I think it’s the shoveling and raking: but she is in acute misery. A day on muscle relaxant, and she’s still having spasms—something about planting: a dogwood, a magnolia, 2 rhododendrons, an azalea, pulling weeds from the entire garden path (about 300 feet loop) raking grass, sorting pine cones, pulling (a real tug of war with our pond pump) and washing the algae filter…
Yesterday we went out to the valley and got some nice water hyacinth to clean up the water in the pond. This soft plant will not live through the winter, so we are dependent on getting it new every year—-it’s huge, about a foot across when adult, so we can’t winter it over in the basement. It has very pretty purple flower-spikes during summer. We filled a floating ring (think of a hula hoop) with them and have tethered them in relative position over the pond. We have 4 lily leaves at the surface now, and the lilies will also help water quality.
If the hyacinth can just reduce the algae, and if the UV filter arrives soon, the pond will become relatively care-free for the summer. This was our first year bringing it out of winter with fish and a full biological load, so we made a few mistakes: Jane says we should have drained it down to half for starters, and I think that might, indeed, have helped. But the problem is, Spokane water is lousy with phosphate (getting better, since the ban on phosphate detergents) and phosphate drives algae. So if we fill it up by half again, we’ll be adding a load of fertilizer.
Ah, the wonders of water chemistry. There is a chemical phosphate remover. In marine chemistry, that tends to be granulated ferric oxide (iron), and I’m not sure I want to dump that into the system—in ponds and tanks with no outlet, what you add stays there, and it takes gazillion-many water changes to get rid of it. It’s also why an excess of some mineral in your water source can get worse and worse and worse in a no-outlet system, because evaporation takes out the h20 only, and everything else stays behind.
So for that reason, in Jane’s plan, we’d be removing very-very-very phosphate-laden water in exchange for water that has only a single load of phosphate.
I think she’s right on this one.
Collect rainwater? Or actually lay a connection from a downspout to the pond, with a diverter for when you don’t *want* to flush out the pond? (This is assuming your rainwater is of good quality and not acid. But it would be phosphate-free.) How many gallons is the pond, again? 1000 square feet of roof in a one-inch rain produces 625 gallons. After a drought period you don’t want to use the first few minutes of runoff as the roof gets washed off, but then it’s good stuff.
In Jane’s condition, I take twice the label-dosage of ibuprofen and DON’T MOVE. Got to relax those spasming muscles so they don’t just keep up a positive feedback loop. Once I took some of my father’s hydrocodone, which was great, as a one-time thing.
Rainwater comes laden with all the city pollution that ran off the roof, which will be more exotic chemicals than I can figure, and I don’t have a test for them. We’re talking 4000 gallons. But it’s a good suggestion for garden-watering that otherwise uses up water.
In our lake in summer we used to have a horrible algae problem, in addition to fish. The solution was to go around and throw handfuls of copper sulfate crystals into the thickest concentrations, which seemed to keep the worst of it under control. If the algae truly gets out of control, maybe a light dosing of copper sulfate could bring it back to the point where the water hyacinth could take over. It didn’t seem to affect the fish, and in low doses is apparently a specific for some fishy diseases. BTW, if you want water hyacinth, I can send it to you by the 5 gallon bucket. It’s taking over the brackish waterways down by the swampy part of the beach.
😆 I’d be a little afraid that it would explode en route. We packed 15 small plants into a garbage bag, knotted it, and left it in the car shaded from the sun while we had lunch. When we came out, the hyacinth had outgassed enough to puff up the garbage bag like a balloon. 4 days in transit and I’d hate to think what it could look like! (It was probably co2, since plants emit that at night, and it was a black bag.)
It’s been a catastrophic spring all around, I too am on muscle relaxers with a separated shoulder. *sigh* Hang in there…
Jane will send sympathy.
I *think* rainwater is your best bet for good water….if you have enough rain.
Sympathies to Jane and all who are putting up with pulled muscles etc. At the risk of redundancy PLEASE take care of yourselves!
😆 thanks! I’ve at least persuaded her that more exercise and shoveling is not going to help her back.
If it helps, tell here the die hard shotokan addict is also refraining from certain preferred, but hazardous, activities for the duration…
er. HER
Good old water hyacinth! Friends with ponds here toss it out by the buckets in summer, it grows so fast. When we were in Egypt years ago I recall mats of it floating down the Nile. It was so think that cranes (or herons?) would sit on it and let it take them downstream. Love the purple flowers. It would even grow in my 1 gallon fountain – tough stuff.
The koi are happy to see it, too. We have a varied environment in our pond, from the rocks in the shallows, to the lily zone, to the deep water, (and one day a bridge, when OSGuy finishes the sanding!) and the water hyacinth, tethered over the deep water where the fish instinctively go when threatened, provides cover from predators. They love swimming among the roots.
Sorry to hear about Jane.
I am over seven feet tall and swing large heavy things for a living on a regular basis. On archaeology sites it has taken up to three screeners to keep up with my digging. What works for me is hanging from a chin-up bar. Ice first, heat later, and lots of stretching after it starts to heal. Hope it works for you. DK
Thanks for the tip! I’ll tell her.
