And so we arrived rather late at the allotment and found that that the wheelbarrow had a flat tyre – entirely my own fault because I’d noticed it needed blowing up days ago, days during which the fugitive valve had managed to hide itself deep within the tyre, necessitating the removal and reassembly of wheel, tyre and inner tube. While Madame busied herself as far as possible away from me, clearing out the shed, I turned to the job I really wanted to do – fitting the new water supply to the drippers in the greenhouse. Unfortunately in my haste to get on I forgot to measure the replacement pipe whilst I had prematurely (it turned out) pulled the other one through its carefully crafted underground passage blissfully unaware that the replacement was 2mm bigger than the original which was built in when the greenhouse was assembled. A search was mounted and an alternative length of hose was found – not in the best condition but it fitted through the hole. At the water tank end, it rapidly became clear that the smaller pipe wasn’t going to fit the tap properly. When I fitted the click lock coupler it leaked like a sieve, which is not helpful when the whole point of my labours was to leave it turned on to automatic while we are away. And so I resorted to that favorite technique – the bash fit. This involves heating the pipe with a gas lighter to the point where it is flexible but not on fire. After a great deal of hand to hand combat the pipe was fitted at both ends and the electronic unit appeared to work.
“Good”, I thought, “I’ll install the gravel boards now”. But where was the marking line? Luckily we had a new one in the shed and so I peeled off the plastic wrapper, pulled gingerly on the end and it instantly turned into the biggest bird’s nest you’ve ever seen. It took 40 minutes to untangle – no kidding – and I had to fight every minute to retain my buddhist like composure. Eventually I wound it on to an empty spool and – to be fair – apart from having to kneel in the mud for most of the time, and apart from spiking myself on a bamboo on our neighbour’s side of the path, it went pretty well – although I did mismeasure the board lengths and had to hammer in extra pegs. We finished after five hours of work that should have taken about two and drove back wondering which of us was going to cook. Clanger pudding again, then. This time it was me, and so we had pasta with our own pesto and the remains of a small chicken which has now provided meat for nine meals and some stock as well. We grow two types of basil – the neapolitan and the classic. I much prefer the first and as soon as I tasted it I realized that the pesto was from a batch of neapolitan. That’s the first thing that had gone right all day!
However my back aches and any sense of reward I ought to be getting from finishing two listed jobs in a day, is entirely missing. There’s the unglamorous side of allotmenteering for you! Photos tomorrow if it’s not raining again. We’ve both got pieces in the annual BRLSI exhibition and we went to the private view last night. Pride, I suppose, came before a fall.
If there’s a downside to allotmenteering (or gardening for that matter) it’s how to get a break during the growing season. I suppose our allotment has the additional problem that all the water is turned off between late October and mid-March, and so we early starters need to make our own provision. Back at the Potwell Inn, we have just under fifty tender capsicum seedlings in the two propagators. Normally I water them once a day with a fine spray of very dilute seaweed growth stimulator, but I thought I’d do an experiment to see if I could use capillary matting attached to a large water source. In its first iteration I passed a wide strip of matting from a small bucket, through the ventilator of the propagator and under the matting inside. A rapid flood occurred because evidently too much water was flowing from the source. So I wondered if the flow rate correlated with the width of the connecting strip, and I halved the width, but that also wicked too much water into the propagator. Quick rumble of the little grey cells and so next I wondered if the amount of wicking that was submerged in the source bucket was the problem. The solution was to shorten the wick and attach it to a wine bottle cork with two drawing pins – as per photo – a very cheap cistern arrangement. That’s been running all day and it’s certainly slowed down the transfer of water to the propagator. If that still proves too much I’ll halve the wick width once again and carry on with the cork cistern – total cost about a pound. The next stage is to work out how large the cistern needs to be for us to have a week away. I should say that the lights are timer controlled to give 12 hours of fairly intense daylight at 24C.
Up at the allotment I spent a couple of hours yesterday reinstating the timed dripper system to water the seedlings in the greenhouse. It took some time last year, researching the available gadgets, to make sure the one we bought would function at the very low pressure provided by the water butts. This battery operated model has been reliable for a whole season, and works on a reasonably small head of water. Given that there’s no clean water available on the site for some weeks yet, I was so pleased when I rigged up a temporary tap from the water butts to find fresh clean rainwater – 1000 litres of it – flowing reliably through the system. Madame had taken a look at the rainwater in the trough but someone appeared to have washed a paintrush in it so it had a nasty blueish hue and was almost certainly contaminated with anti-fungal chemicals.
The other independent watering system we’ve used is soaker hose which we installed under the tomatoes last season and which worked very effectively over the first 2/3 of its length. That’s a point worth noticing, the hose we used was years old and had become kinked. It would probably have worked under mains pressure, but trickle fed from a water butt wasn’t working at all.
