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Use a rain water tank to conserve water

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I think just about everyone these days does at least a little to conserve resources. Some do it to help save the planet while others might do it to save money or for other benefit.

Now I know that many of you who read this blog are gardeners. Some of you live in areas with little water for part of the year or you might have water restrictions during the growing season. Perhaps using rainwater tanks to collect the runoff from your house when it rains might help you keep your garden and lawn looking beautiful during times of water restriction.

By using rain water tanks you’d be helping to conserve the water in your area. I think you’ll also find that your plants enjoy a good dousing with rain water. The water in my part of the world is hard water – full of minerals, but I believe that rain water is usually soft water.

You can purchase rain water tanks at waterharvest.com.au for both residential and commercial use. They also carry grey water systems. If you’re not familiar with grey systems they take water from your shower, wash basins, washing machines and other sources in your home, treat it and store it for reuse in your garden, toilets, washing machines or even for washing your car.

You can visit the site to learn more about their above and below ground rain water tanks and grey water systems. They have several different tanks in various sizes to choose from. Just think, if you purchase a rain water tank you could save quite a bit of money on your water bill and do your part to conserve.






New Question and Answer Page

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed it yet, but across the top of the page under the header I have listed a number of what I feel are this sites important pages. Green Thumb Sunday, how to join the GTS list, A list of what I’m growing in my garden (just updated!), a contact form and now I’ve added the new Q&A page.

Every once in a while someone will decide to take a chance and they either leave a comment or contact me via email in order to ask me to help them identify some strange plant that’s growing in their yard or maybe they are writing to me to ask about a plant that’s not doing well in their garden or in their home.

I’m certainly not a master gardener, but I’ve been gardening since I was a young child and I’ve got a garden that’s chock full of a wide variety of plants, plus there’s a number of house plants in my home … certainly I can try to answer some questions.

As I suggested on the Q&A page – if you have a question for me about plant health, plant care or the identity of a mystery plant please feel free to leave a comment on that page and I’ll do some research and create a new post on this blog about the question.

If I can’t answer a question I’ll try to point the person towards resources that are sure to be helpful.

If you do have a question for me remember to try to give me a link to a picture of the plant in question. I may use the photo in a post (be aware). If you can’t point me towards a photo please do be as descriptive as possible as it will save me a bit of time researching the answer!

If you’re kind enough to send me your questions you’ll be helping me get more garden related content on this site. For the longest time I was doing pretty good about putting up new plant profiles and tips but that’s fallen off in the last few months. I’ll help you if you can help me. 🙂

Also, if you have a garden related event in your area and you’d like to get the word out feel free to tell me about it and if I feel it’s appropriate for this site I’d be happy to tell my readers all about it.

Send me your questions!

Still recovering from my trip and starting to winterize the garden

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I’ve had a heck of week or three between being sick before I went to Vegas and getting even sicker while I was there. I’m still not up to par but I’m doing a lot better today than I have in more than a week. I think …

We got home early Monday morning and my husband had been wise enough to have both Monday and Tuesday off work. He tried going out in the garden on Monday afternoon to disassemble the patio furniture and start putting it away but it was cold, gloomy and rained quite a bit that day so he didn’t get very far.

Tuesday was a different story. It was very nice outside and while I was lying on the couch still feeling ill he decided to go outside and finish what he’d started the day before. He also managed to mound some soil around the base of ALL of our many roses in order to give the roots, graft and the first foot or so of above ground growth a bit of winter protection.

Hopefully over the weekend we’ll both get out into the garden.

I’d like to trim some of the roses that have very long branches that I know will die over winter. If I trim them a bit I can more easily protect what’s left with a large pile of leaves and some burlap wrapped around the roses. Then when spring comes all I’ve got to do is take the burlap off and digg out the leaves and if it’s anything like previous years there will be very little winter damage to the rose branches and if I’m really lucky the stems might even still be green.

Most of our roses are fairly hardy, but I have a feeling this is going to be a brutal winter so I want to be sure to protect the plants. We lost a few roses last year because we didn’t do any winter protection. It was a mild winter but we had very little snow so the cold, ice and frost damage might have been even worse than if we had had a good snow cover.

Have you begun to winterize your garden yet? Or do you even think about protecting your plants at all?

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