Archive for the ‘Garden’ Category

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Tree Removal

Tuesday, October 8th, 2024

At the end of our driveway, right in the corner of the neighbors property, was a massive eastern white pine tree. It was planted when the house was built, making it older than Kristin and I, and had a trunk wider than me. Today it was removed.

It was an extraordinary process: four large trucks arrived, blocking our driveway and much of the street. They started by erecting this unusual cherry picker to take down some of the lower branches and to (I presume) make way for the bigger crane.

The foliage was so dense it was hard to see exactly how they dismantled it, but the crane you can see was ‘catching’ the large branches and eventually trunk sections as they were cut. The guy doing the cutting was somehow attached to the tree and not using a second crane. Maybe he climbed up? I bet he had nerves of steel.

It took most of the day – at least six hours. Most of this was taking down the top half or so, and the rest was much faster. The noise was endless and extremely loud, much of which came from the industrial wood chipper that they fed the branches into (the red machine on the right). Trucks came and went periodically, probably taking away woodchips.

The biggest noise was toward the end when they picked up and dropped the trunk pieces too big to grind – almost as long as a car – into the back of an another truck. Each drop sounded like a bomb going off, vibrated the house and scared the hell out of our cats.

But that was nothing compared to the cacophony of the robotic stump grinder:

The guy standing next to it controlled it remotely. It took quite a while – at least half an hour – for him to finish grinding the stump below ground level, and the noise was like a million wasps surrounding the house.

And then they were done! A dozen or so guys and a small fleet of trucks packed up and left. I can only imagine how much the entire operation cost.

I know the neighbor was sick of cleaning up pine needles (which were incredibly abundant last year) and concerned about branches or even the tree itself falling, but it’s a shame such a regal and aged tree is now just… gone. I’ll miss it, and I hope he plants something in its place.

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Bird of Paradise

Tuesday, May 10th, 2022

It’s time for a new LEGO kit:

This is the third in their ‘botanical’ series, and as a child of the jungle myself, naturally this called to me!

It’s the biggest of the botanical kits so far, mostly because (unlike the flower bouquet) it comes with a pot.

It also came with a number of tiny (~ 5 mm) golden rings. These are dazzling, and apparently somewhat special (the kit mentions it has more of them than any other LEGO kit) but they are embedded inside the pot and you can’t even see them in the finished product!

The pot is dense and heavy, and wouldn’t be fun to dismantle. Obviously the bulk is required to prevent the piece from falling over when made.

The stalks are made from smaller pieces joined together, rather than very long axles, and therefore the plant would be very customizable. I followed the instructions perfectly 🙂

Speaking of which this was a very easy kit to make, even if you’ve not done LEGO before. It was a pleasant build as we watched Japan walking videos on YouTube, and dreamed of our next visit to Japan…

Doesn’t this resemble the real thing!?! I expect as I scampered around the dense jungles of my place of birth I saw these flowers often as I listened to the singing of real life birds of paradise!

The last step was to add the soil, which was hundreds of small brown circular pieces. I expect if you bought enough of these it would make good cat litter.

And here’s the finished piece! It’s lovely isn’t it? It’s also very large, but looks great on a mantle. As with the other two botanicals, I think this one will find a permanent position in our home.

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Halloween Decorations

Sunday, October 24th, 2021

Covid ‘canceled’ Halloween last year, and nothing much happened in the way of decorations or trick-or-treaters. This year it seems people are making up for 2020, since the local decorations have taken it to a new level!

That’s a quartet of creepy children in a yard not far from here. They are on a framework which I believe spins when switched on. They’re quite disturbing even up close and I imagine a real scare for young children!

The same house has a hanging skeleton (with axe in chest) and a disturbing evil clown. The quality of these decorations are leagues beyond even a few years ago, and they’re so common this year!

All of the above is in our street alone! Giant animated inflatable trees, a massive pumpkin with a flame light effect, a dog skeleton and another skeleton rising from a grave!

