…unlike the journey of 10,000 miles, does not begin with one step, but with a List. One of those hanging-fire for months lists where, when the weather is too hot and nasty to do anything else, means you’ve got to get
1. wire staples for weedcloth (sold out at 2 stores so far)
2. 2 short real rubber hoses, not the sort that kink and cut you off (shortest we could find was 50 feet)
3. 2 papers to sign at the bank (one we could do, but the other (Italian tax forms) our bank does not understand: we have been trying to get those signed for nearly 6 months, and it is going to require a trip to the main bank.
4. items to be returned (many: thank you Lowe’s for remembering everything you ever used a credit card on, no receipt necessary)
5. milk (we can only use one brand of actual milk: it’s the carb thing)
6. returning shoes that didn’t work (those curved stretchy ones) at the place where we get the milk
7. cat food, cat tuna flakes, and tubifex worms for the fish….
…we’re pooped!
We ended up able to use one coupon for 15.00 (2 lbs coffee and some milk)…and we actually got unuseable items virtuously returned. We did not resist one more clematis. (My fault.)
Or the second try at the hoses, which turned up what we could have bought at Lowe’s, but decided we needed too badly.
Tomorrow we have to do another of these runs and return a bunch of tile and buy more for the future bathroom tile project (replacing the hog-sized hole in our shower wall)—and the dreaded Costco run, which always leaves me wanting to sit down somewhere cold and allergy-free for a week; and the quest to TJ Maxx which is supposed to have some inexpensive tees Jane wants, because she needs them, actually.
And I need to get to the fish store, but that isn’t happening.
If we can locate the packets of weedcloth staples we can secure this work we’ve already done under weedcloth and mulch, read: quasi-finished, except for plantings! which I do want to do. I applied Preen (prevents seed/weed germination) to the whole front lawn yesterday.
Either we find the staples or I go on looking for some store that isn’t sold out of them. I have 3 smaller candidates where we can look.
Meanwhile, work goes on with Cajeiri’s scene, and Jane so wants to get to her own writing…
But we’re making progress.
For home improvement projects, do you have a ReStore in your neighborhood? I discovered the one on our island several months ago, and it will probably supply the windows I need to enclose my back lanai, for half the price of Home Despot. They’re connected with Habitat for Humanity, and resell donated contractor overruns, order ends, and the spare bits and bobs left over at the end of many projects. I hope your shower will hold together until you get the puka mended!
Italian tax forms? I’m not sure I want to know…
Hoses – I buy whatever length, and make the custom pieces I need for my beds with hose-mender thingies that turn a cut end of hose into whichever coupling I want. Some, little bare brass bits with a small automotive-type hose clamp, are very cheap; others, with varying complexity of plastic screw-to-tighten parts, are more expensive.
Weedcloth staples? Are you referring to a way to anchor the fabric to the ground before putting mulch or whathaveyou over top? I never knew they existed – I just find one of the ever-multiplying wire hangers in the closet, unwind it and cut it into 6-7 inch segments (I would recommend something other than rose clippers to do the cutting…:) Bend into a “U” and shove through the cloth into the ground…. Perhaps I am just misunderstanding what you mean.
Nope, just the regular metal staples.
@AbigailM…you have given me a ‘fer duh’ moment! 😉 I replace hose ends all the time….of course I could cut them to needed lengths! 😆
Nand’ CJ, I too did not know of weedcloth staples….having finally banished the DreadWireHangers…I have been buying reels of cheap wire to make my own. Definitely an idea who’s time has come. BTW how are the fishies and their pond?
Well, it’s a complicated answer, but we’re trying to avoid using algae-killer of any sort. Here’s my reasoning:
1) artificial, liner-based ponds, like aquariums, are a closed system.
2) Put a chemical in repeatedly, you get build-up unless you do a water-change.
3) And if some plant or animal in the system is using up PART of the set of chemicals you’re putting in, you can have an imbalance in, say, ph or whatnot that you have to add a chemical to straighten out: hopefully it will be ‘used up’ in the correction, but maybe not.
4) algae is a very basic prehistoric plant that can live on practically anything, but it’s a real hog for phosphate (with which our city water is contaminated), and metals. SO….by not killing all sorts of the algae by UV (it gets floating algae, not the sort that clings to surfaces) we have to stop it somehow. If we kill it, it decays and puts all the phosphate back into the pond before it gets skimmed out. If we don’t kill it, but skim out the living algae, we get everything it ‘ate’ including the phosphate—out. Out is good.
SO…in answer to your question, better, but it’s still having a new-pond moment. The water is clear, but we are skimming out pounds of algae. Literally. Fortunately this process is largely mechanized, as the pond skimmer sucks it up and we have to clear the filter baskets (2). I don’t want to know what’s going on inside the waterfall filter. 😆
This will get better with age, if we keep after it.
Between the algae, the hemlock droppings, the ripped up grass, and everything else, you must have the Mother of All Compost Heaps!
Tell me about the compost heap, and you forgot all the grass they scraped off our lawn, into which we dropped two batches of the luckiest fishing worms in Spokane: it stands, or did, 30’x10’x4′ and first Jane says move it over here [40 feet away], and then, move it over there [40 feet the other direction, and then, well, line the path with it [30 feet away]. No—the path is looking too square. Ripple the path a bit…waaa!
😆 I kid her. Actually she’s worked her tail off when I’ve only been moving dirt, and a compost heap has to be rolled over periodically to get it to work, which is happening.
For our little pond (about 6×4, up to 3 feet deep), the UV filter + water lilies + water hyacinth keep things nice and clean. We have algae until growing season for the plants gets going. UV by itself can’t keep up. We have goldfish only, don’t know if your Koi would let the plants grow enough. Only downside is the pond surface is mostly veggie covered, but the flowers are lovely.
