It's started to rain.
Which is just as well as I have been slacking off a bit on my watering regime lately.
I finally figured out what I suspected all along, those coconut lined hanging basket liners are for show only. They don't retain water, as each time I tried to water my licorice plant it just drained out the bottom. I got tired of trying to revive it each time and thought oh, hanging baskets, you meant to water them every single day as they are really thirsty. Well no, its just the stupid coconut linings don't hold water like a plastic or terracotta pot would. So I lined the liner with plastic bag from ye olde supermarket, and that did the trick. (Don't worry, its our little secret, you can't tell once the soil and moss covers it all) but you think those garden centre people or manufacturers would warn you.
Other dirty secrets of the garden trade for those show gardens that make you wonder..how did they make it happen? How can they get strawberries to bloom and fruit in June?? Well, I tell you...hydroponics.
The 'switched on gardener' knows that those selling ahem, pot plants, have got it all sussed. The drug dealers want their premium greens all year round and aren't going to let a lack of rain or sun stop them. The florists are in on the racket too. They've got the temperature controlled glasshouses and pH balanced liquid chemical fertilisers, and monitor it all by closed circuit computers. Whole swathes of Spain are literally covered with polythene to produce the perfect plastic tomatoes destined for UK consumers penchant for eating mediterranean salads in the middle of winter.
Oh, no, I hear you squirm as you read this. It's all fresh and natural and organic. But I tell you computerbots are taking our jobs away and soon we will all be growing little pockets of plants in those black pocket plant holders and feeding them drugs as therapy. Not to mention a lot of our plants are...clones.
Yes, they can't even reproduce the natural way using bees and birds. Instead they get artificially induced and pollinated using the plant equivalent of turkey basters. But everyone who farms knows that those bobby calves weren't born when their parents fell in love. Oh no, it was the farmers making the cows pregnant, they had no choice. The same thing happens in the deep dark world of horticulture, of which once your blood and bone is mixed into fertiliser (how do crematoriums make their money?) it may be something you'd rather not know....
