We have been so busy that it is rather a relief to be on the taxi rank.
The new and unexpected lengthy spell of dry weather is wonderful for a person who has got washing to be dried, but not at all wonderful for a person with an allotment.
Hence when we had finished our morning labours we set to loading the water butt into the trailer.
The trailer was already filled with muck collected by Mark from the farm. It was not the sort of muck that can actually be used yet, being too fresh, but he thought that it would be a good idea to take it to rot in situ on the allotment. This means that anything that is leaching out from it into the soil will continue to do good things. Also it is perfect breeding conditions for worms, and the allotment could do with some.
The soil on the allotment is horribly grey and dusty, and Mark says it is mostly ash and sand. He says that on the whole it is pointless trying to grow much in it until it has been fed a bit, and so he has been ferrying compost up to it by the trailer load. He does not mind doing this, because almost all of a farmer’s life is occupied with moving poo from one place to another, and so he is used to it.
However, needing poo is the least of the problems suffered by the poor allotment at the moment.
It has not rained for ages. There are communal water butts on the allotment and every single one of them is empty now. The soil is so sandy and dry that it is becoming a sort of dust bowl, even despite all of the compost Mark has dug in.
As a result, we needed to import some water.
We do have a hose, but just at the moment are inconveniently without the sort of tap on to which it can be fitted. The consequence of this oversight was that we were obliged to fill the water butt with buckets from the kitchen.
Water is jolly heavy. We splashed it over the carpets and out to the trailer until the butt was full, and then drove up to the allotment, where we reversed the process up the hill to the allotment.
I fetched the water and watered the potatoes and the rows of seeds whilst Mark barrowed the compost up and made a neat pile with it. Then we mulched everything as well as we could. We know from summers spent gardening in much hotter climates than the Lake District that mulch is the secret of keeping everything from expiring in horrible dehydrated gasps, and we piled on everything we could find, lawn clippings and cardboard mostly.
There was a man there trying to fill his watering can at the empty communal butts. We were about to offer him a share of our painfully hauled water, but then he turned round and said horrible things about the dogs, who were actually being very good and following us at heel just as they were supposed to, so after that we thought he could sort out his own water. This was not kind of us. Another lady turned up with her own dog and she was friendly and lovely and so Mark said she could help herself.
I got cross with Mark then, because of the allotment taking so long when we had got so many other things to do, so we went home to do some cleaning, because the children’s rooms are still sticky after Easter, and everywhere else is sticky after having us there.
The cleaning stopped abruptly when the hoover broke. Mark says that the motor has gone and that it would make just as much sense to buy another as to try to fix it. This meant that we had to go to work instead of cleaning any more, to try and earn some hoover money.
We are here now. If we make enough we will go to Asda at midnight when we finish and buy a new hoover.
Fingers crossed.
