Digging, planting, scanning

Two days ago I finished digging over the vegetable/cutting garden. I have started the cement block path, but have run out of blocks and must get some more.
I planted the 2 dahlias amoung the foxgloves that I m0ved to the back by the yews. The foxgloves are doing well. I then planted 3 rows of glads. The blue and white row - blue named Airborne, and white Innocence.

I have been scanning in the old photos of the creation of my water garden. There will be 12 steps - loaded and annoted in 3 pages with 4 photos per page. Step 12 will be the water lily from 2002. I made this pond in April, 1998. After that the pictures will be loaded to the life in the water garden. I will make up a sub page called water garden with three parts to it. The third part will be the Japanese garden (which surrounds the pond). It is slowly coming together. After it is loaded I must try find the guy on PhotoSIG who was building a garden and wanted to see my photos of this.

This week end is the Spring Meet of the RROC and BD club. Candy and Gary are staying over with us, so there won't be much done on my stuff for a few days now.

The Woodland, Water and Vegetable Gardens

All the pictures except the Japanese garden were taken today. It has been a very warm day -- up to 21 degrees Celcius. I filled the pond and skimmed off the debris from the top. The marsh marigold and the water hawthorn are blooming. I cleaned up a bit and watered around the pond hoping to encourage the moss. I clipped a few branches off the plum tree that hang too low around the pond. I need to add a bit more pea gravel to the paths and rock edges.

The woodland is looking pretty good. The photo is of the anemonella. The bleeding heart, honesty, blue bells, aubretia and a fawn lillies are in bloom. My pile of pruning sticks are getting pretty high. I should call Tom to come and haul stuff away. The path in the woodland looks good, and almost natural. I could use a bit more rough bark chips for it.

I dug a bit more in the vegetable garden, so that I am about 2/3 finished digging it over. The compost bin is full and I am moving weeds to the old bin. I must get my blocks and get the path done so that I can get the dahlias and the gladiolas planned. The foxgloves that I moved were looking a bit droopy until I gave them some water. The rosemary is in bloom and the other herbs are looking ok. They will all need a good pruning.

Most of the new rock plants will stay in their pots untill they are a bit bigger. The little willow stays in a pot forever. The guy who sold it says it forms its own bonsai shape. So, it shall be on the deck in a clay pot. The big pink clover and the smaller one good out to the front. Pink by the water tub and the other one in the tiny round bed with the sundial.

I put round up on the weeds in the driveway strip 2 days ago. Hope it works. Also painted morning glory. That bed could use some more arabis when the weeds are dead, and maybe more big geraniums.

At the Rock and Alpine Plant show

A few photos from the Rock and Alpine Plant show yesterday. Still having a bit of trouble getting the RAW shots the right color.

I came away from the show with a few tiny goodies! 9 plants and $45.00 lighter.

Today I tried to get a few 'off the beaten path' photos for my webpage album ' my walk - spring' I could not seem to get anything that was not blurring or blown from all the sunshine. It was a lovely day, but I did not get any digging done. The guys were up at the crack of dawn to go over to the Mainland for a motorcycle show.

I reviewed my old prints and found about 9 that I might use for the album - Creating the Water Garden. Shall have to scan them in and decide if I am going to do the water garden in three albums or just number the photos so that they appear on the right pages within the whole album.. I will only need 8 then for the creation page, and sequential number of 4 for each of the other albums; that is, the water gardens (tubs included) and the Japanese Garden. Somehow, I want to do these up from my own thumb nails with text, probably in a table again.

More digging

This is a shot of the Tourist Information building I took last night. Hand held and RAW. Turned out not too bad, considering I have no control over the shutter speed or time of exposure and no tripod. We went to see "The Fastest Indian" last night. Excellent movie!

I did more digging today and have the vegetable garden about half dug over. I moved some of the foxgloves to the back corner by the yews, as they can stand some shade. I want to get the glads and the dahlias planted along that path, just as soon as I get the cement slabs and get them laid into the path.

