whither it leadeth

Nicky was recently invited to take on a quarter-share in an allotment with some colleagues from work so that the original tenant no longer need spend so much time tending to the plot immediately adjacent to the person who is now his ex-girlfriend. It should be good practise for if/when we get allocated one of our own (must ring the allotment-distributing bloke at some point to check that we've not dropped off the list) but as there are already four of them on this one I'll only be assisting when there's heavy lifting to be done or things to be reached down from high.

One disadvantage of working on technically someone else's patch is that it would not be polite to attend to the massive pile of rotting behind-the-shed stuff behind the shed in that special accreting-since-the-dawn-of-time way of behind-the-shed everywhere. There are at least a newshedsworth of various panels of various materials behind there amongst the decaying twine, old plant pots filled with Evil and mice nests but as the proper tenant is a trained woodworker and is supposed to have the rebuild of the shed (current half-a-greenhouse with half-a-tramp-shelter on one wall) on his lists of things to do with the plot I was only able to peer briefly at it with itching fingers when I popped by.

I was also intrigued by a water-filled pipe sticking out of the ground just down from the shed: is it some kind of special gardening-manometer to determine the state of the water table? Just a simple pipe stuck in the ground and now filled with rainwater? Does it maybe get an infundibulum stuck in the top during the rainy season to concentrate the damp a little more at the top of the slope? Does the chill metal condense extra water out of the atmosphere for the plants immediately around it? If I were to connect the end of a hose to the pipe and turn on the tap would the neighbouring tenants run shrieking from their sheds at the end of jets of water?