The rain, that a couple of days ago was forecast for all of today, by this morning was not forecast until mid afternoon, and still has not arrived now, which as I type this is nine minutes to seven. That meant that I got lots more done in the garden than I was originally hoping or expecting, which was good. The flip side is that I got nothing at all done in the house, and we do have to clean the place up before mid morning on Thursday, because some people are coming round then. Also I need to get to grips with the beekeepers' treasurer's stuff as a matter of urgency. I put it off after the handover meeting because of the lunch party, and then we went to Oxford, and it was the Systems Administrator's birthday, and I had to go to work, and I was waiting for a wet day...Enough. It has to be done, on a fine dry day if there isn't a rainy one.
Charlie Dimmock was on the Today programme, talking about how we should adapt our gardens to drought conditions. That was a blast from the past. I think she has been signed up by Thames Water to help their customers cope, or at least make it sound as though Thames Water cares, as it presides over its colossal leakage rate and hosepipe ban. I quite like Charlie Dimmock, or at least I don't mind her, but the trouble with making your garden drought resistant is that you needed to start doing it months or years ago. The advice to make sure that your soil is in good heart, with lots of organic material incorporated, is excellent, but takes a long time to achieve. If Thames Water's gardening customers haven't been adding organic soil improver every time they plant something and mulching regularly over the past two or three seasons, there isn't a lot they can do now to improve the state of their soil before the hosepipe ban starts in two days time.
I felt a sort of seeping weariness as Charlie told us that we would all need to start planting Mediterranean climate shrubs, rosemary and Ceanothus, to cope with the new dry conditions. That doesn't follow, for several reasons.
Maybe the UK is getting drier on a long term basis, though I wouldn't bet the house on that. It's not so long since the great sodden summer of 2000, and even this year parts of the north and Scotland have been torrentially wet. The midlands and southeast have only missed out on rainfall by a couple of hundred miles, which is not very much in global terms. It's true that the pressure of development in the southeast means we are all going to have to adapt to taking less out of our taps as the years go by, but there's a huge range of garden plants which don't need routine watering once established. It can't have escaped Thames Water's or Charlie's notice that we've just had a couple of long, cold winters. Perhaps they are part of climate change too, or perhaps one of those things that nature sometimes throws at us, on account of our being as far north as Newfoundland. Mediterranean climate plants have been among the top casualties in UK gardens, along with the New Zealanders. I have written whole blog entries which have been long, sad litanies of plants I had in my garden which are no more, and I have listened to many similar catalogues of woe from customers at the plant centre. Rosemary, lavender, bay, Cistus, Phlomis, Ceanothus. Gone, gone are they all, dead and gone. As well as detesting long cold winters, sogginess at the root is death to them, so if we revert to wet winters instead of freezing ones, all those Thames customers on their London clay are going to have a difficult time of it then as well.
Instead of emphasising drought tolerant Mediterranean plants, I'd try to think of normal garden plants that will tolerate dry conditions but also have a sporting chance of coming through the winter. In our garden shrubby Potentilla, holly, box, Weigela, Philadelphus, Berberis, crab apples, and yew are still looking OK after two vile winters and drought, to name a few off the top of my head. (It is not for nothing that several on this list are so beloved of municipal and commercial landscapers, which helps explain why some gardeners don't like them). Some traditional cottage garden style herbaceous plants have held up too without irrigation, including Catananche, Aconitum, Hemerocallis, some Campanula, Knautia macedonica and peonies.
Whatever you plant, you shouldn't plant it now, if you are worried about drought. Actually, I'm glad Charlie didn't say that, given my line of work, though she did say that maybe we should think about returning to the tradition of autumn planting (remember the winter, though). I am still planting now, but I'm not anticipating a hosepipe ban, and am fanatical (and fit) enough to carry cans around if needs be. Even drought tolerant species need to get their roots down before the magic starts to work, so planting them now and expecting them to survive the drought without further watering is an almost cast-iron guaranteed method of getting some dead plants fairly quickly.
Apart from fixing their leaks, Thames Water and their mouthpiece need to be looking further ahead, on a larger scale. How about building all new homes with large underground storage tanks to keep winter rain for summer use? I'd love a really big tank, but the cost of retro-fitting one would be prohibitive. And why don't all new homes have built-in, efficient, hygienic methods of diverting grey water for further use, whether in the garden or for flushing loos? Messing around with hosepipes out of the window, and pumps, and syphons, is messy, inefficient and ridiculous. A proper system should be designed and plumbed in when the house is built.
Looking on the bright side, media pundits (albeit slightly faded ones) telling us to plant drought tolerant Mediterranean shrubs ought to be a powerful hex to end the drought. By late May we could all be shivering under leaden skies, like last year.
Showing posts with label drought. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drought. Show all posts
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Sunday, 1 April 2012
getting on with stuff
Gardening is a bit like holidays, in that the disasters are much more interesting to write about than the days when everything goes smoothly and you trundle around, having a nice time. Today was a beautiful sunny day, not too hot, not too cold, and in this Goldilocks world I dug, weeded, mulched, planted and picked up two sorts of stones, the rough and the smooth, without anything exciting happening at all.
White flowers are about to burst upon the garden. After the white of snowdrops it all goes yellow, with daffodils and primroses, and the chrome yellow flowers of Euphorbia, and blue and mauve, with hyacinths and grape hyacinths, violets and pasque flowers. Now the Osmanthus delavayi on the corner of the island bed in the back garden is just opening, and the buds on 'Taihaku' and the wild gean are, as the suppliers' weekly lists put it, showing colour. The trees are studded with knobs of white, and very soon will burst forth in a cloud of whiteness.
Three buzzards circled over the next door field for a long time. They often seem to occur in threes, and I wonder what the group consists of. Rival males and one female? Last year's chick still flocking with its parents? I need to find somebody who understands the habits of birds and ask them.
The Systems Administrator was all set to get the next coat of gloss paint on the section of barge board the scaffolding currently reaches, as the thermometer had hit the vital level of 15 degrees, but discovered that the new and unopened tin of paint bought last autumn and never used as the weather got too bad for painting, was not white, but Parisian Pink. The SA must have picked up the wrong tin from the DIY store shelf, and six months on, with no receipt, there's not a lot we can do with it except think of something we would like to paint pink. It looks rather a nice shade of pink, like a squashed strawberry, and I fancy a little pink summerhouse, but there isn't anywhere to put one.
