The morning began to go wrong for the manager at the point when my young colleague told him that there was scarcely any water left in the tank that feeds the irrigation system. The tank is supposed to fill from a borehole, and if that fails it can be topped up from the pond in the garden, and failing that from the mains. The manager went and looked at the tank, which is a big cylindrical metal affair, and found there was approximately a foot of water left in the bottom. With that little left in the tank you can't risk running any of the automatic overhead irrigation systems.
Apparently the tank is not filling from the borehole because the water level in the hole itself is low. I am utterly baffled as to why that should be, after last year's almost endless rain and a wet, cold March that meant that until recently we've been doing less watering than usual. At home, the bog that appeared last year at the bottom of our garden shows no signs yet of drying up. It seems preposterous that the borehole should be low on water.
The manager summoned the gardener over the radio to put plan B into operation. The gardener went to try and start the electric pump that takes water from the pond to feed the tank, but it wouldn't run. All that happened was that we lost the electricity supply to the shop. By dint of taking the electric kettle from the staff room down into the garden to test the electricity supply at the pond, and running the pond pump in a bucket of water in his workshop, the gardener established that the problem lay with the electrical circuit, not the pump. The power to the shop came on and off throughout, causing a certain amount of difficulty if customers were waiting to pay for anything at the points when it cut out. The manager called the electrician we always use, who is an obliging person and saw that it was an emergency. He came that same morning, but we ended up not being able to water great areas of the plant centre.
In the meantime they had to enact plan C. The manager grovelled around in a strange lean-to with less than standing headroom, which the gardener calls the pig sty, and may even have been a pig sty, and emerged with a long reel of yellow domestic hose. This was taken from the outside tap on the house, run through a protective metal sleeve at the point where it had to cross the drive, and led into the tank. The rate of flow you can get through a normal hose makes a rather puny impact on a tank that size, but it is better than nothing. Once the electrician had got the pond pump to work, and with the hose from the house running for most of the day, we were up to three quarters of a tank of water by close of play.
Trade has dried up almost as much as the borehole, and it was very quiet. Maybe we need the sun to come out and tempt people into their gardens, or some rain to refresh the top layer of the soil and make people feel more like planting things out. We need something.
When I got home I thought I'd better water my own pots in the front garden, and the stash of things waiting to be planted, since some looked dry, and while I could have left it until the morning it wouldn't have done them any good. Watering in the greenhouse, I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. It wasn't the first time I'd got a vague sensation that I'd seen something, and this time I saw what looked awfully like a very small bird hopping on the ground among the pots. I stopped watering and investigated the middle shelf of the multi tier metal rack in the greenhouse more closely. A litter of leaves, a circular depression in the middle hidden between four 2 litre pots, and several small white eggs. Oh bother. I think I have just watered a wren's nest. I'll now have to feel guilty about that until I see if the adults desert it, and if they don't then I'll feel worried each time I use the greenhouse that I'm disturbing them. After the robins last year I really hoped we'd finished with birds nesting in the greenhouse, instead of which word has clearly spread that it's a prime spot.
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