And here is another close up of another variety in the sedum blanket.

  Here’s another cheery fellow. It’s a great shame that we will not be able to enjoy close up views like this in the future.

 While we are taking a few days break from the build we will keep you amused with some sedum close ups.

 We got to be a bit addicted to watching the sedum grow while we had the luxury of scaffold to view it from. If you enlarge this shot you can see the droplets of water on the sedum, which get adsorbed into the pods on the ends of some of the varients and are used as a reserve for the plant and give it better resistance to drought. Indeed, over watering can encourage weeds and grasses that need more water than the sedum to survive.

 A last look at the sedum roof to check for any weeds. This is the last time we will ever have the luxury of being able to walk around the outside of the roof on scaffold planks to view how things are. Already each of the 8 or so varities of sedum are growing, some are flowering so we will put these up on the blog over the next few weeks to brighten things up a bit!

 Another thing to be fitted before the scaffold came down! 

This was quite a complex one. The stainless steel safety rail we made and put on the ridge of the house stuck out above the sedum roof, and with the house being in the middle of a field could have acted as an attraction for lightening. So we discussed the issue with a very helpful lightening conductor designer who told us what to do and what to use. So we have put two conductors, one at each end of the ridge, with one connected to the existing stainless steel safety rail with a further stainless strip. We could not use copper where there was any chance of it contacting the sedum as it would kill off the sedum roof covering we were told. So two neptune like forks at each end of the roof is what we have ended up with, plus 75mm square copper down to the ground where we have put more stainless rods into the ground. How many rods you need depends on the resitivity of the ground, which depends on whether it is sandy, clay or whatever.

 We’ve got grass growing in the Sedum so before the scaffold comes down we will have to have a weeding session.

The recent showery weather has been great for the sedum which is settling in and growing well. The sedum roof is already changing colour as we were told it would. It seems to adsorb lots of water, it has to rain quite hard or for an hour or more before anything comes out of the temporary down pipes. It then comes out in a steady trickle over 3-4 hours. Because of this delaying and reduced flow effect this is great for reducing the problems of flash flooding, if only all big buildings had sedum roofs. We are on low lying ground so this will all help.

It rains again this weekend which is ideal for helping the sedum settle in. Just like the irrigation system, when the sedum has not had any water for a while it is hours before any rain makes it’s way to the guttering. Once it does you get a slow trickly which makes it the ideal roofing cover for our low lying ground to avoid flooding. This will work particularly well with summer storms during dry periods as the sedum will soak up and store most of the water in it’s fleece carpet.

So by 4pm after an 11am start the 185 square metres of sedum roof is covered and trimmed. Now fertilizer is sprinkled by hand over the roof and the whole roof sprayed with a sprinkler head for an hour or more to avoid the fertilizer burning the sedum. Because of this the initial watering cannot be done using the leaky pipe system but subesquent waterings can. And overnight we get some rain which is a real bonus!