The koi we had in Oklahoma City were inclined to eat any plant, but I know now we weren’t feeding them enough greens. Our water hyacinth just isn’t growing because the algae has its roots coated. But the water lilies are getting along nicely—they’re young, and only manage about 8 leaves apiece, some of those about the size of a silver dollar: our one bigger lily is doing far better, with 5″ leaves and blooms pretty often. It’s just that we have so much shallow surface area (20×12) and it’s really sunny these last 2 weeks.
Do you anticipate a small population of frogs and toads to emigrate to your pond? One wonders if the koi would eat the eggs or tadpoles. Do koi eat mosquito larvae? That would help keep the biters’ population down, but if not, then the frogs and toads would help some. The odd garter snake, too, because they eat slugs.
I just got told this morning that my fields are going to be dug to construct a waterway to drain the fields. Now I have to wonder what is in the soil, where will the water flow, how will it affect the local area (my yard, for example), and what ecological impact will it have on the local waterways? They’re supposed to start digging on Monday morning. We’re going to have to construct a bridge to get over to the other side of the waterway, or else put in a concrete or corrugated steel tube. It’ll have to be at least 3 feet in diameter to accommodate all of the water that floods through during a heavy rain or the snow melts. I also wonder if the waterway doesn’t drain properly, will there be stagnant water to breed mosquitoes? Also, the bees will find that water and use it to cool the hive, and what chemicals will be introduced to the hives? Beeswax is a very good medium for absorbing lots of chemicals. Which is why I don’t like using chemicals in the hive and will NOT put any chemicals in the hive when I’m expecting a good honey flow. I don’t want the honey to be contaminated, I don’t want the wax to be contaminated (because it builds up over the months), and while I have to replace frames every few years, I don’t want to have to do it every year. 55 cents a frame isn’t much, until you also add in that there are 10 frames per hive body, 2 or 3 hive bodies per hive, plus the honey supers which are 9 frames each, multiply that by the number of hives you have, add in the cost of the wax foundation, the wood for the hive bodies, etc., etc. So, there is an economic and ecological downside to this waterway. Can I do anything about it? No, it’s not my land, and it’s been approved by the State Soil and Water Conservation Office, and they’ve already started the preparation of the site. The farmers just cleared out all of the area where the dig will occur, which upsets the population of small furry animals, removes a possible nectar/pollen source for the bees, and while aesthetically, it looks better for some people, to me it was as if an invasion had occurred.
Okay, back to my original question on the pond……and maybe I’ll get a permit to dig one here. We’ll see.
I haven’t seen a frog or a toad since I left Oklahoma. Up here in the north, in the middle of a city, no takers. For one thing, no natural bogs, on land underlain by a mile of unmitigated basalt and glacial moraine atop cliffs. You might see them down by the Little Spokane, but not here. Up here we get marmots and coyotes and raccoons—bears and moose and deer, the occasional wolf, but not in our neighborhood.
If you have a waterfall or skimmer, you don’t have mosquitoes, because they breed only in stagnant pools, and koi don’t like stagnant pools, either. You need a pump. And if there were mosquito larvae, the koi would eat them quite cheerfully. The only insects we get are water boatmen and dragonflies and their cousins the damselflies. If frogs and toads are common in your area, you might get them.
Joe, have you ever tried giving the bees empty frames and letting them draw their own combs without purchased foundation? I learned about it at Michael Bush’s site bushfarms.com/bees.htm, and tried it. While the nectar was abundant, it worked fine — of the 5 such frames I put in, 3 have almost full honeycombs. One was never started, and one has just a tiny little squib of a start. (I only have the one hive, but I’m already plotting more.) The end of one of their combs shows in one of the pictures in the July 5 entry in my blog at http://naturalist-amm.blogspot.com/2010/07/berries-in-rain.html
My friend Kay tried this in desperation, without having read anything about it. Some of her frames had moth in them, and she was going to replace the foundation, but Dadant was out (?!) So she alternated empty frames with full combs in the super, and got beautiful comb honey! She gave me some, which is pictured in the July 13 entry.
I’m sorry about the “public works” project you are being subjected to. Hope it works out without the most dire possibilities happening.
@AbigailM, I love the picture of the entrance with the bee in front getting ready to take off, while the ones in the background are just walking into the hive. The worker at the right is just visible because of her pollen baskets. What’s not visible is the line of “guard bees” at the entrance that check each arrival to ensure they “belong”, or at least have nectar in their honey crop.
I have not used empty frames, although I know it can be done, I haven’t seen it. I did have one hive that I inherited that had no frames at all in the super. Let’s just say that the only thing holding the comb in the super when I lifted it up was the queen excluder underneath. The comb was almost 3 inches thick in some places, and the bees were having a competition with the ants to see if the bees could get the honey capped before the ants got into the honey.
Not being quite sure where you live, but if Dadant doesn’t have it, and I find that happens sometimes, even with their range of stores across the country, You might check I hope that tag worked, but if not, well, I tried. I’m not a coder, anyway.
Darn it! You might try Brushy Mountain Bee Farm http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com or call them 1-800-BEESWAX
Just curious. only one brand of milk? (carb thing). I have never seen any brand of milk that is less than about 11 grams of carbs/serving. Unless your talking about soy or condensed milk. Being diabetic my whole diet revolves around counting carbs.
The brand is Hood. And this is their site. http://www.hood.com BUT the low-carb milk is not listed on their national site, indicating it’s not available everywhere.
The Atkins diet of course uses a lot of diabetic products; googling low carb on Amazon will turn up a few. But I wish I could help you on the milk thing.
Thanks