Tuesday 13 March 2012

Hose pipe ban!

Well, its official. As from April 5th Anglian Water are imposing a hose pipe ban. I'm surprised we didn't have one last year. In the height of summer, I might water with a hose pipe in the front gravel garden about once every 2-3 weeks if really needed. Now I'll only water the plants with a watering can when they need it. There are too many in there to water them all, all the time. Mind you, they all have a gravel mulch so that helps quite a bit. Also, many are tolerant of dry weather as well.

We are still busy sifting garden soil from areas of the garden where it is not needed. Once done, it is put inside my raised vegetable beds as they are still a little low. Will be taking one full bag to DS. and FDiL. when we visit this weekend as they also have raised beds.

I reckon we have sifted somewhere in the region of 200 litres of soil with another 100 – 150 to go. It is a thing of beauty when done but hard work. We have barely started emptying our compost bin. We have two that sit side by side. When one is 'cooking' (ending up with around 200 litres of lovely compost ready for use after sifting), the other is in use. As we empty the one that is ready, the full one is closed down to allow it to turn into compost. We then start to re-use the emptied one – if you get my drift.

We bought our large bins from the council £17.50 for one with the 2nd half price. All our kitchen vegetable/fruit waste and soft garden items goes into it. Tough or unusable stuff (to us) goes in the fortnightly collected brown garden bin. It is fantastic stuff when ready, friable and with a lovely clean smell.

5 comments:

  1. We didn't have to water the allotment at all last ' Summer'! Our waterbutts and baths were full to overflowing, and we even went on holiday for a week in July leaving the tomatoes, peppers and chilies in the greenhouse- they survived on a slow drip from lemonade bottles which had been cut in half. There's just no happy medium is there? One side of the country is dry and the other is soggy.

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  2. Thankfully we dont have to worry about lack of water at the moment here.You are going to be busy watering your fruit and veg by watering can!

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    1. Luckily my raised vegetable beds only need one can each. That will last for a few days. The fruit cage has had lots of manure and compost added and has a wood chip mulch on top so am hoping that will help.

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  3. I`m dreading the day they impose the hose pipe ban here in Sussex.
    I have to carry watering cans from inside the house to the garden
    as I have no water outlet outside. I`m going to invest in a few
    water containers for outside, I think. Just wish there was a cheap
    way of doing that.

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    1. As we are a bungalow, we had an outside tap put on from the kitchen and bathroom. They service the front and back. Then we have a garage which has both gutters going into one water butt. That one when full, overflows into another. Any overflow from that, goes into our dustbin pond. However, as I need rainwater for my blueberries and raspberries and heathers, I could do with another one. It wasn't cheap but if in future we need to do more, then we will invest in one for each downpipe even if they are ugly.

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