Kia Ora,
It’s the first of March and the mower has done it again! This time it dropped one of the blades whilst Peter was mowing the paddock.
Fortunately, he had mowed the garden, dog area, orchard, driveway and two thirds of the paddock before the spindle bearing failed, Again – thank goodness we have a 5 year warranty on this mower.
We had a meal out to celebrate Ann’s birthday.
At the bonsai club meeting, Ann worked on her Chilean Guava whilst Peter helped a couple of new club members with their trees.
The Bonsai Beginners course has been shortened by 1 week with Peter running weeks 1 and 4 as well as helping on the week 5 practical follow up. Ann has been helping the students with the practical work.
We both had dental checkups and hygiene checks. Peter also had a filling replaced whilst Ann had to have a crown replaced which cost an arm and a leg, and it took FOUR injections to get her mouth numb!
Honey continues to have her expensive monthly pain injections. They seem to be helping as she’s more able to climb up on the settee by herself. Sox is happy to be the odd one out in the bank balance area – she costs us almost nothing.
Noel came down from Kerikeri to attend a cousin’s funeral and stopped with us for a couple of nights. We went out for a Thai meal together to save Peter from cooking for one night.
Now we are in Autumn the colours are changing in the Italian garden at the Hamilton Gardens.
Peter has been building another woodshed to store all the firewood from the last three trees that were downed last winter. It is slightly narrower than the one on the other side of the water tank as the tank is offset from the centre of the garage plus he had to avoid the water pipes going to the pump in the garage. Ann wants to know where the rest of the wood will go as this will only hold maybe a third of the wood he’s chopping up.
Peter was weeding the shadehouse and found a thriving tomato plant with dozens of baby toms. The thing is – we haven’t grown any vegetable plants this year, and we didn’t plant any baby tomato plants in the last three years!
We’ve had swan plants growing in the garden for about 8 years but this year Ann hasn’t been able to find any monarch butterflies or caterpillars on the plants (and the plants were full of aphids and greenfly). So she began to pull some of the older plants out. Then she noticed a couple of small caterpillars fall on to the garden bed. Then she took a closer look and found several dozen caterpillars of all sizes happily munching on the plants. After rescuing the caterpillars that had fallen out we left the plants alone and Ann is checking daily for when the caterpillars make their chrysalis’s and before turning into beautiful monarch butterflies.
Ann has been doing some repotting work on her smaller bonsai in the garage, under the watchful eye of Sox.
Some of our bonsai are stunning autumn colours.
State Highway 39 re-opened south of the village on the 20th with a single lane temporary bridge so we should be seeing a lot more traffic on the roads, much to the relief of our local businesses. A new bridge should be installed sometime next year.
Peter managed to clear one of the piles of debris from the trees we had felled last year and has started on the next pile of trunks and branches. He also needs to cut down the tall grass so he can mow the rest of the paddock.
