August 2006 Garden news

I have decided to now submit a monthly diary and articles to my blog just to let fellow gardeners know what has happened in the ‘Wintle Garden’ during the previous month.
Only 10 weeks to go for our fifth ‘Open Garden’. This year should be the best yet.
I have put some video clips onto my ‘Photobucket’ site, the video is from the ‘2004 Open Garden’ so things have changed quite a bit since then, must of, because I seem to be working or building all weekend every weekend. Anyway, although it does not reflect how the Garden looks at the moment it will give you some idea of the layout and size of our Garden. My ‘photo bucket’ album has had over 3500 hits this month.
A garden is always evolving and changing and ours is no different.
The first job was to raise a sunken water feature, basically it was a plastic drum cut in half and buried into the Garden. Well, since placing it we have built new Gardens and have raised the Garden level to the point where the water feature looked low and stupid. So out came the tools and it’s a bugger of a job to get out due to the underneath suction, but after some real effort it came out and was repositioned under a new bed of crusher dust, rocks replaced and new fish put in.
I had to clean out another large water pot as the water had become stagnant, another dirty job.
We had a visit from ‘Garden Dan’ and his wife and they left with a boot full of Bromeliads to start their collection.
I am still laying Sugar Cane (58 bales) mulch in the hope that we may get more rain soon.

We had the August meeting of ITFGS about 30 members came and had a wander around the yard and bought some plants, I gave a bit of a talk about our Garden. It was not the best time to view the Garden as a lot of the more colourful plants like the Costus, Gingers and Caladiums are still dormant, and of course the Day lilies are still a couple of months off flowering. We will be holding the Society Christmas Party in December and the Garden will be at its best then.
The ‘Open Garden’ magazine came out this month and all the small photos in the Queensland section are from our Garden.
The frame and base went in for the new Water Tank, had a small painful episode when the sledgehammer hit my foot and not the supporting stake ‘ouch’. There is a lesson to be learnt, never hold the stake in place with your foot and never ever be wearing thongs; I should be old enough to know better.
The new tank arrived and set in place, then I fixed up all the plumbing, the overflow will drain into the adjacent 15.000 litre tank, which will be the one we pump from.
One of the big jobs each year about this time is to trim and prune our five Custard Apple trees; if we don’t do this then they will be massive. All except for the hardwood is put through the Greenfield Shredder and mulched; it is then composted and ready to put back on the Garden in about six months.
Made a couple of Bromeliad stands for Judy and welded heavy-duty castors on the big galvanised plant benches that we use during the ‘Open Garden’.
Put a set of solar lights in the roof of pool gazebo.
Judy had a pre “Open Garden’ Bromeliad sale, I set up some shelters and plant stands, the interest was poor but Judy ended up selling enough plants to make it worthwhile.
It’s hard to think that spring is only round the corner, what happened to winter? It was certainly one of the warmest winters I can remember. I think the Garden will do all sorts of strange things this year as in plants blooming early.
Where are the westerly winds? We have only had a couple of days of them so far and it is now very, very dry, looks like August will be a month without any rain whatsoever.
That’s all for this month, just hope that when I post the September blog that I can mention all the rainfall we had (I live in hope).