Recycling?

If you read Martyn's blog you will know that we had a bit of a mishap with our greenhouse. A pear fell from a branch overhanging our garden greenhouse and smashed one of the very large panes of glass.

Replacing glass with glass on the greenhouse roof is just about impossible - no let me rephrase that - IS impossible and so we - the Royal we that is - sent for a large sheet of acrylic sheeting. It was cut to size and wrapped in lots and lots of bubblewrap.

Now, I was worrying about how our peach tree - that started life as a nectarine - would fare over winter. It did make it through last winter but having sampled its fruits I would be really upset if it was damaged or even killed during the coming - it must come mustn't it? - bad weather.

I'd decided that I was going to wrap the pot in bubblewrap to give it some extra protection and so the packaging material from the acrylic sheet was just the job.

The peach pot has now been wrapped in about four layers and I had plenty left over to also wrap up the pot in which the mini kiwi is planted - although that has been popped in the greenhouse for winter.

After all that wrapping I still have some left which I will be able to throw over the perennial cuttings once the weather turns frosty!

The wrapping is folded over the top of the compost but can be opened up if we think the tree needs some water. The pot does have little feet that raise it off the ground but we have also popped it up on some bricks so that if we have lots of rain and it finds its way into the pot it will hopefully drain out easier.

So that's the best we can do for the plants - now we just need to sort out some lagged piping for our central heating boilers condensate pipe to avoid a repeat of it freezing up as happened last year only a week after being installed. Hopefully British Gas will sort that out for us this week!