Weeding and digging

I have about 1/4 of the area I call the vegetable garden dug over. The last few years it has been wild, with self sown flowers. This year I hope to do vegetables again. Plus I have two dahlias that I am going to add and about 30 gladiolas. I have added the compost bin (old garbage bin that Pat has cut holes in) It looks good on the garden and saves me the trip to the compost bin with this garden stuff. The new bin is already full, so is the old one. I have taken the leaf mold that was in the old wire bin on the garden, and put it around the rhubarb. I want to redo the walk way along the side as well, and need a dozen or so square cement blocks. The area for the iris will be expanded a tiny bit. I need to trim up the wisteria after it blooms and try get it under contol. The lilac by comparison is very civilized and there is no suckers on it. They are both coming into bloom. The bay laurel will need trimming. The clematis is getting out of hand too and needs to be trained and tied up properly. I shall have to tie it to the wisteria and make them intertwine.

Series Page

I finished the sub page 'Series' for my page today. This photo is for the series Beach Combing, should I ever get it loaded. I can now start creating more albums.

Photo.net is becoming more and more useless as people break up into chatroom type critiques and ratings. The site feed back forum is full of whining about low ratings. They never complain about an over abundance of high ratings. I wonder why. It is still good for information in the articles and forums. Photo.sig is run by thugs and has the same mate rating/critiquing problems. I think these sites have outlived their usefulness to me. The way these communities are set up puts us into conflict and competition for attention. Any honest opinion is with what seems like astonishment and silence. Waste of time and money. I shall attempt to better employ myself on sites that actually contain good information, or in reading the back pages and forums containing some actual information. Too hell with anything unrefined.

Today we spent about 3 hours with a financial advisor from the RB. This guy is good! Looks like he will have a good plan for us in a couple of weeks. yeaaaaaaaaaa!

Butchart Gardens and Soccer Tournament

Pam and Rachel were over for the weekend as Rachel and team were in a soccer tournament. There were hundreds of girls and boys from all over the Province attending this tournament. Rachel's team tied one game, won 2 and lost 1. It was a usually lightly raining but the games went on anyway. Was exciting to watch.

On Sunday between the morning game and the 4 o'clock game Pam, Rachel and I went to Butchart Gardens. Its pretty over whelming, even in the rain and at this time of year. Thanks Pam and Rachel for the visit. It was great fun.

I mowed the lawn and weeded some today. Things need weeding but otherwise its not too bad! The hyacinths, daffodils, some tulips, anemones, evergreen clematis, aubretia, arabis, polyanthus, pasque flower, and others are in bloom.

I am finally learning how to convert the RAWs without too much trouble.

Series Sub-page

I have got a fairly good start on my sub page "Series" I have set up the page with logo, menu and the table to insert the 22 thumbnails and text. I have 3 of the 22 finished. I think its looking pretty good, so far.

I finished my income tax forms today and should mail them off, as I get a refund. Take it with me when I go over to the lab tomorrow. Yach more blood tests.

The price was right

When Trevor was over to look at Pat's computer stuff, he mentioned that he had an old desk and did we want it? Just for the taking. I said yes, so they unloaded it into the garage. Pat and Andy brought it upstairs and Pat got to work on it shortly thereafter. We found we needed some hardware and paint. Next day we went to get the rails & wheels, handles and paint - with a nice walk up the galloping goose trail to the creek/rapids below Nob Hill. I did not have my camera. We got home and Pat put the rails in the desk and I painted the drawer fronts. Today, I sanded and painted again.

Last Monday, Dan had been over to get his Smart Car parts and well, there is another sheep. Pat brought 2 home when they had them in stock in a couple of days. While waiting for the paint to dry I shot the sheep and we sent the photos off to them, in the continuing saga of the sheep. I really should add this to my series page.

I just finished reworking the pages with the new series; that total 18, and loading them. If I add the sheep saga I should come up with another one for the series. This shouldn't be hard, as my photography is all over the board. I cannot seem to settle down to doing any one thing. Today there was a short article about Man Hole Covers in the newspaper, so I feel like I am on the right track with that series.