We didn’t have a lot of big plans for this week, so thought it would be a time to put feet up. That’s what retirement is about, isn’t it? Anyway, Lisa had a number of commitments for her volunteering with Georgia Mountains Master Gardeners (she is deep into the organisation of the State conference in September. To help things along, I have volunteered to manage their website for a while.
We are very frustrated over the building of our swimming pool – bureaucratic delays, alas, over which we have little control. And it is part of a sequence of work – build pool, do hard landscaping at the rear of the house, properly pave the driveway once that work has been completed.
So, we have been restricted in our gardening to the front of the house plus the long planter bed (4 foot by 120 foot) in the Great Wall of Dahlonega.
We also have to contend with the dreaded carpenter bees. This pest is a wood eating bee which drills a very neat circular hole about half an inch diameter in timber (it particularly likes western red cedar, we have found. Once inside the timber, the bee continues to tunnel, bending around a right angle, and then laying hosts of eggs. Which in due course hatch out as timber munching grubs which eat their way out to become the next generation of carpenters. It takes careful treatment with special solutions to get rid of them. Uninterrupted, the cycle can result in whole beams being eaten hollow over time. I was initially concerned that doing away with them would upset pollination in the garden – but apparently the bees don’t even do this. Eating houses is much more fun for them.
Luckily (deliberately!) we had the decks on the house made with a renewable South American hardwood called Ipe. Another wood-eating pest here are termites. Ipe is a termite’s worst nightmare – it is so hard that they can’t make any headway.