July 2010 garden news

Gardening Australia showed our garden on national Television, we were very happy with the result and all comments have been favourable, it’s a pity that all you get is a little over four minutes, our garden is much more than that, but they say that’s the maximum attention span, anyway you can see the video segment below.

Helen Curran and members of the Sydney ‘Tropical Garden Society’ called in on their way to the Nambour Garden Expo, they stayed for a few hours and enjoyed their visit, it’s always nice to catch up with this crowd as they are very genuine in their love of tropical gardens.

The Nambour Garden Expo was on and we really look forward to this each year, as usual we bought lots of plants and caught up with all our gardening friends whilst browsing the expo.

We decided to put another four solar energy panels on the roof, this now gives us 12 or 2 kilowatt system, we also installed a low energy pool pump 'Viron' which is supposed to be about 75% more efficient than a normal pump. Our next electricity bill will be interesting.

There was a ‘Cordyline Club’ meeting and as usual I bought $10 worth of raffle tickets, it’s rare that I win anything but I had to try, anyway five prizes later I went home with some beautiful cordylines.

I finished all my leave on 30 July, so now I am officially 100%retired, it’s a funny feeling after 51 years in the workforce.

We had gone almost two months without rain and I was dreading another year like last year where we went almost seven months without any rain, well we had 15mills towards the end of the month, so that was quite good.

I refurbished the path areas in the swimming pool area with a very nice’ tropical gold’ pebble, wow, what a difference that has made, freshened up the area really well.

I have started to expand another garden in the back yard, it’s not all that big but has a nice curve to it, hopefully I will be able to find some nice heliconia’s to plant.