Serious thoughts on what to do?

I am having very serious thoughts on what to do in my garden. I love the lush tropical look but I am very conscious on just how much watering is needed to keep it looking so good. I don't have a problem watering, in fact I quite enjoy it, but water is going to become a precious commodity so we are being told and I would much rather drink it than pour it on the garden.

A view down by the pond.

I have 5 very substantial water butts, not you ordinary 210 litre ones  mine are all 500 litres plus. They are also very nearly empty!

In hindsight, (a wonderful thing, but very annoying) when we had the bio mass boiler installed and had the new patio laid, we should have had a huge tank sunk under the patio as there are 3 roofs that fill just one large water butt, I believe the would have easily filled a sunked tank!

So what to do??
The arid bed just loves the baking sun, I do nothing to it, as you know, occasionally if I am walking past with the hose it gets a bit of water but to be honest not much at all. So do I make the rest of the garden like this? I would have to devise a way to protect it over winter though and that is fairly hard work to set up.

Even the palms, this is my Butia, above,is suffering.

The Ensete Hiniba should be way bigger than this.

Persicara is wilting.

The Maureli, is still a bit stumpy!

I have a decision to make. I don't have and probably won't have grand children, but the rest of my family do, I could easily say 'its not my problem' or 'it doesn't affect me'! But I have to live with myself. I think it is ludicrous that we flush 'drinking water' down a toilet to empty it when we are surrounded by sea. This has been a bug bear of mine for years.

Back to the garden, even though the girls dug in a load of manure the soil is dust dry, I am seriously considering changing the left hand side as you look up the garden to a gravel bed, a bit like at Beth Chatto's gravel garden. The link will take you to the gravel garden gallery, beautiful, but? I am not sure its me. Ideal for my garden and situation, but do I like it? Mmmm??? The jury is still out!!! More thought needed.

Ensete dig out!

So these are  just three that I have to dig out today. The first is my oldest Maurelli. They don't look big but I can assure you they are heavy.

The reason they are so very heavy is the amount of water they hold. You can understand why when you look at a close up and see the little pockets that hold water.

A slightly smaller Maureli, which I intend to store in a totally different way. It is still relatively small so I am not sure it would get through the winter dry stored.

On the Hardy Tropical site on Facebook someone over wintered a Maurelli in a pot of soil. The art is to keep it slightly damp and not wet! So here we go, first time for everything. It will be interesting to see how this goes. I will keep you posted.

Finally my Hiniba. This really struggled to get going this year and to be honest I thought it would be touch and go as to whether it would grow. As you can see, it did and it did it well.

After following Yorkshire Kris's You tube video on how he propagated his Hiniba, I thought 'well why not give it a go'. So this is where you will follow my journey.

First you have to dig it out! Not easy but just about doable.

Then Yorkshire Kris used a large bread knife to cut through the trunk. Which I just about managed. this is only about 4 inches from the roots.

I then had to cut this in half. I could not do this with a knife, the central bit is really tough so I had to use a saw.

I then had to cut them again, so now have 4 pieces all with a bit of the central corm and all with some roots.

I then dusted all four with yellow sulphur. Then popped them each into a pot of compost.

The compost was then dusted with ground cinnamon, I found this works well against any fungal diseases.

They are now in the back bedroom which is not the warmest in the house, and no the radiator is not on, but it is relatively bright. We shall see. Time will tell.

Wind Blown!

We may be having or going to have another wind blown autumn. First ex hurricane Ophelia hit, mainly Ireland but the affect on us was more in the colour of the sky and sun.

The sky turned an amazingly warm colour, the sun went from yellow through orange then red to pink. The next pic was taken by me and to be honest does not do the colours justice. It reminded me of when we had the partial eclipse a few years ago,

The following pic I pinched from the BBC website which shows a better colour.

This was all due to the sand Ophelia had picked up from the Sahara!

Then with in a few days, along came 'Storm Brian' (pic from of a friend on Facebook) now Brian has been very blustery for us personally.

This got me thinking, our storms our named and go in alphabetical order so when was Storm Aileen? Apparently it was around September 12th. I must have missed it, September was pretty full on here!

Its probably a bit early but we have covered the Arid bed.

It was a matter of having too, as again I have a hectic couple of weeks and had the weather changed I would have been caught on the hope. So in good Girl Guide fashion 'Be Prepared'!

I have also had a wood delivery, half the load we had last year. Though it still looks a lot.

But once in the log store you can see quite a difference this was last year a good couple of hours work which I did all alone.

Compared with this, which was done with the help of my daughter and her husband and took about 30 mins!

A bit more manageable and easier to keep dry!

Back to the topic of this blog post 'Wind Blown'  here are a few pics

Till later, take care x