called in an extra staff member who is normally laid off at this time of year especially to finish the potting, was rather irritated to have his crack potting team standing by with no labels.  We all found other jobs to do in the interim until the boss produced labels, and finally got the last geranium roots safely encased in compost five minutes before closing.

None of us are sure how the tea room is going to work out.  Apparently the idea is that we will have somebody to run it during the busy season.  The gig has gone to the gamekeeper's daughter, who has passed her foor hygiene exams and is also going to make the cakes (at this point I feel as though I might be living in The Archers, in one of the brief interludes when nothing sensational is happening).  In the quiet season the plant centre staff are going to dish out the tea and cakes.  We are?  When I get home from work it generally takes me ten minutes to scrub the dirt from my hands, and my cuffs and the front of my jacket are always covered in a dusting of compost and the odd smear of green slime.  How exactly are we going get this past the environmental health officer?

We do have one splendid new piece of equipment.  Last year a couple of us said that what we needed for the plant centre was a mobile potting bench, so that we had a working surface on which to clean pots that was at the right height to work all day, and not 15cm too low, which the display tables are.  Working for eight hours on a surface that is uncomfortably low would give anybody backache, even the fit youngsters, and the two of us grumbling about it have combined ages of over 110.  I discovered today that the older gardener has indeed made a mobile potting bench, with proper wheels, a sturdy metal frame and elegant wooden handles.  I asked, fascinated, what it was made out of, and it turned out to be based on an old ice-cream cart which had been sitting in one of the sheds for the past fifteen years.  I have no idea whatsoever why the boss possessed an old ice-cream hand-cart, but it goes to show that you should never throw things away.  Eventually they do come in useful.