October on my web page

One of the photos from the October photo album on the Gardening page of my web page.  In March of this year, Godaddy let me know that I had malware on my page.  Over the next few months they cleaned up the malware and we now have an SSL certificate on the page.   Since March I have reloaded all of the albums I had previously finished, using the GoDaddy FTP to upload.  I have decided to remake albums in Gardening; from January to May.  And have, completed January, and new albums for June, July, August, September and October.  I have added quite a few new pages, to Travel; and will be making a few more albums in Gardening.  But I am happy with ALL of the stuff I have managed to get done on my page since March.

We have had a terrible drought all summer and now, since September we have been getting an overload of rain.  There were forest fires all over the interior of BC last summer.  My garden suffered from the water restrictions, the tree terrorists chopping down my plants.  God only knows what is wrong with those people.  I had Davey Tree people come in to trim up all the hedges.  They did this in mid-summer when we were in the middle of this drought.  The hedges seem to be doing ok now, though.  I have yet to get the old plum tree taken out and the lovely pin Oak taken down also.  The pin oak is too close to the garage.  I have renovated flower bed along the old sidewalk at the back; taking out the old perennials that have been taken over by the michaelmas daisies, and replacing them with milkweed and fennel, new tulips, and the new soil that was in the pots containing these replacement plants.  Hopefully these plants will take hold and I can get some monarchs to enjoy the milkweed, and maybe even become a place for them to lay eggs.  Perhaps the swallow tail butterflies will like the fennel.  I have also renovated the flower bed in front of the bamboo that was also taken over by michaelmas daisies.  I have a couple of milkweed plants in there, to and a few other new perennial plants.  The thyme circle seems to be rejuvenating and filling in the spots that have gone bare. 

I am now in the process the keeping up to the fallen leaves, and doing bits of cleanup all over the garden.  The germander needs cutting back and the irises need cleaning up.  I want to get the old compost bin emptied to the back bed behind the old garage, and use it to load up the rest of the leaves, this year.  The moss garden is looking good with all the rain and it, too needs cleaning up.  All in all, the garden is looking good. 

We have new neighbors on the west side where a family of Syrians are renting the house.  They have a trashy looking shed in the back for their chickens.  Nice looking big red chickens.  The chickens seem to have found the grass to be greener on my side of the fence once or twice.  They go home to roost at night.  I don't think there is anything back there that the chickens will damage. 

We have had a rather trying summer this year with the purchase of our new camper van.  The delivery date kept us anxiously waiting most of the summer to get it.  There is a lot of new computer stuff that we need to learn about driving it, and running things in the camper.  It has real mattresses and lots of storage space, a pantry, a generator, solar panels on the top that actually feed into the  house battery, so we could run a few things on this power.  It has a shower, for short showers.  Pat likes driving it.  But we seem to be having trouble with the battery in the Mercedes diesel; it keeps losing voltage.  Pat took it to the dealers but they could find nothing wrong with the battery.  Pat has disconnected it and we will see if it keeps running down.  Or this might just be the solution to keeping it over wintered or when we are not using it for long drives and camping trips. 

So, it is no wonder I have not had time to post to my blog.  But Megashot has been shut down, so I have more time in that regard.  Facebook just does not hold much interest for me.