Water In My Wellies

I had it all worked out.

After last year’s disastrous experience with the slug busting nematodes, I thought I’d found the perfect solution. A spraying gadget that fixes to the end of the garden hose. No more measuring, diluting and lugging a heavy watering can back and forth. To make absolutely sure, I watched the instructional video again. The whole process was easily covered in the 3 minutes it took to run. “Simple” proclaimed the presenter, sauntering around his garden with sprayer in hand, in smart casual clothes on a lazy sunny afternoon.

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We started late in the day, prompted by a threatening sky. After all, it was only going to take a few minutes, wasn’t it?

I carefully laid out bamboo canes to divide the first veggie bed into sections and, to effect even application, allowed 25 seconds of spraying for each. Mike deployed the stopwatch app on his phone. But then for some inexplicable reason the water pressure dropped. My stream had turned into a trickle. Perhaps the sprayer was blocked? Mike thought he knew how to fix it, turned the dial from ‘water + nematodes’ to ‘water only’ and gave it a good blast through. Magic, it was working again.

At the end of the third and final bed I opened up the sprayer. The sludgy brown appearance of the water suggested that the concentration of nematodes had dropped not at all.

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It’s starting to rain. And getting appreciably cooler.

The dial on the sprayer points precisely to the problem. ‘Water only’. It never got reset. All I’d been doing was watering the beds. But the thing that really gets my goat, as I retrace my steps? The leak that has suddenly sprung forth between the sprayer and the hose.

My wellies are slowly filling up with water.

 
 

Drying wellies Wm