Same old, same old.

Our first Wednesday of the New Year and back to working away at the Reserve. Already the first New Year’s resolution of taking it a bit easier broken as it turned out to be quite a busy day.

We started off with some chemical warfare against whatever is eating the seedlings in the misting house and Ellie put up five stations with snailbait and also sprayed while the misters were off for the entire day.

She also sprayed the Aloes in the nursery with Oleum for scale.

I had prepared some brackets to start replacing the brandering holding the sides of the misting house together and put those in place. Turned out to be a bigger job than I had anticipated.

So far so good:

It will also be a good place to put trays to root Hawortias etc.

I noticed on a previous visit that the spekboom in the nursery were hardly visible because of all the “companion plants” so after tea I got stuck in doing some weeding while Ellie and Rob went to collect some Strelizia seeds on the Nymph trail and check if they could spot some Tilapia in the dam. Nada, unfortunately.

On the December walk with Samantha, Noxia , Tammy and Ellie saw that a short section of the Link Trail beyond the bridge was totally overgrown so after lunch we went and sorted that out. Rather exhausting in the heat but it looks a whole lot better now. Along the trail it looks like quite a few Proteas did not survive the drought.

Back at the greenhouse we cleaned up some broken glass and did some more weeding.

In spite of the drought the nursery looks in much better shape after Christmas than previous years thanks to the staff maintaining a good watering regime. All our hard work on the pipeline is definitely paying off!