Friday, December 06, 2019

Open Garden November 2019


After early October’s beautiful rain, the garden looked great and as the weather started to warm up, we poured the tank water into the garden.
The result was a beautiful garden for our 716 visitors to enjoy.

Early November I had a procedure done in Hospital, 74 years old and my first ever hospital visit, doctors and nurses could not believe it.
Weeks of hard work from both Judy and I went into the preparation of the garden and the plants, resulting in the garden looking it’s best and some really beautiful plants for sale.
I did make a mistake by putting pictures of plants on the internet, the result was being inundated with requests for a Hoya ‘Kerrii’, we sold them far too cheap and learnt a valuable lesson from that and will not do that again.
Most garden related Facebook sites were fantastic by letting us post about our opening with one exception, I have since left that site. It’s their loss as I answered many questions from people.
We could not do it without our helpers, so thanks to the two Peter’s, Trevor and Erica.
Scott, Eliza and Margaret manned the gate and our Grand Children Luke and Sophie sold the Black Sapote fruit and did quite well out of that.
The day started with a big rush and many plants went out in the first hour or two.
We had a great coffee van on the front lawn which also did well, lots of scones went on the Saturday and cake on the Sunday.
The whole weekend went off without a hitch, but one of our rare plants in the garden disappeared, probably in someone’s handbag.
Absolutely bone weary at the end of the weekend and on the Monday started the cleanup, that took four days.
This year we decided not to take our usual break after the opening, just going on a few garden related day trips.
Now the heat has really started to put it on and NO rain for almost two months and all our seven tanks are almost empty.
Just really hoping we do not get a repeat of last summer where we received NO rain at all from December to late March.
Will we do it again for the 19th year?
Probably YES providing our health keeps up as we are not getting any younger.
No pictures, but you may go to Facebook 'The Giving Garden' where there's lot's of photos of the open weekend.