We are starting to be able to tell the new little hens apart. One has yellow legs, which are very distinctive, and another has a row of dark feathers down the outside of her legs. One of the last two is lighter coloured than the other, so that we can tell them apart when they're side by side, but not necessarily identify either one in isolation.
I ran the hose on recently planted trees and renovated areas of the border while working. Digging holes to plant out hyacinths that have finished flowering in their pots, as I suspected the soil 25 centimetres below the surface is dust dry. A rose in the back garden, that was struggling last year, has suddenly died off in great sections. It is supposed to rain hard on Tuesday, which will force me to clean the house and get to grips with the beekeepers' treasury stuff, both of which urgently need doing, but quite apart from that we desperately need the rain.
About the only exciting thing to happen in the past 24 hours was that the big tabby set his ruff on fire. He has never done this before, and I thought he was more sensible than that around candles, but now know differently. He decided to march straight across the dining table just as I was snuffing the candles out after dinner, and suddenly I had a flaming cat on the loose. I managed to extinguish him before it could burn his skin, or he could set fire to the curtains, but the smell of burning fur was terrible. I don't think he understood in the least what had happened, so was bewildered that I'd suddenly hit him with the candle snuffer, and gave me a wide berth for the next couple of hours. Excitement is frequently greatly over-rated.
White flowers are about to burst upon the garden. After the white of snowdrops it all goes yellow, with daffodils and primroses, and the chrome yellow flowers of Euphorbia, and blue and mauve, with hyacinths and grape hyacinths, violets and pasque flowers. Now the Osmanthus delavayi on the corner of the island bed in the back garden is just opening, and the buds on 'Taihaku' and the wild gean are, as the suppliers' weekly lists put it, showing colour. The trees are studded with knobs of white, and very soon will burst forth in a cloud of whiteness.
Three buzzards circled over the next door field for a long time. They often seem to occur in threes, and I wonder what the group consists of. Rival males and one female? Last year's chick still flocking with its parents? I need to find somebody who understands the habits of birds and ask them.
The Systems Administrator was all set to get the next coat of gloss paint on the section of barge board the scaffolding currently reaches, as the thermometer had hit the vital level of 15 degrees, but discovered that the new and unopened tin of paint bought last autumn and never used as the weather got too bad for painting, was not white, but Parisian Pink. The SA must have picked up the wrong tin from the DIY store shelf, and six months on, with no receipt, there's not a lot we can do with it except think of something we would like to paint pink. It looks rather a nice shade of pink, like a squashed strawberry, and I fancy a little pink summerhouse, but there isn't anywhere to put one.
We are starting to be able to tell the new little hens apart. One has yellow legs, which are very distinctive, and another has a row of dark feathers down the outside of her legs. One of the last two is lighter coloured than the other, so that we can tell them apart when they're side by side, but not necessarily identify either one in isolation.
I ran the hose on recently planted trees and renovated areas of the border while working. Digging holes to plant out hyacinths that have finished flowering in their pots, as I suspected the soil 25 centimetres below the surface is dust dry. A rose in the back garden, that was struggling last year, has suddenly died off in great sections. It is supposed to rain hard on Tuesday, which will force me to clean the house and get to grips with the beekeepers' treasury stuff, both of which urgently need doing, but quite apart from that we desperately need the rain.
About the only exciting thing to happen in the past 24 hours was that the big tabby set his ruff on fire. He has never done this before, and I thought he was more sensible than that around candles, but now know differently. He decided to march straight across the dining table just as I was snuffing the candles out after dinner, and suddenly I had a flaming cat on the loose. I managed to extinguish him before it could burn his skin, or he could set fire to the curtains, but the smell of burning fur was terrible. I don't think he understood in the least what had happened, so was bewildered that I'd suddenly hit him with the candle snuffer, and gave me a wide berth for the next couple of hours. Excitement is frequently greatly over-rated.
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
uneasy thoughts of drought
The garden is beginning to look ominously dry. I did the watering by hand using cans, including the recently planted things in the end of the wood, and the area down the side of the back garden where I removed the Rosa rugosa 'Alba', and I remembered to go and water the 'Quaker's Bonnet' primula in the ditch bed, that I am now meant to call 'Lilacina Plena'. It took a good hour, and that was without soaking the conservatory. Tomorrow I am going to have to investigate the hoses, and find the spray end fittings that I removed last autumn so that they wouldn't freeze and split, and see if they still work, or at least can be persuaded to work, or if I'm going to have to buy new ones. They do have a tendency to stick and choke up with age and use.
I'm going to have to start watering all the trees and shrubs planted last year. They won't yet have large or well-established enough root systems to cope with this weather, and spring, when the new leaves are bursting, is a key time for them. Likewise all herbaceous plants set out last autumn, the newly purchased, those raised from seed, and existing garden stock that was lifted and divided. I renovated one end of a big border, and had to replace a large number of winter casualties, so it's going to be a lot of watering. I don't use sprinklers, which apply water over too wide and indiscriminate an area, and on plants' foliage rather than their roots. Instead I'll go around with the hose, plant by plant, and spray every root zone in turn, counting to thirty, fifty or sixty for each one, depending on how large the plant is and how dry it looks. I'll do one bed one evening, another the next, and so work my way round the garden over the course of a week.
At one level it's not an unpleasant task. It gives me a chance to stand looking at the garden, appreciating individual plants at close quarters, and picking up on aspects of planting that could do with improvement. I can listen to the radio while I'm doing it, and the intensive watering regime only lasts while the weather's warm. If we go back to an apparently endless cycle of low pressure systems sweeping in from the west, like we have in recent summers, then the need for emergency watering will fall right back. It does take time, though. The normal decorative pots plus my propagation efforts in the greenhouse can take an hour by themselves in the summer, so add in extra for the borders, and it can be getting on for a quarter of the gardening day just spent watering. It's time spent that will keep plants alive (on which I have expended much effort and expense getting them in the ground) but it doesn't progress the garden. Weeding, mulching, dead-heading, pruning, planting, laying paths, installing ornaments, bringing out pots for the summer, all of these make the garden better groomed or furnished than it was before. Spending hours watering it just to keep it from dying doesn't.
