A probable drought in 2012

[Lulu-amongst-the-blooms]

Well, thats true, a compost bin or stack is not a pleasant thing and in a small garden i agree they are hard to site. (as is dog waste, even in my good sized garden how to deal with that best is a constant challange!)

[elemire]

Originally Posted by Lulu-amongst-the-blooms

Well, thats true, a compost bin or stack is not a pleasant thing and in a small garden i agree they are hard to site. (as is dog waste, even in my good sized garden how to deal with that best is a constant challange!)

We usually were just digging up a hole in some part of the orchard and dumping the dog duty products there. Once the trees got bigger, nothing was growing there anyways, so it sort of was a good area to place that kind of left overs. We used to have an open compost box in the far end of the orchard as well, I never though of it as unsightly - I mean it was just some planks to hold the thing together, but as it was the working area anyways, that kind of did not look intrusive. Here I have a plastic bin for the compost, basically a huge barel without a bottom, with a small door on the bottom to access the rotten stuff easier. I mean that does not look like the most pretty thing in the garden, but it is in a corner, so not something very intrusive either.

What I find harder to place is a greenhouse. The white and not very clean plastic/glass is somewhat even less attractive than a compost bin, and you cannot really cover it, as plants inside need the light.

[Lulu-amongst-the-blooms]

Oh, but at least ypu have one. I long for a greenhouse.

They come up on ebay a lot but i have no way to get one home atm!

[elemire]

I have only a very small one, something like 50x50x200 cm - no space for a bigger one really. We used to have a proper one in the old garden, actually it was mostly made from the iron bars and the simple plastic - had to replace the plastic yearly, but otherwise it worked just fine.

[campanula]

yeah, my greenhouse occupies a quarter of my entire garden - I sort of train my eyes not to see it and being glass, this is easier to do than when the tatty old shed was there. Even though it is not very nice to look at, I could not imagine not having it - I am an avid seed sower and grow peppers and cucumbers, peaches and melons and keep all the soil mixes and stuff in it. I try to keep the side which mostly faces the rest of the garden filled with stuff like mandevilla and tropolaeums. The whole thing stands on a concrete foundation which extends 2feet beyond the edges and makes a neat shelf for pots such as the lemon trees and solanums so a bit of disguise helps. Even so, the garden measures 3.8m x 9m and the greenhouse is 2.4m x 3m. The design is, ahem, tightly conceived and I have 2 much bigger allotments a kilometre away.

[Paul Narramore]

When we moved here eighteen years ago - we bought the place primarily for the 1/3 acre garden and not the semi-derelict house - the existing greenhouse was not only without glass but sited under a pair of enormous Yews. I later dismantled the framework and moved it into the middle of the garden alongside a concrete path. I could now get to it without a 75yd walk across the grass. Much of the glass I glazed it with came from old windows from the house I replaced. Cutting old glass is very difficult as - and it sounds odd to say this about glass - it becomes very brittle over time and fails to cut properly. I found the head height was poor so built a surround of concrete blocks then perched the greenhouse onto this. This gave me the head height I needed but does require stepping over the blocks to enter the greenhouse. I use the greenhouse for overwintering tender fuchsias as well as growing cuttings. There are presently dozens of rose cuttings which I've taken as various times of the year. I pruned the roses only last week so have some more on the go.

Sheds. I have two largish sheds which I acquired for free. Both had a fair bit of rot where the previous owners had placed them directly on the ground. I can never turn down things like old sheds and they can always be repaired with new timber and roofing felt to provide many more years of use. I built a brick plinth from the smaller one and a chunky timber framework on 'stilts' concreted into the ground for the other one. The garden has a prounced slope as we live on the sides of the North Downs.

After breaking open the compost heap last week, I have been using the stuff to mulch parts of the garden including the rose garden. Being five or six years old, it's lovely stuff although I never found it built up the heat composts heaps are supposed to get. It simply rotted down to shear time.

When we had a Welsh Collie, I buried a plastic drum into the ground first having cut out the base. With a lid added, this was where the dig muck went to rot down in it's own time.

[Lulu-amongst-the-blooms]

So, in the south of england plans for hosepipe bans announced today. I shall have to turn the pump on at the weekend to water, and thank goodness i have sucha thing.

[elemire]

Well on the bright note roses tolerate drought better than they tolerate overly wet season, so they probably will do just fine.

[Flordel]

Yes, they do, maybe the roses will be least affected.
However I am very afraid of drought, even if we haven't had any water restrictions so far and even if I'm kind of independent and have my own well and pump for watering the garden (I've figured out it's cheaper even if it's more incovenient) I'm still dreadful.
That is because we've had years in which we've looked up to the sky and wished for rain while we baked in the heat. No matter how much you water, you can't achieve the same results as a good rain. And worse drought is misleading, it can rain, but if it isn't enough, the deeper layers of soil will be still dry and quickly dry out afterwards.
However I didn't think that it would be a problem in England which is surrounded by water and I had the misconceived idea that it gets a lot a rain.

[black bart]

I, too, am hoping and praying for a major change in the weather. Here it is absolutely crazy: Sicily (yes, Sicily) is being drowned by too much rain,and here in Tuscany (and elsewhere in the north of Italy),it almost never rains at all anymore, it seems. And this has been going on for at least a year...They were predicting desertification of Italy due to Global warming,yet it seems as if the South will be spared, whereas up here, we are in trouble... I am so dreading the inevitable arrival of summer and the heat. Will my roses even survive? Does it even make sense to try to grow them here? I am really beginning to wonder. bart