When I arrived at work the water tank was full to overflowing, a small trickle of water running out of the top. However, there was no power to the controls of the irrigation system, or pressure in the hoses, so we couldn't do any watering. I left my colleagues to grapple with the problem, and hunt for fuse boxes. I am not naturally mechanically minded, and in the ten years I have worked there still nobody has explained to me how the system fits together or where any of the key switches or fuses are, so I didn't thank that having me trailing round after them would be of any assistance at all. Eventually they rang the manager who told them where to find the trip switch that was the usual culprit, and they got the water going.
It was very windy, probably not a full gale, but enough to dry out pots of compost in next to no time, and blow them over. One of my colleagues set the automatic irrigation to run, but the wind blew most of the water horizontally away from the pots it was supposed to irrigating. He then started putting balls of clipped box out for sale, indicating that his participation in the watering process had ended. As I worked my way through the fruit section, a chaotic scene of upended gooseberries and black currants, and around the display of acers in front of the shop, which were very dry, I asked him whether the tunnels had been watered, but he just looked at me and said that he'd set the irrigation.
It is annoying in a small team when people don't do their share of watering. There's no point in complaining to the manager, who will only grumble to me that if he tells the owner she will simply tell him to stop picking on so-and-so. Forget expensive, purpose-designed executive team building courses. You can tell everything you need to know about how someone is going to perform in a team at work by seeing their attitude to watering on a difficult, drying morning in a plant nursery. Eventually my other colleague stopped arranging a display of foxgloves on one of the tables just inside the entrance, and watered the magnolias and climbers that aren't covered by the automatic system. I was still toiling outside, hampered by two elderly customers who'd arrived before we were officially open, and were disappointed that I wouldn't put my hose down to answer their gardening query.
Some of the shrubs were very dry, and by mid day I was reduced to walking around with cans of water, trickling a little into the worst ones just to tide them over until five, when the customers might have left and we could resume watering properly. The drier and lighter a pot is, the more easily it blows over, so the plants that needed watering most badly were the least likely to have got any of what irrigation had landed on the shrub beds and not blown on to the path.
I resumed watering after lunch, and then switched to standing things up as it began to spit with rain, so that they could get the benefit of any showers going. In the end it poured heavily, which will have largely bailed us out on the watering front. There'll be odd dry things in the morning, but at least we won't be faced with wholesale crisping and collapse. Wind is a terrible thing in a plant nursery.
In the afternoon, as I took refuge in the shop from the heaviest part of the rain, I could hear my younger colleague, who came to the rescue of the magnolias, on the telephone. I'm very sorry to hear that, I heard him say, and That's all right, you must have had other things on your mind. It turned out that he had rung a man who was waiting for a particular clematis, and asked to speak to him when his wife answered the phone, whereupon she told him that her husband had died before Christmas. He had been suffering from a brain tumour, and in his last months had ordered all sorts of things that he didn't really need, including Clematis spooneri from us. As my colleague said, that sort of thing was why he didn't like ringing people up.
Although I sheltered from the worst of the rain, I had got rather damp standing things up, as it became clear that it was proper rain and I wanted them to take advantage of it. I also discovered that the free gardening gloves I was wearing to work, won as a prize in a raffle, had the absorbent qualities of sponges, and within five minutes of it starting to rain both were soaked. I ended up working without them, and by five was starting to lose sensation in both hands due to the cold. In mid June. Roll on summer, before it's too late.
No comments:
Post a Comment