Garden in February

 

The Anna's hummingbirds have over wintered.   They seem to have survived.

The view of the drystream meandering under the deck.  The moss is luxuriant under the steps and up to outter post that holds up the deck.  The rest of the moss garden needs more encouragement.  It is coming along nicely, considering I just started it last summer.    This is a view of the water garden from deck.  Photos from the 15 of February.

Today when I went to throw fish food over the deck railing into the pond I was dismayed to see that the pond was about one quarter empty.  I had just topped it up two days ago.  So, this required immediate action to rectify the situation.  Some of the stones from under the little Lebanon cedar had slid into the pond.  They were on the pot ledge, so I could reach them and drag them out.  I examined the area around the pond and found no other damage.  I can only assume that the water fall was running too  fast and I was losing water out the side of it.  Either that or there was a great pink elephant drinking and I missed it!  I cleaned the filter on the pump and reset it to run at a lower feed of water to the fall.  And topped up the pond again.  I shut off the pump to the waterfall.  If I lose water again, I will have to consider that I have a serious pond leak in the pond.  I have no idea what I would do if that is the case.  Perhaps get the pond done professionally.  Later in the afternoon I went out to see if the water level had changed.  The water level seemed to be topped up.  AND.. I saw the fish... I could count at least 6 of them.  So, if there was a creature in the pond, it had not been after the fish.  I have some black plastic pipe where the fish can hide from predators, too.  My fish are very wary and do not even come up to feed.

I have most of my clothes ready to pack for our trip.  I need to have the legs of one pair of pants  shortened.  Tomorrow I shop again.  I would like to get a couple or three blouse tops and some very comfy black pants for traveling.  

James and Bruce have finished the restoration of Pat's 1912 Ford Torpedo Roadster.  It looks great.  I hope to get photos of it tomorrow, or soon, too.  They say it will be slower than the Speedster, but it has a roof, doors and glory be! a windshield.  Not nearly as wild as the Speedster but far more comfortable!  Excitement abounds at our house!

Cyrus has got Megashot moved to the new cloud servers.  They are having a few little delays in sorting it all out but today it was great, fast and more and more people joining and building their pages.  No new communities yet.  We are over 100 registered now.  It is going to mushroom, fast.  People seem very impressed with the quality of photography and photo art on the site and are very protective of the site.  We have soooo many great features... not all totally finished yet... but they are in the works.  One that really rocks is the ability to make a slideshow with music on our profile presentation.  In fact, when they are finished building this feature, we will be able to make up to 20 of these slideshows, and save each of them in a playlist.