Garden Steps

Since the floods the ramp up to the garden was less than great. There were some concrete blocks lying around. Why not use those to make some steps up to the orchard?

Silk Floss Tree

Getting the silk floss trees (16€ a piece). Roadsters are very practical, actually.

Digging a hole (70x70x50), then finding out it's too near the irrigation water pipe, as this tree has a quite wild root system.

Some images of the silk floss tree, "arbol botella" in Spanish, chorisia speciosa, or ceiba speciosa.

Before the deluge we build Deltawerkjes

Heavy rain is predicted, up to 100 mm per m²! Oh dear. Better be prepared a bit.



When it rains heavily the water from the road nears the back gate. It has not been coming through, but better prevent that anyway. Same for the road around. A small dyke of sand (many wheelbarrow loads, actually!) and some old concrete blocks to gently direct the water away...?

Fruiting Stephanotis

Didn't know stephanotis can bear fruit, but now I do! Apparently it takes a year to ripen, then it contains a few hundred dandelion-like seeds.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanotis_floribunda

Jacarandas and the Hollandsche Waterlinie

6 Jacaranda's and a Delonix Regia (Flamboyant, Poinciana), and 4 bougainvilleas need planting. The holes are basically already dug by machine (thanks Antonio). The soil dug out needs to go back into the holes, mixed with compost and fertilizer. After the rains that is hard work. (Again! Who's a pensioner then? Well?)

A bit of a challenge is to initially water 7 big holes, and not resort to watering cans. Well, we have two quite long hoses, but we need about 70 meters here. Lucky there are three lengths of black plastic irrigation tubing. They can be interconnected using bits of the bigger blue hoses, while the blue hose fits the regular Gardena. All in all I can just about reach the last planting hole. Which is rather funny, as that is about 10 meters from the balsa, where the water is actually from:

Last planting hole, with a view on the balsa.

Here is a movie of the Hollandsche Waterlinie, so you have an idea:

As we'll have a lot of wind coming days I extended the supporting bamboo sticks. Else the tops of the young trees are a meter above the end of their stick, and will possibly snap.