Miscellaneous Weekend Ramblings

The weekend flew by again, where does the time go?  I have to admit Carl and I love to play hooky from the garden (especially on Sundays in the autumn) and head for destinations unknown to hike. 
 

A few late waterlily blooms in the pond.

But, this fall is different, this year we're behaving ourselves, or depriving ourselves, depending on how you look at it. We are keeping our noses to the grindstone.  (Well, not actually on the grindstone, that would prove to be painful, but pretty darn close to it.)  


Our garden is tentatively scheduled to be part of a large national convention garden tour in 2019 which sounds a long way off until we look around and see the work we need to do, namely the silly castle construction.

The problem with gardening on a large scale is the work involved.  The garden never takes a break and goes for a hike.  I wish it would sometimes.   Weeds are constantly emerging, oh brother, are they; trees that seemed impossibly, comically far apart when planted as 1 gallon pot specimens suddenly grow into each other necessitating pruning, or moving, or removing.  

I've turned the hens loose in the gardens since the first of September and they are busily scratching out all the pine needle mulch and depositing it on the lawn.  I wish they'd be a little tidier, but I do know they are finding bugs and doing their fall clean up which I appreciate.  We had very little slug damage this year, and the Girls are a huge part of the success.  

 Speaking of birds, here's a look at the Fish Corral we put up last week to fend off the herons:

 We put standard wire poultry fencing in the water and stuck fiberglass fence posts into the mud bottom to hold the wire in place. 

  
We then took a bunch of bird netting, the kind you can buy to put over raspberry bushes to protect the fruit, and stretched the netting over the fence, tying it off in several places.

I tossed some fish food in the water and waited for almost five minutes before a few tiny, extremely skittish goldfish came out to eat. At least we have some itty bitty fish left.  I think I saw one small koi, but he was very timid and darted back into the corral; I hope my eyes didn't deceive me.   The sad part is a week ago I'd counted twenty-five koi, all over nine inches long.

  
We have a perfect setup for a corral since our pond has no liner in place; having a dirt bottom, we can stick fence posts in wherever we want.  I'm not sure how we'd make this sort of contraption if we had a liner to worry about puncturing.

  
The view from the north isn't much more glamorous; I'm going to take the patio furniture in for the winter.  I think we've got the herons outfoxed, I haven't seen any telltale signs, i.e. tracks in the mud or heron poop (their feces resemble whitewash spilled on the ground and pond surface; there's usually a lot of it, which makes sense when the bird is gorging himself with fish.)  The corral works great.  (If only we'd put it up sooner; this is truly like shutting the barn door after the cows are out.) 

 Another option that worked when we had a smaller, lined pond was to float a piece of styrofoam insulation on the surface of the water.   The heron would walk along in the water, trying to scare the fish out of hiding, but they soon learned to stay under the styrofoam; when the styrofoam moved, the fish moved with it.  I realize that's not a very attractive option, but it did work. Also, sinking large plant pots and or lengths of large diameter PVC pipe to the bottom of the pond provided hiding places, too.  

On Saturday and Sunday we mortared and mortared some more.

It's starting to change a little, don't you think?


 (Hopefully we'll find time for a walk before the snow flies though, we can't break all the traditions.)