my impatience that the price of efficiency should be a bottomless pit.
I always hesitate. I have never bought a piece of horticultural equipment with the élan that others, for instance, buy a car they cannot afford. I never enjoy that feeling of wild abandon that comes to people who have had a burst of extravagance. I have been extravagant, I have spent money I cannot spare, but the equipment which is the result gives me no joy. Its only attraction is its necessity.
Salesmen are quickly aware of my lack of enthusiasm so they tempt me by the hook of sound sense. As I am not buying for pleasure, as I look as if I am the gloomiest buyer imaginable, they set out to pierce my resistance by likening the piece of offered equipment to someone I might be employing. It is a persuasive trick.
‘Now if you pay £12 a month for this tractor you can’t say that’s an agricultural wage,’ a salesman will say to me, ‘and yet you’ll have a machine doing five times an ordinary man’s work in a week. Five times? . . . I should have said twenty times!
‘And the money paid to a workman is gone . . . you’ll never see it again. Look at it this way . . . you pay the hire-purchase as if it’s a wage. Then . . .’ and this was always the telling moment in the sales talk . . . ‘then in twelve months you’ve got a workman for free!’
I have fallen so often for this patter. It subtly appeals to my progressive ambitions. It even suggests that I am getting something for nothing. So I yield. And as a result I have had many an inanimate workman at Minack on hire-purchase pay rolls. The automatic irrigation was to be another.
It consisted of rubber tubing, the thickness of my forefinger, which ran the length of the greenhouse alongside the base of each row of plants. Opposite each plant was a nozzle and, when the tap was turned on, all the plants began to receive by drips an equal amount of water.
It had a still further advantage. The top end of the tubes was connected to a larger tube which, in turn, was hitched to the water tap; but, and this was the cunning part, the tube on its way to the tap was fastened to a contraption in a two-gallon glass jar. In this jar was tomato feed concentrate, and by turning the dial on the contraption, one could control the feed for the plants as soon as the tap was turned on. It could be a strong feed or a weak feed, and all the plants got the same.
Such standardised feeding naturally contains certain snags. Not all the plants have the same appetites, nor do they desire identical meals; some want more nitrogen than others, some more potash. But I have learned now to forget the odd men out. If the bulk is all right, and I now grow thousands of plants, I am only too thankful that I have an inanimate workman to look after them.
The water came from the well up the lane, a surface well that now belonged to us. This water was unsuitable, as far as we were concerned, for human consumption; and so we continued to use the well above the cottage, which we sank ourselves, for domestic purposes.
This well remains a shining example of how expensive it can be if you set out to do a thing cheaply. I had been assured that the spring lay so near the surface that it would cost only £30 to reach it. I watched the £30 disappear, and saw no sign that the hole was even damp. I should, of course, have cut my losses and fetched the firm who find water by boring a hole. But their charges at the time seemed enormous. I was not impressed by their guarantee of a huge column of water. I could not afford to be.
Instead I urged the two miners I had engaged from the mines at St Just to dig on. And on and on they dug. It was a beautiful hole, if a hole in the ground can be beautiful, the sides plumb straight, the granite sliced like a knife by their skilful hand-drilling and dynamiting; but never a sign of water. The hole was so deep that I dared not stop. So much of my money was now down the hole that it was too late to seek
I always hesitate. I have never bought a piece of horticultural equipment with the élan that others, for instance, buy a car they cannot afford. I never enjoy that feeling of wild abandon that comes to people who have had a burst of extravagance. I have been extravagant, I have spent money I cannot spare, but the equipment which is the result gives me no joy. Its only attraction is its necessity.
Salesmen are quickly aware of my lack of enthusiasm so they tempt me by the hook of sound sense. As I am not buying for pleasure, as I look as if I am the gloomiest buyer imaginable, they set out to pierce my resistance by likening the piece of offered equipment to someone I might be employing. It is a persuasive trick.
‘Now if you pay £12 a month for this tractor you can’t say that’s an agricultural wage,’ a salesman will say to me, ‘and yet you’ll have a machine doing five times an ordinary man’s work in a week. Five times? . . . I should have said twenty times!
‘And the money paid to a workman is gone . . . you’ll never see it again. Look at it this way . . . you pay the hire-purchase as if it’s a wage. Then . . .’ and this was always the telling moment in the sales talk . . . ‘then in twelve months you’ve got a workman for free!’
I have fallen so often for this patter. It subtly appeals to my progressive ambitions. It even suggests that I am getting something for nothing. So I yield. And as a result I have had many an inanimate workman at Minack on hire-purchase pay rolls. The automatic irrigation was to be another.
It consisted of rubber tubing, the thickness of my forefinger, which ran the length of the greenhouse alongside the base of each row of plants. Opposite each plant was a nozzle and, when the tap was turned on, all the plants began to receive by drips an equal amount of water.
It had a still further advantage. The top end of the tubes was connected to a larger tube which, in turn, was hitched to the water tap; but, and this was the cunning part, the tube on its way to the tap was fastened to a contraption in a two-gallon glass jar. In this jar was tomato feed concentrate, and by turning the dial on the contraption, one could control the feed for the plants as soon as the tap was turned on. It could be a strong feed or a weak feed, and all the plants got the same.
Such standardised feeding naturally contains certain snags. Not all the plants have the same appetites, nor do they desire identical meals; some want more nitrogen than others, some more potash. But I have learned now to forget the odd men out. If the bulk is all right, and I now grow thousands of plants, I am only too thankful that I have an inanimate workman to look after them.
The water came from the well up the lane, a surface well that now belonged to us. This water was unsuitable, as far as we were concerned, for human consumption; and so we continued to use the well above the cottage, which we sank ourselves, for domestic purposes.
This well remains a shining example of how expensive it can be if you set out to do a thing cheaply. I had been assured that the spring lay so near the surface that it would cost only £30 to reach it. I watched the £30 disappear, and saw no sign that the hole was even damp. I should, of course, have cut my losses and fetched the firm who find water by boring a hole. But their charges at the time seemed enormous. I was not impressed by their guarantee of a huge column of water. I could not afford to be.
Instead I urged the two miners I had engaged from the mines at St Just to dig on. And on and on they dug. It was a beautiful hole, if a hole in the ground can be beautiful, the sides plumb straight, the granite sliced like a knife by their skilful hand-drilling and dynamiting; but never a sign of water. The hole was so deep that I dared not stop. So much of my money was now down the hole that it was too late to seek
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