wet feet and only one till

Driving to work this morning I passed quite a collection of motor bikes and their riders in the lane where they congregate early on Sunday mornings.  All were men, wearing full leathers, and while I didn't get a very close view driving by at 30mph I was left with the distinct impression that they were all over 40, if not 50.  The bikes, as far as I could tell as a non-expert who has never ridden one and never intends to, were large and expensive.  I wonder if they all know each other, or if it is free to anyone to turn up and join in, like a ramblers' group.  Presumably there is a grapevine, since there is for every hobby I've ever had, and people involved in the motorbike scene pick up what's going on.

The watering took the three of us fully two hours.  It hadn't been set to run overnight, so we were trying to run rather a lot of different bits of irrigation at the same time this morning, which caused the pressure to drop slightly, with the unfortunate effect that my hose dribbled disastrously over my trousers and shoes at the point where it clips on to the end of the hose.  Or at least, I think it was mainly down to low pressure.  The hose and lance connections are both lined with rubber rings, which are supposed to form a seal and can perish, but they depend on the pressure of the water to force them together.  My trousers, being thin cotton, dried pretty quickly, but I trudged around in damp plimsolls for most of the rest of the day.  I must put them in the laundry room now to dry them out fully before tomorrow.

The bosses had people staying with them, and apart from a brief conversation first thing, we didn't hear a peep out of them for the rest of the day.  The tills from the previous day had not been reconciled, leaving us only one to use.  I've now worked there for slightly over eight years, and nobody has ever shown me how to do the till reconciliation.  Given my previous City incarnation I expect I could get the hang of it.  A colleague who had not been trained by the management either, but had once been shown by a co-worker, said she didn't mind trying to reconcile yesterday's till and risk being told off for doing it wrong, but we didn't really see why she should.  If we'd got desperate for two tills I suppose the answer would have been to tip the entire contents of one of the unreconciled ones into an envelope, or a saucepan, or whatever we could find, and extract a float of known quantity to start us off today.  In fact we weren't that busy, and managed with one.  This was partly down to luck as well as it being another quiet day, in that we didn't have any customers who midway through the transaction managed to cause a hold-up.  Compared to Tesco we seem to get a lot of people who only discover after we have rung up their goods that their purse is in their car, or they have forgotten it and need to find their other half who is somewhere in the plant centre and make them pay, or their card doesn't work, or they need multiple goes at their pin, or they wander off to find just one more thing they meant to buy.

On the way home I came upon a horse and rider stationary on the pavement.  The horse was ignoring its rider's urges to go forward, and after a bit began to go backwards, and then to go round in circles.  I stopped the car and waited for developments.  The horse moved on to the road, and swung around alarmingly.  A car coming the other way stopped as well, and I began to wonder how much damage it would do to a Skoda Fabia being kicked by a large horse.  The rider was a young woman, who looked jolly cross.  Eventually the horse moved into forward gear, and they walked on up the road.  I let them get a considerable lead on me, and the oncoming car let them get well past before either of us moved.  The horse seemed quite placid once it had finished its hissy fit.  I quite like horses, but when I see one misbehaving on the road always remember the warning heard once on R4, that the thing to remember is that a horse is a ton of muscle controlled by a brain the size of a pigeon's.

an ancient weed

The horsetail leaves have started emerging in the back garden.  This is an ancient plant, and one of the most determined and ineradicable weeds found in the UK.  The spore bearing cones appeared several weeks ago, and are now withering, but the leaves will be with me until the autumn.  They are bright green, thin fronds carried on brittle central stalks.  Given moisture they reach 30-40cm in height, while in a dry year they are somewhat shorter.

Questions about horsetail, or Equisetum arvense, crop up regularly on Gardeners' Question Time, and are the cue for the panel to laugh and suggest moving house.  If Bob Flowerdew is on the programme that week he will say that horsetail can't stand mowing, and that the questioner can put their garden down to grass and grow standard trees.  This would be fine, assuming they wanted that sort of a garden.  The roots of horsetail are black, and brittle, and are said to go down so far underground that coal miners have found them growing in the mines.  They run, and horsetail will cover a large area, limited only by whether it finds conditions to its liking.  Black polythene is no cure.  The horsetail will sit underneath, biding its time until the ground is clear again, if necessary for years, and the fronds are capable of finding their way through woven landscape fabric.  It is a plant of poor drainage and compacted ground.  Here it runs around in the back garden, where the underlying clay comes close to the surface, and is absent from the front, where the sand goes on down seemingly for ever.  Just to be on the safe side we have a rule that no roots or waste containing soil from the back garden goes on the compost heaps at home.  Instead it all goes to the municipal dump, where it can be composted at higher temperatures than we can achieve.

Looking on the bright side, we don't have ground elder or Japanese knotweed, and horsetail, although visually intrusive, is not a very competitive plant.  When we first moved here I put a lot of effort into digging it up, or painting its shiny leaves with a mixture of glyphosate and wallpaper paste, before deciding that it was impossible to kill and instead I needed a strategy to live with it.  What I do now is pull up the leaves when they appear, as many as I can get to (which is dependent on weather and what else is going on at the time).  They will regrow but not as tall.  If I keep at them the regrowth ends up so short that it is hidden among the other plants.  This is one reason why I'm so keen on getting a continuous layer of low herbaceous planting between shrubs and the showier herbaceous feature plants.  The horsetail doesn't seem to affect the growth of the garden plants, and I avoid having to see too much of it.  At least, as it doesn't get going until late April and early May, the ground is left more or less clear for early displays of small bulbs and suchlike.  It withers in autumn, leaving remarkably fragile, insubstantial remains.

The leaves of horsetail naturally accumulate silicon, and in times gone by it was used for polishing pewter, according to Richard Mabey.  We do have a pair of pewter plates on the mantelpiece that are pretty black and in need of a good polish, so maybe I should try it sometime.  Unfortunately Mabey doesn't give any instructions about how to go about this domestic task, whether the horsetail should be wet or dry, and if I should use a bit of soap or anything with it.  Mabey also says that the leaves if boiled in water make an excellent fungicide against mildew.  My normal approach to mildew control is to try not to grow things that get mildew, but maybe I should try that too.  We'll see how it goes.