Woeful Wednesday - Wetting agent and weeds

Ahh. Worked from home today, which is always lovely. I'm afraid I rather wasted the time saved by not commuting, by sleeping in. I think it was worth it though! I had a nice productive day, and Tess even helped me out every now and then.

Priority one for after work was cleaning the

bokashi bin, so I can get the next batch started. I hose it down first, then let it sit in the sun for a day or two, and then clean it with the steam cleaner. I'm not sure this does the trick though - I always seem to get blue mould (which you're not supposed to get) in the bucket. Could be... not enough bokashi powder, too much bokashi powder, or ineffective cleaning?? If anyone has some insight, please comment & let me know :)

So that done, we took Tess out to work off her beans in a nice walk - her friend Chardy was so excited to see her, it was adorable :) Then the plan was to apply wetting agent to mini-unidentified-citrus, followed by some weeding.

I started the wetting agent mission at 6:25pm. Generally I turn the hose up to max, and water for a long time, with the hose about 1 inch from the soil - just to make sure the wetting agent is well and truly activated (when it activates it froths).

Every now and then I pause and dig a little hole to see how far down the water has made it. When the little holes consistently show that the water

has made it about 5cm, that's when I usually stop. Today though I stopped for a different reason - a little baby preying mantis appeared from somewhere! At this point it was just starting to get dark, and the water had made it 3-4cm down, so I figured that's good enough for today. It ended up being 7:09pm when I finished, so that's quite a lot of water with the hose going pretty well the whole time.

I'm planning to come back a few days later and do another application, before slapping on the manure, mulch etc - when that's all done, this little tree will be set for summer. I also spotted a ladybird on the little tree, but my photos didn't work out. It didn't look quite like your usual ladybird - the red was a little dull, the spots seemed to be clustered more at his tail end, and he seemed a bit more oval shaped than round. Interesting...

Never got to the weeding I planned to do, although I did pick out a few as I went. I was going to take some photos so that this week's Woeful Wednesday would be more about weeds than wetting agent, but by the time I finished up with the wetting agent it was too dark for photos.

Oh, and I spotted this cricket and managed to get a photo. Cute :)