The damage done by those two cold nights in February continues to reveal itself. The regrowth on the Olearia macrodonta and the various Callistemon has been clobbered, and I'm not sure they will have the energy to regenerate again. The top parts of last year's Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue' have defoliated, and hard pruning will probably be required. Every leaf on the Michelia doltsopa is brown and shrivelled, which is galling when the one tucked into the corner between two walls at work is fine. Temperatures there went down to minus 13 in the open, showing what protection a wall can afford, and how narrow the margin is between receiving a clobbering and escaping unscathed. Arbutus x andrachnoides has lost most of its leaves, and although I don't think the whole tree is dead, there are quite a few dead twigs in the crown, which are going to spoil the look of it even when (or if) it leafs up again.
The spring weather is very beautiful, and the flowers of spring. Primroses, magnolias, little yellow Iris bucharica, pasque flowers, cherries, Muscari, over fifteen years' worth of hyacinths in a myriad of colours (though not pink) planted into the borders after doing duty in pots, species tulips, daffodils, violets, lesser periwinkle. The grass is still fresh and green, the leaf buds are bursting by the day, and the birds are singing from every bush and tree. Most of the time I enjoy it while it lasts. But the garden is beginning to look ominously dry. In years when by July things are flagging I can console myself that I only have to keep them going for another month or six weeks, and then it will cool down, even if there isn't much rain in September. Now it's still only March. Keeping things going for six months could be very hard work.
I'm going to have to start watering all the trees and shrubs planted last year. They won't yet have large or well-established enough root systems to cope with this weather, and spring, when the new leaves are bursting, is a key time for them. Likewise all herbaceous plants set out last autumn, the newly purchased, those raised from seed, and existing garden stock that was lifted and divided. I renovated one end of a big border, and had to replace a large number of winter casualties, so it's going to be a lot of watering. I don't use sprinklers, which apply water over too wide and indiscriminate an area, and on plants' foliage rather than their roots. Instead I'll go around with the hose, plant by plant, and spray every root zone in turn, counting to thirty, fifty or sixty for each one, depending on how large the plant is and how dry it looks. I'll do one bed one evening, another the next, and so work my way round the garden over the course of a week.
At one level it's not an unpleasant task. It gives me a chance to stand looking at the garden, appreciating individual plants at close quarters, and picking up on aspects of planting that could do with improvement. I can listen to the radio while I'm doing it, and the intensive watering regime only lasts while the weather's warm. If we go back to an apparently endless cycle of low pressure systems sweeping in from the west, like we have in recent summers, then the need for emergency watering will fall right back. It does take time, though. The normal decorative pots plus my propagation efforts in the greenhouse can take an hour by themselves in the summer, so add in extra for the borders, and it can be getting on for a quarter of the gardening day just spent watering. It's time spent that will keep plants alive (on which I have expended much effort and expense getting them in the ground) but it doesn't progress the garden. Weeding, mulching, dead-heading, pruning, planting, laying paths, installing ornaments, bringing out pots for the summer, all of these make the garden better groomed or furnished than it was before. Spending hours watering it just to keep it from dying doesn't.
The damage done by those two cold nights in February continues to reveal itself. The regrowth on the Olearia macrodonta and the various Callistemon has been clobbered, and I'm not sure they will have the energy to regenerate again. The top parts of last year's Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue' have defoliated, and hard pruning will probably be required. Every leaf on the Michelia doltsopa is brown and shrivelled, which is galling when the one tucked into the corner between two walls at work is fine. Temperatures there went down to minus 13 in the open, showing what protection a wall can afford, and how narrow the margin is between receiving a clobbering and escaping unscathed. Arbutus x andrachnoides has lost most of its leaves, and although I don't think the whole tree is dead, there are quite a few dead twigs in the crown, which are going to spoil the look of it even when (or if) it leafs up again.
The spring weather is very beautiful, and the flowers of spring. Primroses, magnolias, little yellow Iris bucharica, pasque flowers, cherries, Muscari, over fifteen years' worth of hyacinths in a myriad of colours (though not pink) planted into the borders after doing duty in pots, species tulips, daffodils, violets, lesser periwinkle. The grass is still fresh and green, the leaf buds are bursting by the day, and the birds are singing from every bush and tree. Most of the time I enjoy it while it lasts. But the garden is beginning to look ominously dry. In years when by July things are flagging I can console myself that I only have to keep them going for another month or six weeks, and then it will cool down, even if there isn't much rain in September. Now it's still only March. Keeping things going for six months could be very hard work.
Monday, 12 March 2012
gearing up for the rush
The labels weren't done for the Italian plants, so they stayed where they were on the grass at the back of the plant centre. Most of them are in quite hefty pots, so I didn't entirely mind not getting involved in moving them. Instead I priced up and put out for sale the things we got this morning out of the back of the weekly travelling van, which were much smaller.
I really like being allowed to go and have a look in the van. It visits garden centres between late winter and autumn, and is fitted with racks which are always stuffed with whatever is looking pretty at that moment, plus a slightly random selection of shrubs and climbers that can be useful for plugging gaps when we've run out of something. A few weeks ago it brought pots of snowdrops, miniature iris and winter aconites in bloom. Now it's got primroses and pulmonaria. It is such fun poking around the shelves, to see what they've got, like a visit to Santa's grotto for plantaholic grownups. We took strawberry plants, and little pots of garlic for those customers who neglected to plant their cloves back in the new year, and sweet pea seedlings, bleeding heart, white violets and lungwort. The manager passed on the trays of mixed buddleias because he had some coming in anyway. Then, after nearly nine years of working there, somebody finally showed me how to change the reel of labels in the price gun.
The tunnel over The Other Side is still crammed with plants that ought to be out for sale in the plant centre, and the manager was given the services of both gardeners for the day to help label them and tidy them up ready for sale. It's a busy time of year in the garden too, and I don't think the young gardener was best pleased to lose an entire day from what he regards as his real job, in order to spend it stapling labels on to plant pots. I was rather surprised not to be sent over to join them, but we were just busy enough that we needed two people in the plant centre all the time. The phones kept ringing with the usual mixture of people with sensible and straightforward questions, irritating callers, and the plain weird.
It took a long time for the penny to drop, after I'd explained several times to one woman that we had medium sized packets of micorrhizae in stock at £5.99, but not large ones, and that the large ones had been £10.99 but I couldn't remember exactly how many grammes the large ones held, that what she was after was for me to offer to sell her two medium sized packets for the price of one big one. Look, lady, if you want two medium sized packets then buy two packets. I partly blame lazy newspaper columnists for encouraging this vogue for people spending relatively small amounts of money to start demanding discounts from hourly paid staff, or worse still waste everybody's time by going round and round the houses instead of making it clear that they are asking for a discount. They don't go into Tesco and start asking the checkout staff if they can have two medium sized packets of steak for the price on one big one.