Ladies you really need to utilize the men that hang out at Home-Depot for that kind of work.
$15/hour and they will make short work of anything like that.
We are all (I just turned the big 60) getting too old for that kind of abuse.
Try to find some “java moss”. Its a aquatic moss that will soak up any spare nutrients in your pond. Its easy to clean and the winters will kill it. I keep it in my 55 gallon tanks. It produces a ton of Oxygen and soaks up every thing. Fish love it too. Its easy to remove also.
Oh, dear! My sympathies to Jane! 🙁 I’m young enough to avoid most injuries (save those from stupidity–ie sledding down a dangerous hill–or from my favored sports–ie getting poorly thrown in judo), but I know my parents have had to deal with similar stuff as they grow older (knees, necks, and backs aren’t what they used to be, or so I hear!)… 🙁
Rest, rest, rest! And painkillers/muscle relaxants! And some good movies or books, or something!
Best wishes!
Just finished Deceiver. Do you happen to have a GEDCOM I can download?
Gedcom?
I know that this is entirely off-topic, but I just wanted everyone to know that Trinkett (that’s her in the avatar) is currently not doing well. It’s looking like bone cancer, the fear that all greyhound owners have buried deep in the back of their mind. I am taking her in to see a specialist tomorrow. If I’m lucky, we will be amputating her rear leg. If I’m really lucky, it’s something else and we can save the leg. Right now she is in severe pain, and it’s being very hard on me as she keeps coming up to me and asking me to make it stop, and there’s nothing I can do. I’ve currently got her on the highest safe dose of pain medicine that I have, and it’s hardly making a dent in it, from how she’s acting. Keep us in your thoughts. (PS. I now know how my mom felt when I was in the hospital. It was a lot easier on me… either they were going to make me better or they weren’t, but all I had to do was to just endure. It’s harder not being able to do anything.)
Oh, dear, missed this one. I am so in hopes it’s not as bad as that. I didn’t get to see her when I was down your way, but she looks like such a special dog.
er … GEDCOM, an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a de facto
specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy
software. …
@philospher77…I hope, hope,hope all goes well with Trinket…..virtual hugs to you both.
Sorry, CJ. I thought you would know of it. I wonder if someone on Shejidan has created one.
@philosopher77. I hope Trinket get some relief for her pain and comes through this well.
You mean for the genealogies in Deceiver? Well, Cajeiri is easy. If somebody’s got one for everybody else, I could use it!
I helped a friend move yesterday for 7 hours and was pretty creaky this morning. I figured planting lots of annuals in the garden (Home Depot 8=packs: my spouse picked up 8 of them as my “personal flower shopper”) would stretch me out a bit. It did for the bulk of the planting but then I started hauling rocks and bags of dirt and I ACHE again!!! Tomorrow’s my 51st birthday: definitely in the past few years I creak more after exercise than I used to.
Ibuprophen is indeed your friend: my dentist said you can take up to 24,000 mg a day (when I had a tooth pulled last month). I take it on food or a glass of milk.
We put water hyacinth in our (100 gallon) water garden) where it does very well. When it is happy it multiples pretty fast so your four plants should “expand” nicely. At the end of the season, I dump the hyacinths on the garden bed next to the water garden. By spring they are reasonably (but not completely) rotted after a winter of rain and snow.
Philospher: good luck with Trinkett!
Raesean, did you get an extra zero in there? I know you can short-term take larger doses, but 24000 mg is 120 pills I think!
A physician friend of my brother’s said that as soon as you realize your back muscles are spasming, take 8 ibuprofen and LIE DOWN. Try not to even wiggle until those muscles have relaxed.
What are all your flowers? Eight 8-packs sound like a pretty good mass of color. I was going to have sunflowers and nasturtium and cypress vine, but after being very good about getting the vegetable garden all in (eating lettuce and radishes now, with zucchinis on the horizon), I reverted to my old bad habits of buying things and then not getting them planted. At least it’s just seeds, not struggling little green things in pots.
Ooh, I might of as I frequently mess up my powers of ten: basically you can take 4 800 mg tablets or equivalent a day…. that indeed makes 2400 and not the whopping amount I accidentally suggested. I shall cease to play doctor immediately. Thanks for catching that!
It’s always risky for me to post pre-coffee, but 4 pills, each of 800mg, is 3200mg.
😉
My wife the nurse says that about all you want to do of ibuprofen per 24 hours is 800mg at a time, 4 times daily (what she calls a “Motrin dose”), which is where Rae was headed, I think.
Philosopher77, I hope things go well for Trinket. Sad when the pets suffer.
Trinkett update: The biopsy was “inconclusive”, and there was a possible contributing factor to the bone breaking in a bad fall that she took about a month ago, so we have decided to do a less-radical procedure and just remove the head of the femur. That will be sent out for further biopsy, and hopefully comes back clean, in which case Trink hopefully heals back up enough to be able to use the remaining part of the leg. It forms something called a false joint, where scar tissue binds the two parts together. She’s in surgery this afternoon, and should be going home tomorrow. If it comes back that it is cancer, then I am going to have to consider the full amputation and chemo. But I am going to cross that bridge later.