Hey all,

I've been working in the garden this afternoon. I've taken out three dead threes / bushes. They really needed to go. And I've done some weeding. The spring cleaning isn't done yet with this, but every little bit helps. Pending the weather I'll continue next weekend. I hope we have good weather. That would be fun!

We have more weeding to do and our Apple tree needs to be replanted in the garden in front of our house. It should do better there! I think I'll take a few more things out next week and do some more weeding. After that the spring clean will be done and we can enjoy the garden again!

This is it for now. I'm going to work on my SAG-album again. Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 4:10 PM in Category: Garden
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Hey all,

I managed to finish the work on the pond. I have cleaned everything and I've put everything slowly back into the pond. I have refilled the pond with water. I'll keep an eye on it the coming weeks to check that the alges are not coming back and to check that the "Eendenkroos" isn't coming back.

I have put some more oxygen plants in the pond too. Maybe I'll put some more in later on, but for now it's enough. I can't put too much plants and other things too soon, now can I?

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 2:12 PM
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Hey all,

I've got pretty much to tell you today, so here it goes!

The Garbage
Well, the garbage from our bathroom is finally gone! James and my dad worked hard to bring it all to the dumpster. We have an empty garden again! And it gives a good feeling to finally be rid of all the garbage. It gives you the feeling the bathroom is really finished! I'm glad for that. With all the garbage, I kept having the feeling we were still working on the bathroom, while in fact it already was finished. It's wonderfull to have no more garbage in the garden!

I have also cleaned out one part of our shed. It really needed a lot of cleaning. A lot things from that part could go to the dumpster too, so that's done too! Now we can actually see what's in the shed again.

Work on the pond
We really needed to work on the pond. Our pond has two levels. The lower level was fine, allthough we needed to fill it to the old water level. With this drought the waterlevel dropped about 10 centimeters (or maybe even more). So I filled the pond today and now it's back to it's original water level. The fishes really liked the fact that they could swim through several waterplant again. Due to the drought, these plants have gotten a lot of insects and our fishes were really "grazing" in the plants to catch all het little insects. They even fought for it with eachother. It was funny to see!

The upperlevel of our pond is a completely other story. We have had a kind of weed in there. Here in the Netherlands we call it "Eendenkroos". This is a really stubborn weed, which can really take over the pond and that was not our intention. We've tried to get rid of it. To do this, we had to take out the plants we had in there and we've had to use a biochemical thing to get rid of this thing. In the end it did seem to have done it's job. The only problem we had left was an enormous amount of alges. It makes the water smell dirty and we had so much alges we couldn't see anything else. So I started to clean this part of the pond yesterday evening. We have had some special snails ("Posthoornslakken") which eat alges, but they couldn't keep up with this stuff. Anyway, I had to make sure we weren't going to through these alges away. This made a tedious job, but this morning I succeeded in recovering the last of them and I emptied this part of the pond for the most part. Since it's about 35 degrees Celcius again today, I'm not gonna work on the pond anymore. I'll continue tomorrow morning when it's not so hot.

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 11:00 PM
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Hey all,

Well, I have finally done some gardening today. We have bought three more herb plants yesterday (when we actually went shopping for my aunts' birthday :) ) and two sacks of cacao beans (well, the "Dops" (as it is called in Dutch) to be exact). I wanted to plant the three herb plants today and I wanted to spread the cacaobean dops (or whatever you call them in English). And while doing that I thought it would come in handy to plant the bulbs too, so...... the garden in the back is ready for the winter. As far as it will be anyway :)
Believe it or not, the cacao been dops actually still smell like cacao! So right now our whole garden smells like we poured a few liters of chocolate milk in it!

Now that we have had more then 1,5 year in this house and this garden, I'm glad to see that everything in the garden is growing so good. We didn't know what to expect, but it's wonderful! The plants are growing very good and we have a lot of life in the garden! It's nice to see the birds fouraging for food and to see that our frogs and fishes are doing so well too. Without extra food, they manage to stay alive and healthy!

This is it for now.......... Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 12:54 PM
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Hey all,

Well, Autumn has really started here in the Netherlands. Although the sun was shining yesterday, the temperature wouldn't get abo 16 degrees Celcius. And guess what? This morning the temperature was around freezing point. The car didn't have frozen windows, but it was cold. I have decided to wer my wintercoat for the first time this season. I didn't expect I would do that until sometime in October. And I still have some gardening left to do. I have to weed and make sure we protect our plants enough.

Of course that's not all. I'm thinking about making something for the birds too. I wanted to do this last year already, but I think I'll start with early this year, so that it will be finished when the birds really need extra food. It's always nice to see the birds in the garden, looking for food (and also actually finding enough of it, apparently.... they keep coming back!).

Maybe it's time to clean the pond too, but we'll see about that. We don't want to disturb our frog(s), now do we? :)

Anyway, there's enough left for us to do, so I think that's something will do in the coming weekend, provided it doesn't rain.

Babbled by Ilse at 7:53 AM
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This is just a little test to see how it works Let's see if I can do with this what I'd like to do..........

Babbled by Ilse at 1:57 PM
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