What have you done today in the Garden?

thats kind of funny..My husband would trade you anyday the task... you should try the tracks on an excavator in almost freezing temps... just so you can move the machine when you come back to work tomorrow.

 

Work?

I vaguely remember it, as I took early retirement 23 years ago come February.

 

DH Riley, a true golf freak/fan. My youngest brother is in that group. You perhaps know the joke, "Hit the ball, drag Charlie. Hit the ball drag Charlie!"

 

It's all quite civilised these days.
On my trolley, there's a bracket on the left for a drinks or thermos holder,
To the right is a score card "desk" with a protective cover and it also has a facility to hold a couple of spare balls and some tees.
In the middle is an umbrella holder.
Their 30v lithium batteries these days are quite small and weigh no more than a bag of sugar. They recharge in a couple of hours.

I also have a detachable seat that fits into as bracket on the side of the trolley chassis. A bit like a shooting stick. The "stick" is spring loaded so if you sit on it the base rests on the ground so the trolley doesn't have to support your weight. There's room in a box under the seat for more balls, more tees and a sandwich or some fruit if you choose.


I don't use it much, only to make a point, you can sit on it and slouch back against the top of your golf bag, if people in front of us are taking too long over their shots.

 

Riley, your Golf cart is the Rolls Royce of golf carts. I believe my
brother and his fellow golfers use the pull-along carts.

 

There are more expensive options. Some when you reach a green you can point in the direction of the next tee and press a button to send it on its way, three different distances, depending on how far away it is. Others come with gps which will tell you how far away you are from the pin. They can be programmed to work on hundreds of courses.

I've a funny story about gps.
About ten years ago the wife of a friend bought him one of the new watches with built in golf gps. I was playing with him and another friend a few days after he received it.
We all teed off on one hole and our drives were all of a similar distance. The friend with the watch and I were on one side of the fairway and the other 30 yards away on the other side. He walked across to us and grabbed the wrist of the guy with watch and looked at it.

"That's never 215 yards to the pin!" he said.

I said, "You're right, it's more like 150, but it is a quarter past two!"

 

Good one!

 

I love golf. I have left and right handed sets due to my parents. I play right handed, but putt left handed, but sometimes I will use a left handed club in certain situations. I will build a couple of holes on my land soon. I play golf king world tour on my smartphone. This is the best golf game I have found.

 

I'm left handed, but like most of us, I can use my right hand for anything that requires it.i.e. I don't change round dinner cutlery settings, I can use any tool where the access on something means I have to use my right hand, even a saw and I use a computer mouse with my right hand.
Being left handed there are no good deals in golf equipment. Everything has to be ordered. After playing with a set of Callaway "Big Bertha" clubs and Cobra fairway woods for fifteeen years, I treated myself this year to a new set of top of the range Cleveland woods and irons and another Odessy putter. I kept the Callaway driver I bought at the end of last year.
I didn't feel at all guilty, as the five sets of made to measure curtains, my wife decided we "really needed" had just cost me more.

 

Today we headed out to the lottie for a looksy after a few days of stormy weather. We wanted to check our things but also the things of our little group of neighbours. Our arches, shed and greenhouse were in order. We moved on to check our neighbours allotments. This is what we found by one of them:


The high winds have again caused damage on the allotment complex. I took foto’s and sent an email to warn her. The damaged greenhouse was stable and since the winds have stopped it ought to be ok until her family can get to it.

I checked on the bees because my mentor had sent me a vid showing that some beekeepers have lost whole colonies this winter. When I say, “ lost”, I mean no bees in the hives...not even dead on the floor of the hive, simply not present. One hive did have a dead queen and a couple of tenders near to her. The hives were still full of honey. The beekeepers were suspecting neonicotinoids which can cause bees to forget the way back to their hives while out foraging. He thought that the neonic’s were picked up in the nectar of the flowers of the poisoned plants, taken back to the hive, made into honey, then consumed by the unsuspecting workers.

Anyway, I peeked through a little plastic covered hole to see my bees and they looked good.

I checked our grounds and fed the birds. We were ready to leave then, so I locked up the shed and we started our walk back to the auto up by the clubhouse. We decided to walk over the grounds of the complex to see how it all was looking.

There were some lotties standing under water from the copious rains that we have been having. We came by one chap that wanted to talk. He wanted to talk about pests, and he showed me a mouse trap that his son had made. Take a look:


A little explanation now—
A piece of cheese is placed in the bottom of of the drink bottle to attract the mouse. (Cheese doesn’t really work well with these mouse types)
The mouse climbs up onto the little block and enters the bottle through the opening. The mouse walks to towards the bottom and eats. When it is time to go, it walks back up the bottle towards the opening and the bottle tilts downward closing the escape because of the presence of the little block of wood.

Right then, so you have caught the mouse, what next?
Well, you loosen it from the hinge apparatus, screw on the cap and take the little beast far, far away and let it loose in the woods. There are other options, but the lettem-loose-in-the-woods is the most nature friendly.

We had almost finished our tour of the almost empty terrain, and stopped to chat with a lady that makes creams and oils from things that she grows in her garden. She gets beeswax from us as well. It was difficult talking at such a distance...but safe. When I looked into the neighbouring garden I saw this and immediately took the hint to put a foot in the road and head for home. We talked about this hilarious sight and I put forth that perhaps it suggested getting a leg over.

 

Chuckle! That's a match for your giant chicken claw!

I knew that nicotine derivitives were toxic to bees, I didn't know why. I am glad your hives and lottie were all ok.

 

Yeah, I had to do a double take. Too bad the folks who garden there were not present. I have questions. It was just sticking out of their compost bin.
I do worry about the farmers using that chemical. It is unhealthy for all the pollinators, not just honeybees. They have been looking into other animals such as birds who may catch and eat those dizzy bees.

 

Honestly Sjoerd, you could have used a long stick to prod the bin. There may be a body attached to that lone limb.

 

Growingpains:. Chuckle!

 

Heh, heh, heh. Yeah GP, what was I thinking!