Saturday 11th June

It’s been a week of patchy weather, Wednesday was the only really clear day, so I spent more time pruning roses, and digging over at Hickmott Road, I’m nearly on top of it all there, still some minor pruning to do, but the bulk is just about done finally.

I’ve got another job, closer to Collingwood, similar. A huge amount of roses to prune, a lot of other shrubs to clean up. Plus dig over the beds, they were covered by the flood in January, so there is now a hard pan of silt over everything. Absolute pain to get rid of.

We’re still waiting for some frosts here, Patrick rang last night, it will be close to the end of the month before we can start pruning the kiwifruit, we need 3 really good frosts a few days apart to drop the leaves, hopefully the cold snap that is meant to arrive next week will help things along.

It’s been a year now since Mum died, I ordered two standard rose bushes back in April, to plant out here. Both Blackberry Nip standards, about 3’ high. Mum had one at home, it flowered the whole month before she died, and she loved having the blooms in her room. One of the few good roses with a really good aroma. It almost smells like blackberry, about as much as like tea made by the Sirius Corporation that is almost exactly not like tea.

I’ve got another workshop to run at SeniorNet at the next meeting, just a continuation of the first one from the other month, but with more details about internet scams, and the ones I think the SeniorNet members need to be aware of mostly.

Took the camera out last Monday in the gloom and intermittent sunshine, well, low level light anyway, calling it sunshine is slightly exaggerating things. Here are a few pics from near Collingwood, looking over the Aorere River.