The mystery tree

Thank goodness the winds have abided, the sun is out and the temps are fine for outdoor work.  That is what I did most of the day. No matter how many weeds I pick, there are always more someplace else so no shortage on that exercise. As I could no longer find an excuse to cut the grass, today I took out the John Deere for all the large areas. Actually, riding the lawn mower is fun and no work at all I find. The real workout is when I walk all the perimeters with the weed trimmer. Usually I go through three batteries, but today I needed two extras that were already charged to do the outside of the fences as well. And, I opted to rake the cuttings by hand (I could have used the sweeper but didn’t want to hookup, clean, and store again) because the high winds had brought so many keys from the maple trees across the street. If they are not picked up or cut to pieces we will have hundreds of maple saplings sprouting from the lawn in a few weeks. A big thank you to Benno for helping to cut the areas the riding mower can’t do with the self-propelled mower. It is all done now and should be good for a week at least before I have to do it all over again. Hey, I don’t complain, it keeps me fit.

There is a mystery with the little blue spruce tree I was gifted a couple of years ago. We planted it at a spot we thought it would thrive. It looked beautiful and even grew some last year. This year when we came back from Florida, I noticed that the tree looked the same as it did in the fall before we left for our trip south on the east side. However, the other sides, especially on the west side the blue spruce had turned all green. Really green with no trace of blue! I have absolutely no clue what happened over the winter months to the tree other than that there were some strong winds from the west. 

To help this little tree out, I went and bought some fertilizer for evergreens and stuck that into the ground. Now the new growth is blue gain. Go figure.

How this tree looked when we planted it

How it looked when we got back from Florida

Today on the west side

today on the east side

So while I had some outdoor fun, Benno had taken out the Webasto Diesel heater from the boat. It was not installed in a good position and had taken up some good real estate. We think we can mount it in a better spot. Also it lacks some hardware to make it run more quieter and more efficient. This particular heater was actually a truck cab unit and not configured to be mounted on a boat. We know that, because we had two of the same Webasto Airtop 2000 marine heaters on “Diesel Duck” and a similar product, the Espar Diesel Heater on “Najade”. 

Benno wanted to test it out. In order to do that, he needed to hook the heater up to a 12volt battery and then got some diesel fuel from the gas station in Wheatley. As it turned out, the heater would not fire up and produce any heat, its metering pump (Pulse Pump) did not pump any diesel to the heater, its 12volt supply was missing. Upon further investigation, like dismantling and cleaning the heater, he found a fault on a disconnect at the CPU inside the Webasto unit, which supplies the 12volt to the metering pump. (We presume the problem was already present when we bought the boat, because the previous owner had bought another fuel pump which it didn’t need after all.) 

So once Benno had everything hooked up this heating unit produced plenty of really hot air, albeit at more noise than necessary. So now we know this Webasto Heater is working and with the already ordered parts, it will find a new place in the boat in the coming months.

That is it for me today and I am wishing everyone a nice and relaxing weekend. Maybe I will sit down and read a book tomorrow.

Thanks for dropping in again.