Eradicating an Oak Tree from the Peach Tree

One of our peach trees has been infested by an oak tree!

The only thing we know to do about it is to chop out all the new growth.

I actually quite like the leaves on the oak tree, but I think I like the fruit on the peach tree better. :D

You can see in this picture that the oak tree is growing mostly off to one side of the peach tree, but it actually has some shoots coming right up through the middle of the peach tree's trunk:

Canicus (Pronounced Con-EE-cuss - It's Spanish for Marbles) and Midnight, my kittens, had to come see what I was doing. They wanted to hide behind this box though:


Look at this big pile of oak branches I clipped off:

I wish I thought that was the end of that, but somehow I'm afraid the saga will continue as it has for the past few years. Any suggestions for a total annihilation of this tree would be greatly appreciated.

My New Vases - Repaired

I was given 2 of these vases that were cracked because they were in an unsaleable condition. One had 2 of the feet clear broken off. The other just had one foot cracked. This article will show the one that was cracked. This is the box it came in:

If you ask me, that's an awful picture of it on that box. It's way prettier in real life. Here are some pictures of the damage. It's made of cast resin so it broke pretty easily:



I pulled it out a little:

And put some glue in the crack:

Then I pushed it up tight and held it for a little while:

All better:

Isn't it beautiful?

No vase is complete without flowers. I got my gloves on and clipped a few:

I love cut flowers. I added a few more to fill up the vase since it's pretty big. Isn't this a nice home improvement?

I didn't put flowers in the other one yet, but they look nice on either side of my headboard.

New Gardening Gloves

I mentioned in an earlier article that I had to get some new gardening gloves. I bought a 5 pack from Costco for about $17. They're Wells Lamont brand:

These are just your standard everyday knit gardening gloves that you can buy about anywhere other than that they have little dots of rubber on them. They call them Dotted Jersey Gloves:

I've never been disappointed with a pair of knit gardening gloves other than the fact that they don't usually last a whole season. This next pair they called Latex Coated Knit Gloves. They're supposed to be better because the sticker-burs aren't supposed to poke through them. I'll have to let you know if I end up having any troubles with them:

Then they had some Nitrile Coated Knit Gloves with double dipped finger tips for extra finger nail protection. Good! I never like to break a nail. :D

This pair of gloves looks as if I'm planning on having a sword fight with them. They called them Leather Palm Garden Gloves for heavy duty use. I liked them for pruning rose bushes since our bushes are extra thorny. Good thing they're green or they might have been appropriated for use with my father's Jeep for winching! (He hate's green.)

I think I liked this last pair the best. I think it might be the little flower on the strap that fastens it tight around your wrist, or maybe it's the fact that they're machine washable. Then again, maybe I just like them because they look like they might last a season. They called them Synthetic Leather Gloves with LiquiCell Technology. That last bit means it's supposed to prevent blisters. I don't have enough time to spend gardening to get blisters anyway, so I didn't worry too hard about that. Here they are:

This is a little off the subject, but I've always wondered if those silica packages that came in things would swell up real big like those kinds you buy for house plants so I gave it a try. I dumped them into a cup:

The beads are tiny:

There are probably 100 of them in this cup:

I put plenty of water in for them to absorb:

Guess what happened....Drum Roll!

...Absolutely Nothing!!! Anyway, it was a nice experiment. :) I threw them out.

Spiffing-Up the Plant Shelf

When you walk in your bedroom and see something as beautiful as this lovely African Violet...

...on your lovely plant shelf...

...you probably won't notice that it's incomplete. This "Papaya Grove" as I like to call it, needs repotted:

I grew that from seed. We got a papaya and I planted all the seeds from it thinking maybe a few would come up. I think they all came up...it just took about 4 months for them to sprout! This Impatiens plant also needs re-potted:

But I think the last thing you're going to notice is how dirty the shelf is:

It's amazing how much dust we collect in our homes without noticing. Well, I went ahead and re-potted the Papaya Grove:

And I re-potted the Impatiens:

I really like Black Gold brand Water Hold Cocoblend Potting Soil. If I buy it, that's what I get and nothing else. I have used other kinds that people have given me, but I never like them as well. I taped the bag shut after I got through potting up those plants. I don't want to imagine what my "Hermanita" (Pronounced like air-mon-eat-ah - It's the Spanish version of "Sis") would do when she found a whole big bag of dirt here nice and handy in my bedroom!

Next I piled all my plants around the room while I cleaned the shelf:

This on the wall is where the tomato seed package got wet and stuck to the wall when I was sprouting them this spring:

It was really stuck on there good too:

Look how nice the shelf looks now:

Isn't this most lovely now?

That plant on the left hand side is a few of the Papaya seedlings I re-potted for one of my co-workers who asked me for some. I think you'll agree that this shelf looks much more appealing to the eye than it's sister shelf across the room:

One of these days I'm going to come up with some fancy way to make those dark black cords not stand out so much against the bright white of the rest of the room. Feel free to drop me some ideas on that one!

New Bathroom Timer

We had 15 minute timer that had stopped working so we needed to replace it. It was the knob style that you turn to the time you want it to run:

I got my nifty 2 in 1 Stubby Quick Change Pocket Screwdriver that I got from Meritline for 89 cents and set to work:

For some reason the face plate wouldn't come off, so I had to use the screwdriver to pry it off:

Don't ask me why they used flat head screws to install the thing. I hate flat head screws, but nonetheless, out they came:

At this point I remembered that I'm not an electrician, so I better switch off the breaker so I won't get zapped. I don't know what those wires might be up to!

I took the wires off the old timer:

Again, lovely flat head screws; what good is a 2 in 1 Stubby Quick Change Pocket Screwdriver that I got from Meritline for 89 cents if I only get to use one side?! :D At this point, I took the new timer out of the box. Uh oh! Do you see any problems here?

FOUR WIRES! HELP! What am I going to do with twice as many wires as I think I need?! Perhaps I can consult with the instructions:

After pondering why these instructions weren't making any sense without actually reading anything very close I discovered they were in Spanish. That's one problem with being a Spanish student, it takes a little longer to register that it's not in the right language. The other side looked much more understandable:

English or Spanish; either way, it was all Greek to me...besides I was too lazy to read it. I shall converse with my brother who is an electrician:

I'll bet you thought you were going to find out how I got shocked, set the electrical on fire, had to buy a new timer, had to scrape melted wire nuts up off the floor, ect, etc, but no. HE WOULDN'T EVEN HELP ME! His reply? "I'll be over there tonight and put it in for you." So now I don't even know how to install one for if I want to sometime. :( At any rate, it does look nice:

You push the button to turn it on and again to change the time to run:

Next time I'm going to demand a tutorial on the installation! :D