Sunday, August 22, 2010

Bees

I have ignored my garden blog all summer.  And I have ignored my garden. It makes me sad to go look at my veggies all gone to seed.  At leas the lettuce and radishes have gone to seed, I think I can salvage the rest...but no peeking until I do!  ~grins~

The Handyman took out our dead Mountain Ash this afternoon. It looks funny to me with out a "tall" tree there, even tho ours was dead.
Later this fall, we'll probably transplant our Hawthorne tree to that space.  Or next spring.  The Hawthorne is in a bad place and will soon be taken over by our Mulberry tree.  It needs a new home.

So....a few random pictures of getting the Mountain Ash out of there, and then, some bees on the Hollyhocks.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Trees

We've had bad luck with our trees this year. Earlier this spring the Handyman cut down our cherry tree. We knew it was coming.  Every year for the past couple of years, we've had some branches die off. So that was to be expected.

What was not was our Mountain Ash. And our Blue Spruce (okay, we live in the desert, so maybe), and I tried to ignore our Purple Globe Locust tree....tried to ignore it as we lost limb by limb by limb in wind storms.

Can you see our little Mountain  Ash skeleton?
I love a Mountain Ash tree, but probably should have been concerned since it wasn't a "Desert" Ash.  I have high hopes tho.  I don't want my backyard to look like the desert--even tho I love the desert.  I want it to look as green as it can.



Our dead---even tho the Handymany won't admit it--Blue Spruce tree.



He even wastes water on it...thinking it will come back.





The Locust tree....it was diseased. But at one time it had been a beautiful full tree that shaded AND was a barrier between our very close neighbors. Now, we have a broken stump and it is so sad.



The Handyman is cutting it down after it fell.


As I said, during a few previous wind storms, we had lost parts of the tree, but yesterday afternoon, I was upstairs (yes, during another wind/thunder storm) and I kept hearing something thumping the side of the house. I looked at my bedroom window and there was a tree...where a tree shouldn't have been. Darn it anyway!


Hard to see....but there is a broken off tree trunk there.


A different view.  We still have the one little limb there, but we will dig this all up next weekend.


Another look.



It was really diseased....  see the holes?


More holes---I wonder what it was?  We should probably have our friends, the tree sprayers come check it out.

And  look and see all the "sawdust" around the trunk?  Something has been boring into it for quite sometime.



When it's all said and done, I really like summer storms. I'm weird like that.
But it's funny, while the wind took down our tree, it really didn't mess much with my patio table and placemats, Or the newspaper.  Now that's odd.