My Blog

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The big freeze came!  15 Oct 2002 On Monday night, there was a major frost warning, so we pulled in most of the tender plants. This included the papyrus, canna and the elephant ear (taro). We are intending to keep all of these going as house plants during the winter. The only problem is finding space to put them all. We had to hack a few bits off the papyrus to get them to fit in the pots (16 inch - emergency buy at the brand new local Home Depot). I expect that these bits will grow as well, so I have to pot them up.

Bullfrog eviction (again)  2 Oct 2002 This evening -- it was warm and damp -- I decided to try and evict the bullfrogs again. I used the trick of a bright flashlight to confuse them, and I got two monsters in the net at once! Total weight of frog was 8 ounces. I managed to get another small one and then drove the three of them 1.5 miles to a stream. I hope that they don't find their way home. I have already evicted one of these guys before, but I only took him a few hundred yards, and he hopped back within 24 hours.

Hydra  2 Sep 2002 My water filter is infested with Hydra. I got some pictures - this is typical. I don't really want to disturb them, but I need to clean out the filter!

Snake in the Stream  2 Sep 2002 Over the weekend, a couple of the neighbourhood kids were over looking at the pond, when one of them spotted a snake in the stream. I happened to have my camera handy, and I tried to get a picture of it, but it slithered off. A bit of further investigation revealed that it was hiding in the 'toad house' that has (as far as I am aware) never housed a toad. I got one (not very good) shot of it. I think it is a Ribbon snake rather than a Garter snake. This may explain where some of the small frogs have gone. My four year old daughter had earlier reported seeing a snake chasing a frog (which got away) when she was staring out of her window. I doubted her story at the time, but no more!

Updated the inbound link display  28 Jul 2002 A couple of sites (watergardening.infopop.net and gardenweb.com) added links to the pondcam. I decided that it was about time to improve the link counting script. The new version collapses and summarizes the list rather better. It also allows you to see just the top 40 referring sites. Remarkably, a bunch of sites just link to a single image, namely hole.jpg. I suspect that Google image search is the way that they found it, but currently for the search 'hole' it doesn't show up till the second page.

Pondcam streaming  14 Jul 2002 I've finally added the links to allow people to see the streaming video from the pond. See: Windows Media (100k), Windows Media (40k), RealVideo (100k), RealVideo (40k). I've limited the outgoing bandwidth to 300k so you may get a 'busy' page sometimes. If you use the links that are in the pondcam section, then you should get video day and night. (At night, I stream the video that was recorded 12 hours earlier.)

Two large Golden Orfes died  8 Jul 2002 Last week, during the very hot weather, two of my Golden Orfes died. I don't know whether the heat got to them, or they were chased by the other fish, or what, but I found them floating amongst the plants. The other two orfes survivied. The pond temperature reached 92F during this time. I'm not quite sure how to limit it -- maybe I could add cold water. You can see from this graph that adding cold water does have a noticeable effect. The reduction is (obviously) much larger when the water temperature is higher.

Goldfish caught eating a salamander  29 May 2002 Argh! This evening, I observed a four inch goldfish with half a salamander hanging out of its mouth. This rather suprised me as I assumed that the goldfish wouldn't go after anything that big (the salamander was probably three inches before it got munched). I had added the salamanders to the pond last fall when a friend gave me a bunch that he had rescued from his swimming pool filter. Until today, I hadn't seen any, and now I think that ignorance of their fate was probably bliss.

The pondcam is back  16 May 2002 (Updated 22 May 2002) I am fiddling with the pondcam -- it is back in the water but I am trying to get a good picture. So, for the next few days the picture may be at a funny angle or similar. I am also experimenting with streaming better video, but I have not yet found a solution for netscape and IE that doesn't cause problems in (at least) one environment. I wish browsers and plugins were more compatible! Update: For IE running with WMP7, you will now get a stream at a good frame rate. The bad news is that it doesn't work well over a slow line (unless you have your WMP preferences set to correctly specify your connection speed).

Yet more plants arrived in the mail  21 May 2002 I ordered a bunch of plants from World Plants out in Oregon. I received a Juncus Filiformus for the pond, and various other small plants. However, the real motive was to get a Gunnera Manicata. I admit that I am suffering from a severe case of zonal denial, but I felt that if I put it in a large pot, and stuck it in the basement / garage over the winter, then it ought to survive. It currently has four leaves, the largest is under a foot across. In a fit of madness, I potted it up in Miracle Grow -- the stuff that is supposed to double the size of plants. We shall see! I also got a Ginkgo Biloba Tree. This should survive the local climate, and will make an interesting addition to the regular garden. I have no affiliation with these guys, except as a satisfied customer.

Topic:  All Internet Radio Phone Pond Weather

Rolodex

gunnera
Neat description of the Gunnera Manicata -- a truly monstrous plant!