Panama Hill Park

Yesterday I walked an extra half mile to the Pond in Panama Hill Park.  As the sign says this is an environmentally sensitive area.  The evergreen trees they planted are getting taller and the grasses are filling in around the pond edges.  It has been awhile since I walked here.  The meadows in the park look very nice at this time of the year.   There were very few ducks and I saw only two dragon flies. There is a well used path that goes right along side of the pond, so I cannot see this pond getting very many water birds in it. 

This is the stone path in the front garden now.  The Irish heather looks very good, and the ornamental oregano on the path edge has been performing beautifully for the last month or two, with its lovely delicate pink blossoms. 

This morning I did a bit more work on the cement blocks that I have put around the water meter .. I dug out the plants that were growing up between the blocks and moved them to other areas around the garden.  These plants are tough, and floppy.  They have fuzzy grey green leaves and blue flowers.  They look good when there is a big clump of them.  I shall try to grow them with the montebresias that are a bright red.  We are having a nice soft rain now, and the garden is looking better already for having received some moisture.
I noticed that I now have 3 lilies up in the little rockery in the front garden.  They should be very nice next year.  The path is quite clean and free of weeds.  I would like to get that sicilian mint growing between the stones, now that they are free of clover and other weeds.  The violets are still popping up everywhere and I shall have to keep after them to get rid of them.  With the improvement of the clay soil the violets are much easier to pull out and get the whole root out now.  The moss garden needs weeding.  I managed to get a bit of weeding and deadheading done in the woodland garden and it looks not too bad.  The irises will need more weeding and a mulch of compost added.  Hopefully, they will bloom next year.  When they bloom I should thin them out so I get bigger plants growing.
Last night I made up 3 kinds of soup - cabbage/ham cream soup, borscht and carrot/ginger.  I have some of each for our lunches and one of each frozen for future lunches.  We are no longer buying canned soup, as it is just too salty.  Most of my soups are made with chicken stock.  I made up some fish stock a few days ago and did up a big pot of seafood chowder with it.  We have about 3 meals of that frozen.  So, I now have a good supply of frozen soups and a few other things I can just take out of the freezer and heat for a good meal. 

The deer pasture

In the block across the street from us, the Colquitz River and the high density power lines create a Park area that is rather wild but belongs to B.C. Hydro and Sannich parks.    When I was returning from my walk yesterday this doe was in the area I call the deer pasture.  This is directly across the street from my house.  Finally, the deer are back. I have not seen a deer here for a long time. The black berries are almost ready and are being picked over by people.  One of the neighbors has been taking his dog here and not cleaning up after it.  He has since stopped this ill conceived practice.   We did not talk to him or mention it to Saanich Parks people.  Another neighbor may have done this, as I don't see the dog stinking up the place any longer.  Maybe that is why the deer are back!  The deer do not eat my plants, at all, so I love to see them.  My apple tree is loaded with apples and I think the deer may be getting some of them later this winter.  I take them across the street and drop them off... a few dozen a day and they disappear. 
A couple of days ago, when returning from my walk, I noticed a couple of people on bicycles with backpacks.  They were not riding, but standing still when I came out of the trees along the trail.  Next to them was a feral rabbit, the kind that are over-running the University grounds and are being 'taken to a good home on the farm' .  There are protests, of all silly things, about the rabbit population being controlled.  They are totally destroying the grounds at the University!  Now, its seems these bunny huggers have dropped off a breeder in our area.  We have the indigenous little brown bunnies.  I do NOT want to see these feral rabbits take over the habitat of the brown bunnies.  We also have Eagles in our park, so hopefully the feral rabbits will be controlled by the eagles.  They should be easy pickin'.

A new season

These blue perennial geraniums are very good garden plants.  The one with the felt-like textured dark green leaves has found its way into a few spots around the garden.  It is not invasive, I moved transplants of it to available spots.  There are some other, tougher perennial geraniums growing in the strip along beside the driveway.  Very good plants for beneath the cedar hedge.  They never need watering and fussing over.

The malva are good perennial plants that I think are in the hollyhock family.  You can see that the leaves get rust like the hollyhocks in my garden do.  They seed themselves around a bit and I don't mind seeing them come up where ever they may be.  Last year I planted a lavatera that has flowers like the malvas. It gets quite big, like a bush and will be covered with the pink flowers.  It needed water this year to get established.  Hopefully I will have pictures of it in bloom, next year.  It is deciduous, so adds nothing to the garden in wintertime.

This is the fleeting flower of the unknown plant with the blue-green thin leaves and seed heads that the finches like.  This is plant seeds its self everywhere.  I have to keep after it to keep ahead of all the seedlings growing everywhere.  It does not seem to spread across the road into the park though. 