Another caller was completely unable to hear me. I kept repeating who we were more and more loudly and slowly, until I had to go out of the shop because it was too disruptive, and she kept repeating that she couldn't hear me, she couldn't hear me at all, while not saying who it was she wanted to speak to, or asking who she had run. This alternated between long silences and truly disgusting coughing. Eventually I hung up. If she was a genuine caller she needed to try again and hope for a better line, but she didn't.
On the bright side, some of the regular customers were back, including a tall and perpetually amiable garden designer who gets a very generous discount despite never spending much, mainly because he is so cheerful and rather good looking. He is also gay, so the boss needn't worry about the owner's generosity in the matter of discounts. And I steeled my nerves to ring people about plants they had ordered a very long time ago, and had taken that long to come into stock. A couple of people still wanted them, one had bought elsewhere but was awfully apologetic about letting us down, and the others were on answering machine. I should really have done yesterday afternoon, but you need to be feeling well rested and quite brazen to summon the nerve to call people to tell them that if they still want that rose they ordered a year ago, it is finally here.
Somebody rang to enquire whether we had his Berberis georgii yet. It would be very handy if only we could find some somewhere, as by now the list of customers looking for it runs to half an A4 page of an Excel spreadsheet. It had a glowing write-up in the Telegraph, ages ago, and today's would-be purchaser told me that there is a very fine one at Hyde Hall, which he and presumably some other customers had seen, but we can't find plants anywhere.
The cloud never lifted, despite optimistic weather forecasts first thing, and by mid afternoon it had got distinctly cold. I think it was a fog off the sea, as one customer told me that her son in London reported bright sunshine there. Driving home I heard there were hosepipe bans across swathes of southern and eastern England, as I feared there would be. That will not be good for trade. Looking when I got home at the map on the BBC website of exactly where the restrictions were, I saw that the Tendring Peninsular was still a little unrestricted island in a sea of bans, so I'm still OK in the garden at home. Passing the end of our wood I saw that the neighbours have had a delivery of some sort of compost dumped on our land. They have their septic tank on it, which happened before we bought the house, and we agreed that they could use the track to their tank for overflow parking. More recently they, or somebody, has been using the edge of the track as a compost heap. They denied all knowledge of this, but subsequently some branches of Magnolia grandiflora appeared in the heap at the same time that one vanished from their garden, so I don't think they were telling me the truth. Now they, or somebody, is using it to store bulk deliveries of soil improver. We are going to have to get on and fence the land off to stop the compost heap, and it would serve them right if we put a gate across the track at the same time, padlocked it, and didn't give them a key.
I really like being allowed to go and have a look in the van. It visits garden centres between late winter and autumn, and is fitted with racks which are always stuffed with whatever is looking pretty at that moment, plus a slightly random selection of shrubs and climbers that can be useful for plugging gaps when we've run out of something. A few weeks ago it brought pots of snowdrops, miniature iris and winter aconites in bloom. Now it's got primroses and pulmonaria. It is such fun poking around the shelves, to see what they've got, like a visit to Santa's grotto for plantaholic grownups. We took strawberry plants, and little pots of garlic for those customers who neglected to plant their cloves back in the new year, and sweet pea seedlings, bleeding heart, white violets and lungwort. The manager passed on the trays of mixed buddleias because he had some coming in anyway. Then, after nearly nine years of working there, somebody finally showed me how to change the reel of labels in the price gun.
The tunnel over The Other Side is still crammed with plants that ought to be out for sale in the plant centre, and the manager was given the services of both gardeners for the day to help label them and tidy them up ready for sale. It's a busy time of year in the garden too, and I don't think the young gardener was best pleased to lose an entire day from what he regards as his real job, in order to spend it stapling labels on to plant pots. I was rather surprised not to be sent over to join them, but we were just busy enough that we needed two people in the plant centre all the time. The phones kept ringing with the usual mixture of people with sensible and straightforward questions, irritating callers, and the plain weird.
It took a long time for the penny to drop, after I'd explained several times to one woman that we had medium sized packets of micorrhizae in stock at £5.99, but not large ones, and that the large ones had been £10.99 but I couldn't remember exactly how many grammes the large ones held, that what she was after was for me to offer to sell her two medium sized packets for the price of one big one. Look, lady, if you want two medium sized packets then buy two packets. I partly blame lazy newspaper columnists for encouraging this vogue for people spending relatively small amounts of money to start demanding discounts from hourly paid staff, or worse still waste everybody's time by going round and round the houses instead of making it clear that they are asking for a discount. They don't go into Tesco and start asking the checkout staff if they can have two medium sized packets of steak for the price on one big one.
Another caller was completely unable to hear me. I kept repeating who we were more and more loudly and slowly, until I had to go out of the shop because it was too disruptive, and she kept repeating that she couldn't hear me, she couldn't hear me at all, while not saying who it was she wanted to speak to, or asking who she had run. This alternated between long silences and truly disgusting coughing. Eventually I hung up. If she was a genuine caller she needed to try again and hope for a better line, but she didn't.
On the bright side, some of the regular customers were back, including a tall and perpetually amiable garden designer who gets a very generous discount despite never spending much, mainly because he is so cheerful and rather good looking. He is also gay, so the boss needn't worry about the owner's generosity in the matter of discounts. And I steeled my nerves to ring people about plants they had ordered a very long time ago, and had taken that long to come into stock. A couple of people still wanted them, one had bought elsewhere but was awfully apologetic about letting us down, and the others were on answering machine. I should really have done yesterday afternoon, but you need to be feeling well rested and quite brazen to summon the nerve to call people to tell them that if they still want that rose they ordered a year ago, it is finally here.
Somebody rang to enquire whether we had his Berberis georgii yet. It would be very handy if only we could find some somewhere, as by now the list of customers looking for it runs to half an A4 page of an Excel spreadsheet. It had a glowing write-up in the Telegraph, ages ago, and today's would-be purchaser told me that there is a very fine one at Hyde Hall, which he and presumably some other customers had seen, but we can't find plants anywhere.
