Kia ora Whanau,
After having sold some of our trees at the show, Peter was able to remove the whole of the back row of stands which gave us more room and meant that the jessamine hedge didn’t send out tendrils straight into the bonsai. He also made some stands wider to take the larger trees and revamped a few of the smaller stands to lift the trees up.
The annual scarecrow festival was held at Hamilton Gardens. Quite a wide variety of very colourful scarecrows on display whilst Peter was on a sunny roaming shift showing a new volunteer the ropes.
Work on clearing the felled trees continues. All the branches have been cut off the trunk of the large gum tree and a lot of the small branches have been mulched. Four full trailer loads of mulchings have been put on the garden and about 2 months worth of firewood cut up and stored under cover. Still plenty for Peter to work on before tackling the big logs.
Ann is still going to physio and we’re both continuing to use the exercise bike daily – Peter’s up to 9kms in 19minutes whilst Ann’s doing 6kms in about 20 minutes (her programme is a lot easier than his). We did have a few days off when one of the pedals developed a knocking sound and had to go back to the shop for repair.
Of course, with it being November, fireworks have been going off all through the month scaring both girls. Honey hides in the study and Sox takes herself off down the hallway to the back door. Sometimes people will post on the village Facebook page and at least we’re forewarned. Just one more month or so before it all stops.
Our new mower broke – again. This time one of the brackets welded to the top of the cutter deck came off dropping the deck on the one side. It’s beginning to look like a Friday afternoon build. The local dealer where we bought it from have also been a bit lax in dealing with the problem but they eventually managed to fix it quickly once they had picked it up.
Peter had a Volunteer Training Day at Hamilton Gardens.
Peter was also back on brownie baking duty as Azaria and Carolien visited.
We’ve decided to have a high, wooden fence to replace the low post and wire fence behind the pittosporum hedge (which has died in a few places). In preparation for the installation of the new fence Peter has started cutting back the pittosporum so the contractors have a clear space to work in. Once the new fence is up, he can work on removing the rest of the hedge and the internal doggy proof fence we installed. Hopefully this will result in less hedge clipping work for Peter in the future. The hedge will be chipped for use as a mulch with the thicker trunks going for firewood.
Merry Christmas
