I set off for work this morning conscious that today was the last day of the six o'clock finish. From July we go back to 5.15pm, and the thought that it was the final ten hour day for this summer cheered me at intervals. I was greeted on arrival by the owner, who informed me that it had been very windy and that everything would be very dry and that we would have to run the overheads even though it was still windy because there wouldn't be time to hand water everything, and that in particular those four trolleys of recently delivered roses were very, very dry and would need lots of water. I concurred, taking this as a ritual display of authority, given that the owner is not usually around first thing on a Saturday, and I work out what needs watering by myself by dint of looking at it.
The watering did take a long time, and I didn't finish dragging hoses about until gone ten. I felt a certain amount of irritation that one of my colleagues, after bustling around standing pots up, programming the automatic system and throwing a few switches, didn't participate in the hand watering that still needed to be done. He is a year or two younger than me, and competes in triathlons in his spare time, so there is no particular reason why he shouldn't heave hoses about and get dribbled on by leaking lances like the rest of us. (However, through the course of the day he finished emptying a full red trolley, and did some hand watering in the last half hour, so doing his share of heavy lifting in the end).
My task was to clean one of the shrub beds, in the course of which I reduced another work shirt to a state where I certainly couldn't serve refreshments wearing it, and it won't do a second day of outdoor work without washing. I got the tail end of Ceanothus through to Clethra back into neat alphabetical order, swept, weeded, dead leaves and twigs removed, and where necessary the pot dressed with a fresh layer of compost. Some of the Cistus were horribly dry and had to be soaked in the water butt, having passed the stage at which spraying water on top of the pots does any good. They are very thirsty plants in pots, which seems curious when they are drought resistant in the ground. The one remaining Chimonanthus praecox was a sorry specimen, its roots having started to rot, and I removed it from sale. My new young colleague said that when he worked at Nottcutts it seemed as though wintersweet always started to go downhill after about two weeks in a pot.
I got home to see the chickens eating grass outside the hen house and not my dahlias, and expressed my delight to the Systems Administrator, who said that the chickens had only abandoned the dahlias after being squirted twice with the hose. While I was watering in the greenhouse they snuck back into the dahlia bed twice more, wriggling through my Barbara Hepworth-like array of interlocking strings like limbo dancers. I threw more water over them from my cans, but am beginning to get rather depressed about the whole thing. They have the entire front garden to range over, so why are they fixated on destroying a dozen plants in the dahlia bed? They don't like eating the bronze leaved varieties, by the way, only the green ones, half of which have been reduced to leafless stumps. When I have finished typing this I am going to start researching pigeon netting.
The watering at home took another hour, though the SA chipped in upon realising that it needed doing. It may not have been that hot today, but sunshine and strong wind are an incredibly drying combination. Some of the small plants in my greenhouse were starting to collapse. If I'd been at home tomorrow I would probably have risked leaving the pots in the Italian garden until the morning, but I'm not.
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