The cloud never lifted, despite optimistic weather forecasts first thing, and by mid afternoon it had got distinctly cold. I think it was a fog off the sea, as one customer told me that her son in London reported bright sunshine there. Driving home I heard there were hosepipe bans across swathes of southern and eastern England, as I feared there would be. That will not be good for trade. Looking when I got home at the map on the BBC website of exactly where the restrictions were, I saw that the Tendring Peninsular was still a little unrestricted island in a sea of bans, so I'm still OK in the garden at home. Passing the end of our wood I saw that the neighbours have had a delivery of some sort of compost dumped on our land. They have their septic tank on it, which happened before we bought the house, and we agreed that they could use the track to their tank for overflow parking. More recently they, or somebody, has been using the edge of the track as a compost heap. They denied all knowledge of this, but subsequently some branches of Magnolia grandiflora appeared in the heap at the same time that one vanished from their garden, so I don't think they were telling me the truth. Now they, or somebody, is using it to store bulk deliveries of soil improver. We are going to have to get on and fence the land off to stop the compost heap, and it would serve them right if we put a gate across the track at the same time, padlocked it, and didn't give them a key.
Saturday, 19 November 2011
nice day, not many customers
It was a very beautiful morning, with a streaky pink sky behind the lime avenue on the lettuce farm, and layers of mist laying over the fields. I was rather surprised, on getting into the car and flicking the wipers to clear the condensation from the windscreen, to discover that it was not moisture on the inside of the car but ice on the outside, and that the wipers would not flick because they were frozen down.
The farming programme on R4 was talking about the severity of the drought, from Shopshire across to East Anglia. It's true. Recent rain has moistened the top few centimetres of soil, but dig down and it's still dry. If we don't get some proper rain at some point over the winter then next year is going to be very difficult, for farmers and gardeners. By the time I reached the Stour valley the radio had moved on to the Today programme, and a politician was explaining how within the next two weeks the European economy could go over the cliff. I suppose it could. The idea seemed to exist in a different world to the one in which clear morning sunlight shone on a high tide in Constable country, and beyond the river reeds and pastures stretched away.
There had been a delivery of shrubs from France since the last time I was at work. The boss has bought plants from this French supplier for all the time I've worked there, including lilacs, some varieties of Philadelphus, and hydrangeas. We don't take many deliveries from them each year, and it did seem as though we had a year's supply of Philadephus 'Buckley's Quill' sitting on the grass at the back of the plant centre. There were some fine chunky Magnolia 'Elizabeth', which is a good yellow flowered variety (though maybe not the best), but alas, the customers we had waiting for them had all either found plants elsewhere in the meantime, or weren't prepared to pay the price of such large specimens. Over sixty pounds for a magnolia is painful.
The wood turner who lives in the village, and makes wooden pepper mills and fruit that we sell in the shop, using wood from the estate, called in to see what extra stock we needed. As we chatted I discovered one of the drawbacks of living in a conservation area with no street lights (on account of the light pollution). The pavement in his street was dug up for work on the gas main, and going out after dark he fell over the barriers around the hole, which were not lit. The gas company say it is not their fault there were no lights, as the council wouldn't permit them. The wood turner is taking Warfarin and so vulnerable to internal injuries such as you get from walking straight into a metal barrier, so he's not at all happy. He was even less happy when his doctor told him that if he developed a headache he should call an ambulance immediately, in case it was an aneurysm. I thought that if the council had really forbidden any lights, even small ones, for an a obstruction on the pavement, then that was a pretty stupid decision. Though I suppose if you know you are at risk from knocks and bumps and you live in a village with no street lights, you might do well to invest in a decent torch.
The wood turner's misfortune reminded me again how quickly life can turn. One minute things are fine, the next, not. A case in point being my hand, still swollen to a shiny potato, though the tide of red seems to have peaked at the first joint of my middle finger and half way down the back of my hand, and is now receding. There has to be something in there, and I keep hoping it will work its way out. I have my eye on a pair of leather pruning gloves, with suede gauntlet cuffs to protect the wrists, which I'd better get and wear when working around roses and other plants with substantial thorns. I was wearing gloves when the accident happened, and trying to be careful, but obviously the gloves were not up to the job and I was not careful enough. I must remember to swap them for normal gloves for fingertip weeding, since expensive leather wears through at the fingertips every bit as quickly as normal rubberised fabric.
Trade seemed quiet, but I learned on getting home that the A14 was horribly blocked due to resurfacing work following an earlier accident, with enormously long tailbacks. If you had been thinking of paying us a visit, and then heard that the A14 was one gigantic traffic jam, you would probably have altered your plans and decided to do something else this afternoon. But who knows? Maybe it is the drought, or the prospect of Europe's economy going off a cliff.
The farming programme on R4 was talking about the severity of the drought, from Shopshire across to East Anglia. It's true. Recent rain has moistened the top few centimetres of soil, but dig down and it's still dry. If we don't get some proper rain at some point over the winter then next year is going to be very difficult, for farmers and gardeners. By the time I reached the Stour valley the radio had moved on to the Today programme, and a politician was explaining how within the next two weeks the European economy could go over the cliff. I suppose it could. The idea seemed to exist in a different world to the one in which clear morning sunlight shone on a high tide in Constable country, and beyond the river reeds and pastures stretched away.
There had been a delivery of shrubs from France since the last time I was at work. The boss has bought plants from this French supplier for all the time I've worked there, including lilacs, some varieties of Philadelphus, and hydrangeas. We don't take many deliveries from them each year, and it did seem as though we had a year's supply of Philadephus 'Buckley's Quill' sitting on the grass at the back of the plant centre. There were some fine chunky Magnolia 'Elizabeth', which is a good yellow flowered variety (though maybe not the best), but alas, the customers we had waiting for them had all either found plants elsewhere in the meantime, or weren't prepared to pay the price of such large specimens. Over sixty pounds for a magnolia is painful.
The wood turner who lives in the village, and makes wooden pepper mills and fruit that we sell in the shop, using wood from the estate, called in to see what extra stock we needed. As we chatted I discovered one of the drawbacks of living in a conservation area with no street lights (on account of the light pollution). The pavement in his street was dug up for work on the gas main, and going out after dark he fell over the barriers around the hole, which were not lit. The gas company say it is not their fault there were no lights, as the council wouldn't permit them. The wood turner is taking Warfarin and so vulnerable to internal injuries such as you get from walking straight into a metal barrier, so he's not at all happy. He was even less happy when his doctor told him that if he developed a headache he should call an ambulance immediately, in case it was an aneurysm. I thought that if the council had really forbidden any lights, even small ones, for an a obstruction on the pavement, then that was a pretty stupid decision. Though I suppose if you know you are at risk from knocks and bumps and you live in a village with no street lights, you might do well to invest in a decent torch.
