Perception is Truth » photos

The Story of our Willow Tree

tony — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:56:21 +0000

Myself and Grete, we both like trees. We were sad when we had to fund cutting down a very large tree in the garden (for various reasons) and we promised we’d plant some to make up for it. We tried a cherry tree, but got it badly wrong and the tree it was grafted onto was the only thing grown (and would have been huge, so that had to come up). Then we saw a miniature willow tree and that sounded perfect.

So this year we got it, planted it and cared for it, within only two days it had sprouted a load of extra leaves and branches (more than the cherry tree ever did) and we thought we were onto a winner, and then it went wrong.

We’ve got several large ants nests in the garden, and either I plant the tree in one, or they moved into the soft earth shortly after. They swarmed all over the tree, and although I couldn’t see them doing any specific damage, they weren’t helping the root ball settle in. We also got a spot of super-hot weather (just two or three days) and the tree didn’t get enough water. The new foliage died. We were sad, we were killing another tree.

But I took some corrective measures, more top soil, and some solid application of the end of a lump of wood on the ground left the tree solidly bedded in. I watered it every day. I tried to kill the ants (but failed, as usual). I watered it some more. And it stuck it out, survived a few weeks of miserable weather and made it to the long strip of hot weather we’ve had. I’ve been out every day making sure that tree has enough water (even if the rest of the garden is turning into a desert).

I think it’s paid off – it flourished, new leaves, new branches, thickening of the branches already there. I think it might pull through.

But now we have aphids. Not one or two, but billions. We’ve never had aphids in the garden that I can remember seeing in any number, so it looks like we’ve brought them in with the willow and they may well be a specific willow based aphid. I’ve just been out to squish them, again. The ants look like they’re milking them.

I need a ladybird infestation!

Anyway, I don’t think the aphids will kill the willow, but they do generate some annoying issues (honeydew and the stuff that feeds on it, including wasps and mold).

So I’ll be out making sure they stay as dead as I can for the next few weeks, washing them off and squishing the hangers on.

I’m rootin’ for you miniature willow (pun intended), we can do this.

Willow when we got it in April:

Willow in mid-June:

Willow now:

My hands are too shaky, I don’t own a big enough tripod and the camera is really not good enough to take photo’s of ants and aphids, but I tried anyway.

Just aphids.

Ant vs Aphid (I think it’s milking them)

And last, but not least, more aphids.

Fixed (kinda)

tony — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:27:43 +0000

So it turns out it wasn’t anything I did re: the change of themes, it’s a small problem with the Mandigo theme not linking to the theme options page in WordPress v3 correctly. I can work around it for the time being, although I am hankering for a new look for the site (but still want to keep / use some of the header images).

The new default theme is okay but it’s all so big and I much prefer small sites. I guess I can edit the theme options and have a play.

Anyway, I finished my little plastic knight, and it’s not a half bad job considering.

More sunset

tony — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:39:57 +0000

Something about this time of year, and where we live, gives us these sunsets.

No related posts.

Quick garden update

tony — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:00:55 +0000

We’re treating / painting our fence! Takes about an hour to do a single panel, slightly less now, and there’s 10 panels left on the side of the house with the most fence. Some photo’s for proof! We’re using the same stuff that our next door neighbour used first on her side of the fence, so she chose the colour which we actually quite like.

In order, the front including the half panels, the side, to show the difference between treated and untreated, and lastly, the remaining 10 panels.

The garden’s doing pretty well although we’re coming to the end of summer. The grass we seeded has grown in and we’re starting to get it tidy, and the flowers are really doing well and have looked great throughout the summer.

This year has seen us do more for the house / garden than we’ve ever done for any property we’ve ever lived in, without a doubt. There’s so much in the house we should still get sorted (but we’re just so bad at doing it, well, I am, Grete tries to encourage me, but I mainly just stall and fob her off) but getting the garden sorted has been such a good thing and I’m glad Grete has been able to enjoy it while the weather has been good.

Bah and buggerit

tony — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:23:40 +0000

I thought I was doing the right thing taking the photo’s without the flash with as much ambient light as I could generate and then using picasa to correct the white balance etc. However, looking at the new pictures (uploaded) they’re worse than the ones I initially took with the flash ages ago. These are only there to get the basic images on-line so folk can see the figures, but I’m still annoyed at myself. Internal warring between the ‘it’s done, leave it, they’re only crappy little miniatures’ and the ‘do it right, if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing it right’ factions.