I managed to get a photo of one of the little European wall lizards.  They are usually too fast to catch and disappear in a flash.  Upon examination of the photo of this one, I find that the lizard is molting and so that is why it could not run away.  These little creatures are great in the garden.  I am sure they eat bugs of all kinds.  I still see lady bugs in the garden, so they are not eating them.
These photos are from July.  August has gone zipping past, with just the bare minimum of maintenance in the garden this year.  We had a good half inch of rain a few days ago.  The Autumn rains are starting, hopefully.
We had no yellow plums this year because the blooms froze.  There does not seem to be any purple plums either.  The apple tree, though, is loaded with apples.  One of the branches is leaning way over and touching the ground.  My vegetable garden was a bust, again.
On the other hand, our new photo upload /networking site is growing steadily.  Our alexa ranking will be breaking the 100,000 mark soon.  In this ranking system, the lower the number, the better the rank.  I have added Google ads to my communities, on the site.  I set up Adsense for google ads on my blog and can ad the ads to my communities on Megashot.net.  This is my referral code.  You can use it to see the site and register. You can see the ads and the communities I have built on the site:  In the Garden, The Honest Fox, Whimsies, Flares and Echoes, Playtime, and Abstract Art.  The ads are text ads and unobstrusive.  I actually like their appearance. I set up my adsense account on August 10th.  Since then I have actually earned $50.00.  It was interesting learning how to do this, and actually user friendly and easy to do.  I have trouble not clicking on my own ads, which is a definite no-no. Of course, the ads are gardening oriented and in my own area.    I suppose I could take URLs on the ad and put them into my browser to look at the advertising sites.  That would not be clicking on my own ads!  I will need some chipped rock for my woodland path.  The delivery charges for the bit of stuff I need are expensive.  I don't have a truck to haul dirt or rocks.   I would like to compare the delivery prices on some of the ads I see.  Well, I guess I will need to use Google's search.  It works very well too.

Gardening in Summer

The thyme circle in bloom on July 21, 2010

The little rockery in the front garden on July 21, 2010.  You see the white perennial snapdragon beside the iberis in the front.  The snapdragon is an excellent little rockery plant.  The blue poppy just behind them has died.  No idea why. This area has had some attention this year and should be looking good next year.   There is an orange lily that was given to me and there is another lily that is just now coming up.  It is an oriental lily and should be taller and fragrant.  I have a daphne that is going to become a small shrub over time, and fragrant too.  It is new this year from the Rock and Alpine show and sale.  I am happy to say it is doing fine, now too.  The smaller daphne on the back garden rockery is in bloom now.  It is going to be another good rock garden plant.

This is a close up of the holes that some little wasps are building in between the stones of the stone path.  There do not seem to be as many of them now.  I have been seeing little wall lizards around the back and the front garden.  There has been garden snakes across the street in the wild park.  Hopefully they will migrate into my garden.

The last two photos are also from July 21st.  They are the decorative seed heads from the pasque flower and from the unknown plant that seeds itself every where.  I think I will call it the lovely nuisance.  I think it arrived in the bird seed, as I have seen finches feeding on the seeds.

This morning I watered around the front a bit.  I moved some of the Lady's mantle to a few new spots.  Its a very hardy plant.  It was growing over the path to the water meter.  I now have the path cleared, and some cement blocks and  flat stones put in place for the water meter reader, who seems to be quite helpless and blind.  This spot is ugly, but I am becoming accustomed to it.  I think my best heather did not survive  the move.  It looks like its dying.  I watered at the back a bit and did a bit of deadheading and topped up the pond.  The apple tree is loaded with fruit and is leaning way over.  There are no gold plums, as the late frost killed the blooms.    On Monday, I walked from the mall and brought home an erodium and another little rockery plant for the front garden.  I think our heat wave is over now, so I should be able to put them out in the ground now.  We have had some very hot days but today is cooler and cloudy.  Hoping for rain.

We went for lunch to the Gorge Vale golf course and we were to Matticks Farm at that golf course this week.  I had a spinach salad both places, both very good.
On Tuesday I found I had won $1000.00 on the extra of a lottery ticket.  We now have to go out to the casino to collect any winnings over $200.00.  If you win over $9,999.99 you must go to Richmond to collect.  We got out to the casino and found that I needed picture ID, which I did not have, to cash this winning ticket.  The whole process was extremely annoying.  I missed seeing this winning ticket on the lottery website.  This website is also a very annoying set up.
Last nite I set up a new 'Abstracts" community on Megashot.  It seems to be well attended for a new community.  My Adsense Ads  are not going to make me rich!  I have earned about $27.00 so far.