January 2018 Garden News

No blog last month (December) as we were just so busy with family and of course Christmas.

We had great rain in December which filled all our seven tanks.

I was mowing the grass twice a week, which is a very rare event.

We looked after Grandchildren for a couple of weeks during school holidays and I was fortunate enough to see some quite good children’s movies.

Not much done in the way of gardening except for cutting out a couple of White Sapote trees which had never borne any fruit and constructing a shade area /walk where they used to be.

I replanted this area with all the new Costus and Beehive Gingers, should look great when established.

I think I should just forget about January, just so hot without a day being under 30c in the shade and absolutely NO rain whatsoever.

Thank goodness we had our tanks full because most of our time this month has been spent watering.

I must admit spending so much time watering really annoys me when I could be doing other things, but has to be done if we want to keep our plants alive.

One Sunday we had to drive with the trailer to Centenary Landscapes at Darra.
This is the only place we can find the 15 mill pine bark needed for bromeliads.
Left a very dry Birkdale and when we reached the suburb of Rocklea it started to pour with rain, so much so that we had to switch on the car lights and slow to a crawl and this lasted for some time, the curbside gutters were overflowing.

We picked up 1 and 2/3 rds metre of bark and returned home.
Guess what, Birkdale was as dry as a bone.

Hopefully it will rain soon, cannot be as dry as last year surely.

I split up my Native Bee hives and have four hives soon to be picked up from orders taken during last years 'Open Garden'. Waited until I was sure they are settled and happy in their new home.

You know they are Ok when you walk past the hive you get a strong smell of their honey.

A couple of years ago I bought a pool pump shed from ALDI, anyway it started to corrode and over a couple of days I have built a new one.

Also had to buy a new air blower for pool spa and our old one burnt out.

I  actually found time to take my boat out and catch a feed of prawns from our local creek.