The wood turner's misfortune reminded me again how quickly life can turn. One minute things are fine, the next, not. A case in point being my hand, still swollen to a shiny potato, though the tide of red seems to have peaked at the first joint of my middle finger and half way down the back of my hand, and is now receding. There has to be something in there, and I keep hoping it will work its way out. I have my eye on a pair of leather pruning gloves, with suede gauntlet cuffs to protect the wrists, which I'd better get and wear when working around roses and other plants with substantial thorns. I was wearing gloves when the accident happened, and trying to be careful, but obviously the gloves were not up to the job and I was not careful enough. I must remember to swap them for normal gloves for fingertip weeding, since expensive leather wears through at the fingertips every bit as quickly as normal rubberised fabric.
Trade seemed quiet, but I learned on getting home that the A14 was horribly blocked due to resurfacing work following an earlier accident, with enormously long tailbacks. If you had been thinking of paying us a visit, and then heard that the A14 was one gigantic traffic jam, you would probably have altered your plans and decided to do something else this afternoon. But who knows? Maybe it is the drought, or the prospect of Europe's economy going off a cliff.
Friday, 3 June 2011
a lucky miss and obsession with watering
I'm terribly grateful that I decided not to grow any vegetables or anything from seed this year. It wasn't that I had any prescient foresight of how bad the drought was going to be, just that as I looked at the mess the garden was in after two hard winters I thought that something was going to have to give, while I caught up with myself, and veg and seedlings are both time-consuming. It's the first time for over twenty years that I haven't had pots and trays of new young plants on the go. I love raising plants from seed, and I'd even put in a modest order to Chiltern Seeds, but as my normal seed sowing date in the second week of February slipped by and it got to March, I realised that there simply wasn't going to be time this year. At that point I made the policy decision to give the veg a miss too. I like homegrown vegetables, especially the things you can't easily buy like small absolutely fresh broad beans, and the Systems Administrator will miss not having a large pile of beetroot to pickle, but the sowing and weeding and watering do take ages. Surrounded by dead shrubs to remove and blank stretches of borders, rapidly filling up with weeds, I thought that reclaiming the ornamental planting was more urgent. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, watering the veg would have been a nightmare, and the seedlings would probably have cooked at some point in the greenhouse despite my best efforts with shading paint.
Watering is becoming the all-consuming task, and I plan each day's work on the basis of what needs watering most badly and positioning myself in that part of the garden. Today I largely dispensed with actual gardening, and spent the time mostly watering, standing over a needy plant, hose in hand, counting to sixty, then on to the next one. It is no longer a question of whether the cherry tree will drop its fruit (although, amazingly, they are still on the branches), but which plants look as though they are actually going to die without water. The Zelkova carpinifolia has got dieback on the south facing side (which could of course be Dutch Elm Disease, but I think is drought, as it isn't displaying the characteristic shepherd's crook curling at the twig tips). I ran the hose for twenty minutes on a Malus floribunda, which I would normally never consider watering, but its leaves, small, incurved and the wrong shade of green, were signalling acute distress.
We have arrived at an efficient system of hoses over the years. The outside tap leads to a four-way distributor, each outlet with its own valve which can be open or shut. One hose, with spray nozzle permanently attached, leads down to the conservatory, where it lives coiled in a largish flower pot when not in use. The hose is just long enough to reach everything in pots in the back garden, as well as into the conservatory. A second hose, again with permanent spray attachment, is long enough to reach to the extremities of both the front and back gardens, and is kept flaked down by the dustbins when not in use. (Since at the moment it is in almost constant use it is currently in the front garden by the chicken house). A third hose leads to a second tap up by the vegetables, where there is another long hose that will reach to all the fruit, the veg patch, and up the meadow by the wood. We've got spare lengths of hose so this can be extended if needs be to reach to the very far end of the meadow. The fourth hose is short, and is used to fill cans at the tap. There used to be a fifth hose that was led permanently to my greenhouse, but that split where it used to get run over, and at the moment I'm using the all-purpose long hose. I might replace it, on the other hand it was a bore with five hoses and four spaces to plug them in, always having to keep switching them over.
Labelling the individual hoses is the least satisfactory part. I wrote descriptions on plastic plant labels and tied them to the hoses with wire, but they kept sliding down out of sight and the labels broke. Recently I thought I was being very efficient tying tape round them, and writing on the tape with marker pen, but the pen smeared and wore off. Now each is permanently plumbed in I simply remember which location feeds which hose.
We did find ourselves forgetting to turn the outside tap off after use, which could be wasteful of water if a fitting came loose, so I made a token, consisting of a short length of hose on wire, designed to be hung from the front door handle when the tap is in use. The theory is that we can't go back into the house without being reminded that the tap is still on. I took the idea from the railway safety system for ensuring that only one train was on a given length of track, and was rather pleased with it. It is a good system, as long as we bother to use the token.
Watering is becoming the all-consuming task, and I plan each day's work on the basis of what needs watering most badly and positioning myself in that part of the garden. Today I largely dispensed with actual gardening, and spent the time mostly watering, standing over a needy plant, hose in hand, counting to sixty, then on to the next one. It is no longer a question of whether the cherry tree will drop its fruit (although, amazingly, they are still on the branches), but which plants look as though they are actually going to die without water. The Zelkova carpinifolia has got dieback on the south facing side (which could of course be Dutch Elm Disease, but I think is drought, as it isn't displaying the characteristic shepherd's crook curling at the twig tips). I ran the hose for twenty minutes on a Malus floribunda, which I would normally never consider watering, but its leaves, small, incurved and the wrong shade of green, were signalling acute distress.
We have arrived at an efficient system of hoses over the years. The outside tap leads to a four-way distributor, each outlet with its own valve which can be open or shut. One hose, with spray nozzle permanently attached, leads down to the conservatory, where it lives coiled in a largish flower pot when not in use. The hose is just long enough to reach everything in pots in the back garden, as well as into the conservatory. A second hose, again with permanent spray attachment, is long enough to reach to the extremities of both the front and back gardens, and is kept flaked down by the dustbins when not in use. (Since at the moment it is in almost constant use it is currently in the front garden by the chicken house). A third hose leads to a second tap up by the vegetables, where there is another long hose that will reach to all the fruit, the veg patch, and up the meadow by the wood. We've got spare lengths of hose so this can be extended if needs be to reach to the very far end of the meadow. The fourth hose is short, and is used to fill cans at the tap. There used to be a fifth hose that was led permanently to my greenhouse, but that split where it used to get run over, and at the moment I'm using the all-purpose long hose. I might replace it, on the other hand it was a bore with five hoses and four spaces to plug them in, always having to keep switching them over.
