Kia ora whanau (hello family and friends),
We’ve had a cold but sunny start to the month with two weeks of near zero or sub zero nights but bright cloudless skies during the day – apart from a couple of foggy mornings which is nothing unusual in the Waikato.
Honey has been strutting her stuff in her winter coat on some of our morning walks.
We’ve been doing more spring cleaning in the external garage / sleepout and the bedroom cupboards. All of it either going to the dump or donated to a local op shop.
Peter celebrated his 64th birthday (caught up with Ann again)!
Peter has been designing a new railway layout with 230m of track and 91 points. It’ll take up most of the sleepout and utilise most of the current buildings, electronics and track from the old Coed Bach layout. He thinks it’ll probably take 2 to 3 years to complete due to the complexity of the track layout and electronics.
As it was the school holidays (and even though Azaria has left school) it was visiting time again. The chocolate brownies and shortbread went down well!
Winter is the main bonsai repotting season so we’ve spent time in the garage sorting, making up bonsai mix and repotting a good number of our trees.
The Hamilton bonsai club had its usual Tony Bebb workshops etc. Tony is arguably Australasia’s foremost bonsai artist and spends up to a month each winter in New Zealand working with some of the clubs around the country. We had Tony for a couple of days of private work plus attending the club workshops.
Ann and Tony (mostly Tony) pruned and wired this redwood before removing it from its pot (huge struggle because of all the roots), trimmed the roots and repotted it using fresh mix back into the same pot.
Peter and Tony worked on 9 trees on the Tuesday whilst Ann was at physio and working at the Hamilton Gardens, including the huge olive tree that he dug up from Whakatane about 10 years ago.
A yummy Thai meal as a reward for all our (Tony’s) hard work!
At the club workshops we worked on more of our trees.
Another Thai meal out after a hard workshop day.
On the 24th Peter had a very busy shift at Hamilton Gardens with a large number of Chinese visitors who were touring parts of NZ after participating in the World Choir Games being held in Auckland. He has also been training two new volunteers on how things operate in the Visitor Centre.
On one of Ann’s visits to Marshall at Tamahere Eventide Covid had made an unwanted appearance. In order for Ann to enter the unit she had to put on the full PPE.
Peter pruned the Camelia hedge down the driveway – he still has part of the red robin and the corokia hedges to go, plus the jasmine and kanuka hedges too.
The section we acquired the bark mulch from in April now has a house on it. Two trucks brought the house in from its old location in Te Awamutu. They did have a few problems as it had been raining heavily before the delivery and the ground was very soft,
The month ended with a lunch date of the famous five!
