My travels and another garden update

It's a big decision to take my camera kit with me on my work travels. The weight of the rucksack with everything in is sufficient to bruise my shoulders every time so I have only taken it with me when I've tagged on some spare days at the end of the trip for a holiday. This has proven frustrating as work is taking me to some interesting places and I haven't been able to share these experiences thus far. To cut a long story short I have therefore invested in a camera that is about the dimensions of a pack of playing cards, that fits in my hand luggage without adding weight or bulk and can 'go anywhere'. The focus options are limited but it does nonetheless allow me to capture images of my travels, and is therefore helping me to look more closely at my surroundings as I do so.

For my first trip I didn't have the required type of memory card so with limited in-camera capacity, I picked a few shots to start with, so here's a couple taken in Boston just after dawn in late summer:








The Washington Metro - Foggy Bottom station underground:




And lastly Reagan/National airport in Washington D.C. This was a very frustrating situation, the delay to our departure meant I missed out on hoped-for daylight views of The Mall, Capitol Hill, etc. Hopefully next time! Oh yes and I missed my connection, spent a night in a sheddy hotel outside JFK airport with no luggage (still behind security), getting home very early Saturday morning. My luggage joined me on Tuesday afternoon...



Meanwhile back in the garden using the landscape camera, some snaps of recent goings on, including a sunflower growing from the bricked area, between the bricks:

A solitary bee is very busy ensuring the seeds set.

The next plant is nicknamed 'the money plant' - the more they grow the better things seem to go:

This is a variant:

Both are very late flowering and an important food source for our local pollinators who are now in a mad dash to stock up for winter.

In terms of structural stuff, you can see here I was chucking upturned sods into the base of the completed 'pit'. This was followed by a layer of shredded paper, then a layer of wood chip, a layer of two year-old leaf mulch and then sifted mud. A recent delivery of horse poo on top of that and now we're sifting the spoil heap, removing the stones and adding the sifted soil to the top of the mix for winter. Hopefully there are sufficient worms to give it a mix during winter before we add more manure in late winter, ahead of Spring:

You can still see the cut-off remains of bricks and breeze blocks in said pit. We've effectively created a large plant pot in the lawn but with significant volume and therefore growing potential. This time next year we should be enjoying a bumper vegetable harvest and the insects will be enjoying the mix of wildflowers interspersed.

That's all for now except to say that the next trip involves lugging the rucksack :)