Class #2

Update from Alan

Class number two, last Saturday, was well worth me getting up for. I ended up with at least four things that I had never given any thought to before. In this post I’ll deal with the easy one:

In my story about the old geezers standing out in their front yards on warm weekend mornings with a squirter on the end of a hose ‘watering the lawn’. About them sending a fine spray into the air and me watching most of the moisture drift off in the breeze either to fall out in the road or to evaporate never to be seen again. As soon as I said that they wouldn’t live long enough to get the requisite one inch layer of water on the lawn, I realized that I really had no idea how long it would actually take.

In the story I used the floor space in front of the tables in the classroom as the size of a small lawn, about 10' by 20'. 200sq.ft. one inch deep requires near enough 17 cubic feet of water. So, how long does it take to get that much water through the squirter? The picture shows how. 50' of ½" hose connected to the washing machine faucet and a bucket that just happened to be half a cubic foot in volume. It took a minute and five seconds to fill the bucket or two minutes and ten seconds to pass one cubic foot.

Assuming all the water reached the ground, it would take a tad under forty minutes to water 200 square feet of lawn. Taking into account evaporation and drift, the vagaries of water pressure, hosepipe length and diameter, and faucet size, probably an hour to an-hour-and-a-half to do the job properly. Not a lifetime perhaps but totally impractical and actually damaging to the grass.

 

Rules of Gardening

While reviewing garden rules - there are none - I drew a parallel between piano playing and gardening. A piano has a number of keys and using two fingers almost anyone can knock out a recognizable tune. The repertoire expands with the knowledge and virtuosity of the player. Horticulture also has a number of keys, simple techniques and principles, and with little more than ‘green side up’ and ‘snip off the dead bits’ something garden like can be achieved. Just as a piano contains every piece of music ever composed, (someone is going to jump on this I just know it) so every garden ever created was based on one combination or another of basic horticultural notes.

So how many garden ‘notes’ are there? I really have no idea, but like a piano I’d guess that the most used ones are clustered around the middle. Last Saturday I couldn’t remember how many keys a piano had, but I can now definitively state: ‘standard’ is 88, a few have 85, and the Bosendorfer 9'6" concert grand has 97. Isn’t Google wonderful. Trouble is, the 97 key job is just screaming to have its own limerick and that will be a challenge.

Comment from Patty : While most pianos have 88 keys, there are thousands of plants to create a myriad of gardens. Alan teaches you things you didn't know you didn't know. Like how to buy a proper corn broom that will last you 20 years. Glad I'm taking this course!