Sweat Relief

I have just returned from a week or so in Gai Paris where I spent long hours in a sweat. A sweat not only because of the heat, IT WAS HOT, but a fear that my trees may not be getting watered properly in my absence quite literally troubled me some nights.

The first problem was that I was using a Hozelock automatic timer with a normal garden sprinkler to water the trees. I had set it up the night before I left and then disconnected it briefly the following morning to water the greenhouse tomatoes. On the way to Dublin airport my wife asked me if I had remembered to set the timer to AUTO. I contacted my son in law and asked him to check but wasn’t confident that he knew what to do. It turned out that I hadn’t set the timer properly and it also turned out that he really didn’t know what to do but evidently got there in the end. As I wasn’t absolutely confident about that I was really worried that the trees were not being watered in the hot weather but I could do nothing about it. That with the very hot and dry weather combined to have me convinced that I was coming home to dead trees. Thankfully, much to my relief,  that was not the case. The trees have done really well as the following pics taken in low light last night show.

This is the fourth time I have gone away and used this system and it has worked well each time. I know it’s not foolproof but in a normal British Summer we can usually depend on rain every few days. Not this year though.