One of the best in our street is this Sadako (the evil long-haired girl from the Japanese film series The Ring) sitting on a swing blocking a front door. I imagine on Halloween night they’ll light this creepily, and it’ll be terrifying for kids to have to push her out of the way!

But the most impressive decorations we’ve seen this year utilize these $80 posable life-sized skeletons sold at Walmart:

People have been so creative with these! Here’s one display not far from our house:

Mum, dad, child and a dog – all skeletons! They spent big on this didn’t they?

A little farther down the road we see this guy keeping watch next to a mailbox:

Fantastic isn’t it?

And then just down the road from our house the owners have put two of these guys and poles and even strung up a net and shuttlecock to make this incredible display:

Skeleton badminton players! And they’ve even lit it at night:

Let’s hope the children are out trick-or-treating this year. It would be shame for all these decorations to not be appreciated 🙂

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Green Thumb Days

Thursday, July 30th, 2020

We planted some seeds. How did they turn out? Let’s look!

That’s the ‘left’ planter on the back patio (this is a rare post from my computer so you can click on the images to see them in higher resolution). The whiskey barrel is old and falling apart so it may be it’s final year, and we planted morning glory seeds in it. These photos were taken over an approximately 4 month period, about one a week. You can see a few (purple) flowers in the second last photo, but it’s starting to look a bit ragged probably due to the excessive heat it receives during the day.

That’s the ‘right’ planter, and you can easily see the dilapidation of this barrel (not to mention the no-longer-functional palantir in the middle). As with the other barrel we planted morning glories and you can see they flourished in this one since it is partially shaded by the tree above. However they are still showing sun damage in the final few shots. Had I taken any of these photos during the early hours you would see more flowers; they are mostly closed during the day.

And here we have close to the full life cycle of marigolds from seeds. I bought the seed packet for next-to-nothing at Walmart, and planted all the seeds in two cheap pots. Sue told me that this was a bad idea since they’d compete for nutrients and it seems she was correct. Even though I tried to thin them out when they (all!) sprouted, their roots had entangled a bit and this was difficult so I decided to leave them to their own devices. As you can see they started promisingly but quickly became weeds. They were not helped by a rogue chipmunk hell-bent on digging out the soil and monsoonal rains that kept knocking them over for days at a time. Basically these plants were cursed, and their ruinous lives led to a wretched final state. If we actually see flowers I’ll deem it a miracle!

So there you go. Some success and some failure, but mostly more the former. Lessons were learned, and next time the marigold seeds will fare better 🙂

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Snowpocalypse 2019

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

In the last 48 hours we received a lot of snow. I took regular photos from the same angle to show the accumulation. Here they are:

The above three run from noon to about 5 pm on Sunday. The snow was falling lightly at first, but picked up after nightfall.

The above is a 10 pm shot. It looks brighter than the 5 pm one due to the remarkable low light camera mode of my new iPhone. You can clearly see the snow has been coming down since the last shot: the driveway is barely visible here.

Above shows 6 am Monday morning. According to the weather service we’d received about 16 inches (~38 cm) overnight, and it was heavy snow which proved difficult to remove. Down near the street it was as deep as our snowthrower can handle, and although we have a powerful machine it really struggled.

That’s immediately after we finished clearing the snow. It was still falling lightly at this point. Although it was Monday almost everything was cancelled and we were both staying home for the day.

By around lunchtime not much had changed. The footprints were from the postman, who isn’t stopped by ‘a bit’ of snow!

By evening though (this is around 8 pm Monday) you can see it had built up somewhat again: there had probably been another 3-4 inches by this point.

And then we woke today to this: another 6+ inches since yesterday. Once again it was tricky to remove due to heaviness and the cold (it was -4 C) but at least it had stopped falling.

And here’s the final shot, after we had finished this morning. All told the official tally is 22.6 inches of snow (57.4 cm) in Albany and slightly more where we live just to the south. It was the 8th biggest snowfall of all time in this city. I expect well remember it for a while 🙂

Posted in Blog, Garden, Home, Miscellaneous, Nature | 1 Comment »

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