Mossline — allotment notes from plot 12 Field notes on growing, compost, and the slow repair of clay soil.

Sixty-one mornings of watering, most of them too late

Why count

The tomatoes kept rotting at the blossom end and every book said the same word: irregular. So between the last frost and the first I wrote down every watering morning — the hour, the bed, the minutes. There were sixty-one.

The count, honestly

Before seven: twelve mornings. Between seven and nine: eighteen. After nine, sun already on the clay and half of every bucket gone to evaporation before it soaked: thirty-one. Thirty-one of sixty-one is most. Barely most. But most.

What the count changed

Knowing the number did nothing by itself. What changed things was standing at the plot at six in the morning with the list in my head, feeling the day already scheduled around a mistake. April mulch did more than any good intention in May ever had; the count just made the intention harder to keep pretending.

August

Eleven of the thirty-one late mornings were a single week in August, when the tap at the far end gave up and every bed drank from the long hose walked out from the shed. The far beds went thirsty on principle. I do not know whose principle. The notebook records only the hours, and the hours do not flatter me.