On Monday, September 12, John the landscaper finally came by and agreed to the remaining items to be completed and the final cost. He promised he would have everything finished that week. While experience has shown us time and time again, that we could not rely upon John following through, I went ahead and paid him everything owed. Guess what, they did not show up Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Friday it rained and, of course, that was the day he wanted to do the work but could not since it was raining. While disappointed, we were not surprised.
We spent this past week at the Montauk State Park. Some time during our absence, John apparently came by and replaced three of the boxwood along the west fence and straightened the Zelkova. There is a fourth boxwood on the west fence that still needs to be replaced and nothing was done about the dying junipers along the east fence. John claimed that he has already replaced these junipers twice. While immaterial, my records show that they replace three of the five back on March 8, 2016. Those three still look relatively good. The other two (second from the north and southern most) have a lot of dead branches on them.
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| Junipers |
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| Looks like three new boxwood have been planted |
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| Boxwood in the center is dying |
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| Zelkova looks better |
There are still several other items yet to be accomplished. Not holding my breath.
The zucchini has pretty much succumbed to the squash bug infestation. Those plants in the west raised bed are completely dead. Too bad, we got a lot of nice fruit off of them. The bugs now have moved over to the butternut squash and cantaloupe in the east raised bed. We got two squash off them before the plants died. We tried to be nice and encourage them to leave, but they will not.
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| Dead Zucchini |
On the bright side, the okra has really gone to town and the tomatoes, which T had all but given up on due to the squirrels, are fruiting rapidly. Shooting that one squirrel seemed to make all the difference. We even got some help from our neighbor's cat on discouraging the squirrels. And the peppers are still going strong. We even found a fruiting peppadew plant in among the tomatoes. We were given seeds for these by Mike, our carpenter.
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| Okra "trees" |
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| Today's harvest |
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| Spike (neighbor's cat) and his squirrel catch of the day |
On a sad note, when we arrived home Friday, we discovered another gold fish had died. This one was one of T's favorites, Dorothy. Her corpse was in the skimmer. Not sure if she died and then floated into the skimmer or if she got trapped in the skimmer and died.
