Dede Sophie

Oh my goodness, my orchid cacti have been absolutely fine wintering outside for the past 6 years, then this year they have been absolutely smashed!  If you didn’t know before, Orchid cactus – Disocactus ackermannii is an species of epiphytic cactus that occurs in the cloud forests of Veracruz and Oaxaca, in Mexico. It is a gorgeous, evergreen plant with an arching trailing habit and produces dark green, long, flattened leaves which are only 2-3 inches wide but up to 36 inches long! Usually tough as old boots I like to grow it outside hanging from my trees. This year however a polar vortex descended on the garden and stayed for a couple of weeks, just long enough to kill a lot of my ‘on-the-edge’ hardy plants. Even the back up plan cacti in the greenhouse were frozen to mush! Luckily it wasn’t a complete disaster as you will find out in this video.

Oh, my goodness, our family has been on an emotional rollercoaster for the past week or so! One of our tortoises managed to force its way out of one of the summer enclosures and make his escape. After checking both our gardens and the neighbours gardens to no avail we assumed that he was just hiding and would naturally reappear a few days later. However ten days had passed and still no tortoise.  Then out of the blue, a chance notification on facebook have us a tenuous lead. A tortoise had been handed in at the vets in a town 3 miles away for us. Was it our missing tortoise? Well you can find our as it happens in the accompanying video. If you would like to see more content like this then let us know in the ‘comments’  or consider supporting our channel by clicking on to the ‘SUBSCRIBE’ button. It is absolutely free and allows you to never miss one of our future videos.