Garden - Disaster Mansion

01/04/201813/04/2018

Wild life in the garden

Saw maybe my first woodpecker in the US today, I think it’s the Downy woodpecker (Picoides pubescens), it was pretty small, probably no bigger than a Starling.

Came across a lovely big bumble bee, we think it was the Common Eastern Bumble Bee (Bombus impatiens). It might be common but it was pretty cool. These bees are known to be hardy and will be the first to appear in spring.

The good pictures were taken from internet, mine are the rubbish ones.

We also had a bald eagle fly maybe 100m over the garden which was nice. We’re lucky to live by cliffs which seem to attract eagles and vultures.

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31/03/201831/03/2018

What is this tree?

Can anyone tell me what this tree is? It’s over 100′ tall, the trunk must be a good 4-5′ across and it has lots of small red blossoms on it. These trees are numerous around Kingston but I haven’t been able to identify it.

A beer or substitute for the first person who identifies it correctly.

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26/03/201811/12/2019

Clearing out the Garden

According to the neighbours the garden had been unattended for about a decade. In that time many hundreds of saplings (they looked like ash) have taken root. The small ones could be pulled out by hand but most needed digging out. Not hard but when you have hundreds it can get tiring. Spend two weekends on it so far and probably have half the garden cleared.

Worse than the trees are the creepers which are thick on the ground and like to put down roots every 6 or so inches which makes pulling them out hard.

The garden is a good space and we will first get accustomed to the levels and how we start to use it before we do anything. Currently we are thinking of some lovely blossoming trees and beautiful blue stone walls. We will visit https://www.opus40.org/ again to give us some inspiration.

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