Refurbishing after a dreadful heatwave

This summer was the hottest on record so far (don't they say that every year?). And to make matters worse for our plants, we went on a long holiday. This subjected them to dry and hot winds, without receiving any water. Sadly, we lost about 50% of our plants.

Not wanting to cause further damager, we waited for the monsoon to arrive before we shopped for new plants. Yesterday was Plant Shopping Day!

We'd gone with a long list of pots to fill. And we've come back with a lot of plants! 

I'll let the pictures do the talking for this blog post.

Hibiscus

Pentas

Philondendron Xanadu

Crepe Myrtle

Lemonia

Plumbago

Texas Purple Sage

Ruellia and Evolvulus Blue Daze

Aralia, Golden Money Plant, Pearl & Jade Money Plant, Neon Money Plant, Aglaonema

Song of India and others

Croton and others

How we plan for new plants

Planning a garden is a lot of fun! We always start with a full layout our new garden and break it up into different zones. Then we go into detail for each zone to decide which plants would suit them best.

As our garden grows, we continue this planning. Sometimes we need to add more plants because we are filling gaps in the garden. At other times, it could be dictacted by the season when the dead plants need to be replaced. 

As the worst of the summer heat is expected to be over soon (Monsoon arrives in end June), we wanted to replace all the plants that sizzled in the summer heat. As we were away for a long holiday, we did lose a lot of plants. So this requires thought and a fair amount of work.

Step 1: Identify which spots in the garden need replenishing

Step 1

As I said, we had a lot of empty spots to fill! These were of different sizes, so the list had to reflect that. Also, some of these were indoor pots, so we had to know about those too. 

We also had some amount of material like soil and compost already. So we noted down those too.

Step 2: Identify the plants that would suit our needs

Step 2

The next step was to match each pot with the plant we wanted. This is where the size, material and the location of the pot became important. 

Step 3: Buy the plants!

And so, our plant list is ready! The next step is to buy them in the next couple of weeks.