Labelling the individual hoses is the least satisfactory part. I wrote descriptions on plastic plant labels and tied them to the hoses with wire, but they kept sliding down out of sight and the labels broke. Recently I thought I was being very efficient tying tape round them, and writing on the tape with marker pen, but the pen smeared and wore off. Now each is permanently plumbed in I simply remember which location feeds which hose.
We did find ourselves forgetting to turn the outside tap off after use, which could be wasteful of water if a fitting came loose, so I made a token, consisting of a short length of hose on wire, designed to be hung from the front door handle when the tap is in use. The theory is that we can't go back into the house without being reminded that the tap is still on. I took the idea from the railway safety system for ensuring that only one train was on a given length of track, and was rather pleased with it. It is a good system, as long as we bother to use the token.
Friday, 27 May 2011
villanelle
As I was dozing off on Wednesday night, a couple of lines of verse drifted into my head. They sounded as though they ought to be from something formal, and I promised them I would think about it in the morning if they would just let me go to sleep. I decided yesterday that they came from a villanelle, though I had to look up the exact structure on Wikipedia. The rules about the number of lines, repetitions and rhyme scheme are strict.
I feel a bit cheeky rhyming 'west' with 'Inverness', but it's only doggerel. I think I detect the Kaiser Chiefs as an influence in there, as well as The Bard.
In fact we had 5mm of rain yesterday afternoon, and have had another 3mm today, but still need much, much more. I was talking to my hairdresser, who has a horse. A bale of hay lasts a horse 2-3 days. Two years ago it cost around £2.50, and now they are up to £6 a bale. There isn't really anything else you can give a horse to eat instead.
From Aberdeen to Inverness
The rain it raineth every day.
It rains on Essex less and less.
Sweet rains the Scottish crops caress,
The northern flowers are bright and gay,
From Aberdeen to Inverness.
Parched earth gapes, that no raindrops bless,
The leaves are sere, the blooms decay,
It rains on Essex less and less.
The churchyard is a squelching mess,
The bride for sun in vain doth pray,
From Aberdeen to Inverness.
Dry winds double our distress,
As flower borders turn to hay,
It rains on Essex less and less.
It has rained to north and west,
From tip of Cornwall to the Tay,
From Aberdeen to Inverness.
It rains on Essex less and less.
It rains on Essex less and less.
I feel a bit cheeky rhyming 'west' with 'Inverness', but it's only doggerel. I think I detect the Kaiser Chiefs as an influence in there, as well as The Bard.
In fact we had 5mm of rain yesterday afternoon, and have had another 3mm today, but still need much, much more. I was talking to my hairdresser, who has a horse. A bale of hay lasts a horse 2-3 days. Two years ago it cost around £2.50, and now they are up to £6 a bale. There isn't really anything else you can give a horse to eat instead.
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
first (and maybe only) honey of the year
The Porter bee escape worked. There were a few bees left in the super with the honey, and I was able to brush them gently off the combs and remove the super. If there are quite a lot of bees left then I remove each comb individually, shake it briskly to get the bees off, and move it to a second super in a wheelbarrow parked a little way away. I had taken a spare box with me this time, just in case, but didn't need it. Three stray bees ended up in the kitchen. I knew there were bees somewhere in the super from the sound, and once disturbed they fly to the window, where it is easy to place a glass over them and slide an envelope over the mouth of the tumbler to trap them. Released outside they fly off immediately.
The honey was ready, no drips at all, and the bees were just beginning to cap it. I got a full food bucket full, and a bit left over. I don't know what weight that is, as I can't remember the capacity of the bucket. It took almost exactly half an hour to spin the frames, the duration of R4's Saving Species, and longer than that to filter the honey to get the stray bits of wax out, and wash the extractor afterwards. I washed the kitchen floor before I started, and all in all there wasn't much of the morning left over by the time I'd finished. Home honey production is definitely a hobby and not a commercial proposition. My extractor holds two frames at a time. I spin them counting to sixty rotations, then sixty turning the handle the opposite way, then reverse the frames so the opposite side is facing outwards, and repeat the process. People write about the sound of the patter of honey on the sides of the extractor, but with mine all I can hear is the mechanism squeaking. It is helpful to spin frames of equal weight together to balance the thing, otherwise it judders and tries to walk across the floor. The honey was delicious, the colour of pale straw. I'll leave it for a day, to allow any fine debris to float to the surface, then use a trick taught to me by a friend, which is to lay clingfilm across the surface and remove it again. I lose a little honey that way, but it collects any bits. And that's it. I won't heat it, unless I have to very slightly to soften it if it sets in the bucket before I've put all of it in jars. Honey should be kept in an air-tight container for medium term storage, to keep atmospheric moisture out, and a big plastic food bucket with snap lid is better than keeping it in individual jars, with their screw lids and higher surface to volume ratio. I've learnt not to bottle more than I expect to give away or sell in the near future.
Going up to the bees I was shocked at how the planting in the meadow had collapsed. My poor little primroses, bought from the farm shop this spring, and seed-raised salvias, planted last autumn, and many others, were dangerously shrivelled, and some of the more recent shrub plantings were badly scrunched. As the drought continues, 'recent' covers a longer span of time, until by now it can mean anything planted in the past two years. I spent the afternoon working up there, weeding, and moving the hose every few minutes. It wasn't where I'd planned to spend the rest of the day, but it is getting to the point where the location of each day working outside is going to be driven by which things most urgently need watering. Plants here can take years to get their roots down, then suddenly take off when finally fully established. An Aesculus indica, which made only sedate growth for several seasons after going into the ground, has shot up prodigously in the past year and suddenly looks like a proper young tree. The tough bit is getting them to that stage. This garden is designed not to need irrigation, but in weather like this it's a case of water it or lose it, when it comes to young plants.
