Time for another plug

It turns out that when it comes to drips, what comes down must also come up.

Having taken 38,000 drippers out of growbags at Ford in September, I found myself putting more than 15,000 back into them at the Redhill site in early November.

The last row of hanging drippers at Redhill. I reinstalled these while listening to the McAlmont and Butler epic You Do. Their self-titled debut album The Sound of McAlmont and Butler still sounds magnificent despite dating to the mid-1990s.

Next year’s strawberry plants have been tricked into thinking it’s mid-winter as they’re currently hibernating, for want of a better phrase, in the packhouse chiller. The same room which housed countless pallets of strawberries and raspberries during the summer is now a few degrees cooler and is filled with hundreds of boxes of young strawberry plants.

If you’ve read my earlier posts, you’ll remember these plants were borne from cuttings, called runners. They were planted in plastic trays, then pruned and thinned out before moving to the great outdoors. Since then they’ve been pruned again, placed in wooden boxes and taken to the chiller.

Between now and Christmas they’ll be taken out of the cold and transported to the two empty Redhill glasshouses for maturation. The heat will be turned up, tricking the plants into thinking that spring has arrived, and thus making them ripe for picking come the start of summertime.

But they will need water and that’s where drips and I come in. I was asked to reinstall the drippers via a text message from Graham one evening and thought nothing of the task. After all, how hard can it be to put a dripper back into a growbag hole?

Reinstalling one of the 15,000+ drippers. It's harder than it looks.

Turns out there’s a lot more than just putting it back in its place. Having put close to 3,000 drippers back in their place during a three-hour stint in one glasshouse, Steve decided to check up on my work.

“These aren’t very good, Paul – you’ll have to do most of these again,” were his alarming words.

He informed me the drippers have to be stood up straight, otherwise water congeals at the bottom and doesn’t irrigate the compost (and don’t confuse this with soil, I was also told, for Steve is very strict with his agricultural terminology). I also learned later that the new supervisor also likes the drippers to be 50/50 in compost, so naturally I took this into account as my task went on.

It’s all a learning curve and I want to learn from my mistakes, but this setback was a trifle bit frustrating as I learned of my mistake after completing 24 rows. Indeed, Steve wandered into the glasshouse just as I was finishing the very last row.

So instead of moving on to the second and much bigger greenhouse for the big job, I spent the next three hours rectifying my error and making sure each and every one of the 3,000 drippers was correctly placed and standing true. Hmph.

It took nearly two days to reinstall all the drippers in the second house but it was a pretty big job. There were 56 rows altogether and some 15,600 holes, yet by the end of the first day I was averaging 15 minutes a row and even worked into near-darkness after finding myself on a roll.

Ta da! Just the one or two drippers I reinstalled.

As there’s only two pickers left on the farm these days – hello to Rumyana and Constantine if you’re reading this – a lot of the work is now solo. Sometimes I work in silence but I’m finding that headphones are becoming increasingly important with music and comedy filling the void.

Spotify is a near-constant companion and I’ve got a few playlists which I regularly tune into. My favourites are a 1989 mix as it reminds of me of my halcyon Langstone Middle School days, and a Forgotten Gems collection, which I’m constantly adding to. Sample tunes include Good Morning Britain by Aztec Camera ft Mick Jones, '74 '75 by The Connells and Monsters and Angels by Voice of the Beehive.

Being alone in a vast glasshouse with music for company also offers opportunities for singing loudly (and badly) and dancing. In fading light on the second day I found myself doing both while listening to a Oberhofer* cover of the overlooked Cyndi Lauper ditty All Through The Night. Perhaps it’s just as well there was no one to see or hear it.

I think Cyndi Lauper's contribution to music is overlooked. There's much more to her back catalogue than Time After Time.

*This is perhaps the best thing about the 2017 romantic comedy Table 19. It stars Anna Kendrick, Lisa Kudrow, Wyatt Russell and Stephen Merchant among others, but I wouldn't let that pique your interest.