Forty-eight in the box. Forty-eight is not forty-eight. Sixteen of those are soft and a soft one is not a stem, so write thirty-two and write why.
Why goes in the COND. column and the word is SOFT and it goes in red every time, so the driver can read it at the door without taking his gloves off.
A soft neck is bacteria in the top two inches of the stem. It is not thirst. It is not the truck. It does not come back. The head drops clean off inside a day and it drops wherever it happens to be at two o'clock, and that is not here.
So it is not a discounted stem. It is not a stem. It does not go on the docket at a lower rate, it goes on the floor sheet as spoilage, and the spoilage figure is mine and nobody else's.
You have had that bucket since six. Turn them. Turn means take them out, look at the cut face, put them back the other way round so the ones that were at the wall come to the front. It does not mean stir them with your hand.
The whole of the job is one inch of stem.
Cut a stem and you have not made a drinking straw, you have made a straw with an air lock in it. The second the blade is through, air is drawn in at the cut face, the column breaks, and inside a minute or two that bottom inch is conducting nothing at all.
Everything after that is getting round the inch or taking the inch off. There is nothing else in it. There is no other part of the trade.
Recut under water. Under. Not over the bucket, not on the wet bench, under, so the new face never sees air. Two inches at a slant.
The slant is not decoration. It is surface area, and it is so the face does not sit flat on the galvanised and seal itself against the bottom of the bucket. Cut them square, stand them down hard, and you have corked them yourself.
Those secateurs have not been on a stone since I had them back off you in May. A blunt blade does not cut a stem, it squashes it and then tears it, and a squashed stem is dead in the bottom two inches whatever you stand it in. You cannot un-crush it. Feel the face. If it is oval, you crushed it.
Wilt is not thirst. It is air.
That bunch that flopped in the dry bucket at half past seven does not come good because you have now put water under it. It comes good if you take the bottom inch off under water, and it does not always come good then. Two of those will not.
Leaf area is the whole loss term. A stem loses water out through the leaf, faster the warmer it is and faster the drier the air is, and the doors have been open since five and the floor is being hosed.
Strip the bottom leaves. That is not tidying up. That is halving the loss, and it keeps foliage out of the water, and foliage in the water is the thing that rots.
A bucket with leaf in it grows bacteria in hours. Bacteria plug the cut face from the outside while the air lock plugs it from the inside. Topping a bucket up is not changing a bucket. Top up a fouled bucket and you are running a culture and paying the water rate to do it.
Three things in the sachet and they do three separate jobs and half this hall thinks it is one thing. Sugar, because the bloom has no leaves of its own to feed it and will not open without it. Acid, to bring the water down to about three and a half, where uptake is measurably faster and the bacteria are measurably slower. And a biocide, which is the only one of the three that is actually killing anything.
And the tap in this bay is hard and it is alkaline and it defeats all three. Every dose printed on every sachet in that store is written for somebody else's tap. We dose heavier than the packet and we still do not get three and a half in the door bucket by nine o'clock.
Ethylene. Ripening fruit puts it out, an engine puts it out, and one stem already gone puts it out at every other stem in the same bucket. Carnation first, then sweet pea, then snapdragon. The petals curl in on themselves and then they shatter, and the concentration that does it is nowhere near anything you can smell, so do not stand there sniffing at it.
Which is why the fruit barrow at the end of the bay is a cost. It goes on no sheet anywhere and it costs me. When he comes up past the post, move the carns out of bucket three. Do not argue with him, do not ask him, move them.
Cold is the only real control there is.
Respiration about halves for every ten degrees you take off. A box held at two has something like four times the life of the same box at twenty-two. Every hour on that concrete is spent and you do not get it back afterwards by putting it away.
Now. Eight of those are spray and I wrote eight stems on line two. A spray is not one head, it carries three to five open, and this order is costed on open heads and the trough takes heads, not stems. I had that wrong and it is my hand on the docket. Eight spray stems is thirty-one open heads. Stems in the QTY, heads in the note beside it, both of them written.
And cross the thirty-two. I read the cool room at the door and the door says four, so I took four. That box went in at five past five and it went to the back, and the back of that room runs nine and has done since the fan bearing went in April. Six hours at nine is not six hours at four. Take four more off. Twenty-eight, and write TWENTY-EIGHT in the QTY, not thirty-two.
And the trough. I costed the trough against the new brick. The store has the old size, and the old brick is short across the width by an inch and a quarter, so it does not fit. Two bricks trimmed for one trough, and the trim is waste, and the waste is bought and paid for the same as the brick.
Float the brick. Lay it on the water and let it go under on its own weight and in its own time. Push it under and it takes water round the outside and stays dry in the middle and there is no way of telling from outside. A stem finds the dry core every time. A stem in a dry core is a stem in air and you have done all that recutting for nothing.
Thirty-two stems to a brick before it gives. That is not a guide. The thirty-third does not go in, it breaks the block up round the other thirty-two, and then you have thirty-three stems standing in nothing at all.
Woody stems get split and a long drink. Hollow stems get filled and plugged. Daffodils bleed a mucilage that genuinely blocks anything sharing the bucket with them, so they stand on their own for hours first and then they go in with the rest. Tulips keep growing after they are cut — real centimetres, not a saying — so a tulip job made up of an evening is a different shape by the morning and the fault will be put on you.
Wire order. Marion rang the sending shop at twenty to nine, the sending shop takes twenty off the top, the service takes seven off what is left, and this bay fills to what lands. We do not fill to what they paid. In nineteen years I have never once seen the figure they paid written down anywhere.
That is commission taken twice on the one order.
Twenty and seven. Twice. I wrote to the district secretary on the fourteenth of March, our docket 3318/2891, and I have an acknowledgment dated the eleventh of April and nothing since.
So build it to the received figure and not to the quoted one. Every wire order that goes wrong in this hall goes wrong in that gap, and it goes wrong at the door at delivery, not on the phone at the start.
Three bays down has white glads and will not sell across to me. That is his business and it is not a grievance, it is simply not a source, so do not go down there and ask him again.
Order reads white and nothing else. Nothing else means no foliage, and I have read that back to them twice and had it twice.
Card in block capitals, copied as it came over the phone. Do not improve it and do not correct the road. Thirty-nine characters and the card takes forty-two.
Wire docket goes back with the driver at twelve. Not half past. Twelve. The yellow goes with the box, the pink stays in the pad.
Nothing has gone out of this bay with a soft neck in it since June nineteen fifty-eight.
Twenty and seven, taken twice, and I will write again on Monday with the docket numbers set out in a column so it cannot be read any other way.
June nineteen fifty-eight. Nineteen years and not one. It is not going to start today, so go and turn that bucket properly, Rodney, and then come and read the tag on the trough.