The honey was ready, no drips at all, and the bees were just beginning to cap it. I got a full food bucket full, and a bit left over. I don't know what weight that is, as I can't remember the capacity of the bucket. It took almost exactly half an hour to spin the frames, the duration of R4's Saving Species, and longer than that to filter the honey to get the stray bits of wax out, and wash the extractor afterwards. I washed the kitchen floor before I started, and all in all there wasn't much of the morning left over by the time I'd finished. Home honey production is definitely a hobby and not a commercial proposition. My extractor holds two frames at a time. I spin them counting to sixty rotations, then sixty turning the handle the opposite way, then reverse the frames so the opposite side is facing outwards, and repeat the process. People write about the sound of the patter of honey on the sides of the extractor, but with mine all I can hear is the mechanism squeaking. It is helpful to spin frames of equal weight together to balance the thing, otherwise it judders and tries to walk across the floor. The honey was delicious, the colour of pale straw. I'll leave it for a day, to allow any fine debris to float to the surface, then use a trick taught to me by a friend, which is to lay clingfilm across the surface and remove it again. I lose a little honey that way, but it collects any bits. And that's it. I won't heat it, unless I have to very slightly to soften it if it sets in the bucket before I've put all of it in jars. Honey should be kept in an air-tight container for medium term storage, to keep atmospheric moisture out, and a big plastic food bucket with snap lid is better than keeping it in individual jars, with their screw lids and higher surface to volume ratio. I've learnt not to bottle more than I expect to give away or sell in the near future.
Going up to the bees I was shocked at how the planting in the meadow had collapsed. My poor little primroses, bought from the farm shop this spring, and seed-raised salvias, planted last autumn, and many others, were dangerously shrivelled, and some of the more recent shrub plantings were badly scrunched. As the drought continues, 'recent' covers a longer span of time, until by now it can mean anything planted in the past two years. I spent the afternoon working up there, weeding, and moving the hose every few minutes. It wasn't where I'd planned to spend the rest of the day, but it is getting to the point where the location of each day working outside is going to be driven by which things most urgently need watering. Plants here can take years to get their roots down, then suddenly take off when finally fully established. An Aesculus indica, which made only sedate growth for several seasons after going into the ground, has shot up prodigously in the past year and suddenly looks like a proper young tree. The tough bit is getting them to that stage. This garden is designed not to need irrigation, but in weather like this it's a case of water it or lose it, when it comes to young plants.
Friday, 29 April 2011
a dry season
I didn't watch the Royal Wedding. It's not really my sort of thing, but I'm glad today turned out fine, given all the people who did want to line the route, or hold their own street parties. The lack of rain is getting serious, though. A while back the Systems Administrator, who likes technology, added to the data empire by investing in an electronic weather station. This takes all sorts of weather related measurements and transmits them by wireless back to a base station in the house, which displays and stores them. They can be downloaded to the p.c. and in theory we could analyse them and produce graphs and tables galore.
The rain gauge requires at least 0.7mm precipitation in one go to read it. In total since 1st March it has recorded 9mm, which is a seriously small amount of rain. 9mm is less than half an inch. Even allowing for one or two showers of less than 0.7mm that's a pathetic amount of rain to fall in nearly two months. Coastal north Essex is one of the dryest places in the country, but we expect to get around 21 inches or 525mm per annum on average. Since the start of March we're running at an annualised rainfall of around 50mm or 2 inches.
An increasing proportion of each gardening day is spent watering. Watering recent plantings, watering the fruit (we had a dry April last year, I didn't water the sweet cherry enough, and after a good set it dropped its entire crop), watering trees planted within the past year, and things badly hit by last winter's cold but which I think might have the capacity to resprout if the drought doesn't finish them off, and the little patch of new turf where I cleared away the bags of left-over sand. I felt a certain wry amusement one of the last times I visited Hyde Hall, where after going past the much trumpeted Dry Garden (never irrigated after initial planting) I saw the sprayers going on the borders even though there wasn't then a drought. Nothing here is routinely irrigated, apart from edible crops and recent plantings, and the plants in most of the garden, not just the gravel garden, are chosen for their modest moisture requirements. No border phlox or delphiniums or monarda here, and few viburnums. If this weather goes on much longer, however, then even established plants will start showing signs of acute stress, and will require a drenching with the hose.
If I were having a house built from scratch, I would instal a grey water capture system and a very large underground water storage tank during the initial construction. It is so much easier to fit these things at the outset than to retrofit. We are eyeing up the price of water tanks once again, as there would be room for quite an array of them under the veranda, but they are expensive. The last time we did the maths we would have to fill them from captured water a lot of times for it to be cheaper than buying the water out of the tap. We debate getting the well going again too, but again pumps are costly and tend to break down, and it's not clear we would manage to pump enough water to make the investment worthwhile.
The rain gauge requires at least 0.7mm precipitation in one go to read it. In total since 1st March it has recorded 9mm, which is a seriously small amount of rain. 9mm is less than half an inch. Even allowing for one or two showers of less than 0.7mm that's a pathetic amount of rain to fall in nearly two months. Coastal north Essex is one of the dryest places in the country, but we expect to get around 21 inches or 525mm per annum on average. Since the start of March we're running at an annualised rainfall of around 50mm or 2 inches.
An increasing proportion of each gardening day is spent watering. Watering recent plantings, watering the fruit (we had a dry April last year, I didn't water the sweet cherry enough, and after a good set it dropped its entire crop), watering trees planted within the past year, and things badly hit by last winter's cold but which I think might have the capacity to resprout if the drought doesn't finish them off, and the little patch of new turf where I cleared away the bags of left-over sand. I felt a certain wry amusement one of the last times I visited Hyde Hall, where after going past the much trumpeted Dry Garden (never irrigated after initial planting) I saw the sprayers going on the borders even though there wasn't then a drought. Nothing here is routinely irrigated, apart from edible crops and recent plantings, and the plants in most of the garden, not just the gravel garden, are chosen for their modest moisture requirements. No border phlox or delphiniums or monarda here, and few viburnums. If this weather goes on much longer, however, then even established plants will start showing signs of acute stress, and will require a drenching with the hose.
If I were having a house built from scratch, I would instal a grey water capture system and a very large underground water storage tank during the initial construction. It is so much easier to fit these things at the outset than to retrofit. We are eyeing up the price of water tanks once again, as there would be room for quite an array of them under the veranda, but they are expensive. The last time we did the maths we would have to fill them from captured water a lot of times for it to be cheaper than buying the water out of the tap. We debate getting the well going again too, but again pumps are costly and tend to break down, and it's not clear we would manage to pump enough water to make the investment worthwhile.
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