In the Spring an old man's thoughts ...

... turn to gardening!

In fact sometimes:
  1. you are born gardening (which I probably was, with my Dad's skills in that direction); or
  2. you achieve gardening (despite the hopeful start, I am still struggling towards that one); or
  3. you have gardening thrust upon you.
One morning in early September I was definitely in category 3, and this could be considered part of the series http://franmart.blogspot.com/2008/08/life-rural-joys-of-continuing-series.html. The previous night I had gone over to the stable to get a lump of yellow box to keep the fire in overnight and noticed a "squelch" as I walked across the lawn. This caused a more or less sleepless night as I went through what could be wrong - the main worry was that it was a leak from our main tank so we turned that off and used no water.

The next morning I was up at sparrow fart to find the water still evident so called a plumber. The first couldn't come but agreed that as it was leaking polypipe Rhett Cox from Bywong was the man. After some rapid work with a spade Rhett found that it was a leaking joint from the irrigation system - the tank was OK. The cause of the problem was a liquidamber growing into the joint so the liquidamber took some punishment (note the proximity of the axe in my hand to the roots). It has now been replanted, in a largely root-free situation.

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