I’m going to take Simes up on his offer to do some good photo’s of some of the better mini’s, this isn’t about that, it’s just about having a library of all the minis I’ve got in photo form.

Five hours.

Maybe I’ll do them again, but much later.

This is a similar issue to when I was doing the photo scans, ended up throwing a good weeks worth of work away when I changed my mind about DPI and file format.

Anyway, here’s some of the earliest miniatures, in their terrible horrific glory.

Frost came visiting

tony — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:21:49 +0000

Totally clear night last night (Saturday to Sunday, since technically I’m writing this on Monday morning), so it was always going to be cold. The frost this morning though was amazing. On the shed roof it looked a little like snow, but the grass and leaves on the ground looked like they’ve been coated in sugar.

Tried to get some shots, but not really pleased with how they came out. I’ve whacked a Picasa album up (including the shots of the snow we had recently) which you can see over here.

Here’s my favourite shot though (click for full size) and check out the album above for a couple more.

WordPress & Grete

tony — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:54:27 +0000

I really can’t praise WordPress enough. It’s such a simple install (point it at your mysql server, and it’s done) and although out of the box it looks pretty ugly (in my view), there are so many quality free templates that it can look however you want in about 20 minutes. Of course, it takes more time to use some plugins and decide on a layout in general, but really it’s so easy to use everyone who wants an web presence but doesn’t want to spend much time should use it. It’s mainly a blog, but the pages feature means you can certain include a lot of ‘non-blog’ content easily as well.

Anyway, the point of this post, Grete has moved her blog from blogger to WordPress over at her old URL (http://www.darkstorm.co.uk/grete) and she’s slowly moving the content over from her old personal website at that URL, so it’ll be more than a blog in the end (she assures us!) She’s using the Mandigo theme as well, so I put together a few random headers for her site, she’s not seen them all yet so they may not all stay and at least one of them doesn’t work very well in my view, so I’ll probably get rid of it later. But I liked them all anyway

Paw prints in the snow

tony — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:50:31 +0000

Why are they so evocative? Click the pictures for full size images. It snowed in Nottingham today, for about 15 minutes, really heavy wet snow which lay and then started to vanish almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Both cats are old hands with the whole snow thing so no sudden flurry of excitement from them, although Fizz did try and eat a few snowflakes as they fell on her.

The Tooth

tony — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:21:33 +0000

My jaw is pretty sore now, both the muscles from holding it open for 20 minutes and having my lower jaw stressed hard when the tooth was pulled, and also the gum/jaw area where the tooth was removed now actively hurts (pulsing pain).

So, here’s a few pictures of the tooth I had extracted. Feel free to show these to your kids, or your nieces and nephews as a reminder of why they should,

brush their teeth more than they do
take the advice of their dentist when he says ‘you should consider having your wisdom teeth out’

This tooth was impacted by one of my wisdom teeth growing into it at an angle, and basically got a cavity and decayed at the point of impact, until the hole you see was caused when that part of the tooth fell away a few weeks ago. I was lucky, it didn’t hurt.

If you’re reading this on an RSS feed reader, sorry, you’re going to see the pictures. If you’re reading it on the site’s front page, you can click the link to see the pictures. If you’re reading the full article already, then you can’t avoid the pictures any longer.

This is a shot of the tooth, with the decayed part not visible (it’s at the back). If you were looking at my head yesterday, and I opened my mouth, this is the direction you would have been looking at the tooth. i.e. the flat surface you can see was pointing straight out of my mouth. The decay was at the back of the tooth.

Side shot of the tooth, you can see an old filling in the top, and the missing back of the top of the tooth is more visible.

This is the shot of the back of the tooth. Yep. I know. I’m not sure if the dark area was like that due to the decay, or if that’s the result of most of the tooth being missing for 4 weeks while I got it sorted out. There’s a big hole in that section of the tooth which you can’t really see, which was caused by the dentist sticking a metal spike in it, in order to free the tooth up for removal.

This is the last side shot of the tooth which shows you the overhang from the top and where the piece sheered off while I was eating toast.

And finally, a couple of shots for scale.

And then the sun went down

tony — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:01:54 +0000

Had to take some photo’s of the sunset.

All hail the Internet