There’s a glitch with the Blogspot website, which isn’t
letting me save posts at the moment, so I am writing this in Word with the
intention of copying it over before midnight, or before I go to bed, whichever
is sooner. If I don’t manage to do that
then there won’t be a post for 1 July.
I don’t mind taking a blog holiday on my terms, but it would be a pity
to start missing posts due to systems failure.
Still, there’s nothing I can do about it, and use of the site is free.
There was a long wheel based transit van already parked up
when I arrived at work, which turned out to belong to the contractors who had
come to re-skin the polytunnels on The Other Side. They’d driven all the way from Maidstone, leaving at five-thirty. According to the manager you are supposed to
renew the covers on polytunnels every six years, and one of ours has lasted longer than that, but still I found it vaguely reassuring that my employers had
decided to make the investment, in the current economic climate, rather than deciding
that the tunnel would do another year. I should
have liked to see how they attached the new plastic skin to the metal frame,
since large commercial tunnels aren’t like domestic ones, where you simply bury
the edges of the plastic, but I wasn’t working over The Other Side, so can’t tell
you.
The watering took three of us until ten o’clock. The manager needed to run all the irrigation
on The Other Side to get the plants watered ahead of the contractors working in
the tunnels, so we ended up with too many things running at once, and low water
pressure in the plant centre. This had
the unfortunate side effect of rendering the seal between the end of the hose
and our lances ineffective, since normally it is the pressure of the water in
the system that presses the lance down into its rubber seating. This morning they dribbled and leaked over our trousers, and watering took longer than usual, because we only had the
flow to cover a small area at a time.
The automatic irrigation didn’t work very well either, and after it had
run there were still dry patches among the shrubs and in the tree
line.
Looking on the bright side, I did not pick up a hose and
find that the section I had grasped was covered with peacock shit, as happened
yesterday. It was a waste that we had
two girls from the village in that day to run the café, as otherwise the
horizontal streaks of what might have been compost but was probably bird crap on my uniform shirt would have provided the
perfect excuse not to work with food.
Today I had a narrow escape, as somebody wanted refreshments while our
usual conscript was at lunch, but I called the manager and then her companion
declared that she didn’t want anything, and the woman who had wanted something
from the café requested a sandwich. We
don’t do sandwiches.
Takings for the day were boosted by a customer spending over
six hundred pounds on trees and three trolley loads of plants.
She had chosen them all herself, except for the trees, and while she asked for advice on those I think she essentially knew what she wanted. Sometimes people don’t want advice, even when
they think they do, so much as a sounding board while they talk themselves into
doing whatever it is they want to do anyway.
We arranged to deliver the trees, but she managed to pack everything
else into her car, which was larger than mine, but not that large. She was accompanied by a cheerful and
well-behaved baby, and as she painstakingly loaded the final three Stipa
gigantea, complete with 2 metre flower spikes, I couldn’t see where the
baby’s buggy was going to fit, but it must have gone in somewhere as we didn’t
find the infant in the car park after she’d gone.
As we were about to close I answered the phone to a panic
stricken regular customer, who wanted to know whether there were Muntjac in the
area, as something had bitten through the stems of several shrubs in her
garden. It sounded like classic deer
damage, and again she knew the answer already.
I commiserated and talked her through the basics of life with Muntjac. Yes, they can jump three feet. If your garden fence is already that high you
could run extra strands of wire above the top of it. Yes, I have seen them, the last one lying dead in the road. The only way to kill them, apart from
running them over, is to shoot them with a rifle. Even if you know somebody with a rifle, or hire a pest controller,
there are legal safety limits on where they can use a rifle, to do with
proximity to roads and neighbours and so on.
Muntjac are primitive deer. They
bark. They have tusks. They do not come every night, but pass
through. You could get a lot of damage,
set night cameras to see where they are coming in, and not see another for a
week. Their numbers are growing rapidly
in the UK. They are a curse for
gardeners and woodland owners. Not good
news. Sorry.
Addendum The site relented and let me post at half past nine. Obviously.
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