Drainage · 17 May 2002
There’s a hole in the bucket. Six of them, actually, punched with nails to facilitate drainage, in an enormous galvanized container; one that until recently held an olive tree. The tree was gnawed down by a weimaraner. It’s what they do.
This bucket (so big that one wants another name for it, but it’s in that shape so the name sticks), its cakey black soil now strewn on the ground among the tomato and pepper plants (it’s only May and they look winded and morose: they need it, or something), had seemed like just the thing for which I was looking: a vessel to warm cold well-water in the heat of the daytime sun, in advance of gentle evening watering. (Gardening literature, I am discovering, approaches literary criticism and talk radio in its loony rancour and disagreement, but everyone concedes that warm water is best for the wee plants; especially in the sort of concentrated, square-foot approach I’m now commencing the royal upfucking of.)
So I wasn’t going to let a few holes stand in the way of this plan, right? First I figured, with the bucket now in place, that – by dint of gravity, pressure and my own will – a miraculous hole-filling seal would form between the bucket and the soil on which it rested. I mean, water is heavy, a lot of water is a lot of pressure. Big bucket, small holes. It’ll be slow, if nothing else. So I fired up the pump and stood, hose in hand, for about five minutes. The pump claims five litres per minute, so that should work out to something.
I went away to fling some stuff into the compost, and wandered back a bit later to see if the water level had gone down. The bucket was both empty and dry. Me, blinking.
And then came duct tape, then ‘bathroom’ poly-filla, then plastic sheeting, then some weird gummy shit I found in the garage, filling up and draining out, and so on, and so on. Rafters filled the sky, packed with the ghosts of craftsmen, laughing.
I am of course open to suggestions.
UPDATE: Thanks to Goon Koch: beeswax appears to work.
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