I experimented in the mid 70s with various what my dearest wife calls 'white elephants', notably the 1976 Al's Automatic Hothouse and Horrid Death Machine. With a 3-week vacation in France looming, I automated my old cedar greenhouse with a couple of thermostats, a fan ventilator, an electric heater and a washing machine valve and an army-surplus electric timer [for regular water], off a hose from the outside bib. The hazardous combination of my amateur wiring, 60 psi mains water pressure and 240vac still makes me shudder at the utter stupidity of it all.
The crop was to be cantaloupe melons, grown in compost bins up cunningly crafted nets to catch the budding fruits.
It was a disaster! We returned from sunny Provence to find a pumpkin seed had somehow got in with the melon seeds at the seedsman's premises.
It had been one of the best English summers for decades, and the pumpkin had grown like some 'B' movie science-fiction plot to a monstous size. It had crushed the melons to death, and overwhelmed the technical department in a jungle of leaves a yard across draped over contacts, wiring and kit and pressed against every last square inch of glass. A gigantic squash weighing over 100lbs sat on the glasshouse floor with siblings of similar size jostling the electrics for floor space. A tendril had got out of the door and snaked up the garden like a hawser, leaving a trail of orange bombs in its wake every few feet up my lawn.
I never lived it down at the Plant- my neighbor worked in my office and had been delighting my colleagues with the latest developments [and conducted tours of my garden!] for a week or more before we got back.
Alan
PS. I decided to sell the greenhouse that autumn [fall] and enlisted, for the relatively simple dismantling procedure, the assistance and guidance of the noted scientist, colleague, friend and lunatic, Professor Barry C. of O. University, who must remain anonymous. A gentleman and scholar with whom I once had the honor to get arrested with for being drunk in charge of a dangerous musical instrument, to whit a trombone, on Brighton beach at 3 in the morning. Don't ask. Having a World Class Brain does not necessarily guarantee hand and eye co-ordination abilities and between the said noted Professor and the fearless Engineer, [with blame, to be fair, in equal proportions], we gradually and meticulously whittled the structure down to a pile of useless matchwood and a heap of razor-sharp broken glass shards.
Later that moonlit night, a casual observer may have glimpsed two shadowy figures amongst the shrubbery, fuelled by a dram or two of the famous amber nectar, digging a large grave in the nearby park's rose gardens, amid maniacal laughter.
Yes, I admit our guilt. We lugged the sad remains of the greenhouse and its fated scrapped electrical apparatus in an old plastic baby bath and buried it there for some distant future archeologist to slash himself to ribbons on.
