Day 2, Sunday, May 31, 2026: Losing the Spirea
Fuelled by rhubarb and strawberry muffins courtesy of mama E, we kicked off Day 2 early on a bright Sunday morning at 7:30!
P and D started by digging out the cherry tree stump and surrounding roots from in the lower pond area. Then we started digging the outlines of the upper and lower pond, with P using the digger and Y following through on the upper pond with a trowel.
The bottom pond needed a lot of pick-axe action from P and D, while the upper pond had a lot of grass with deep roots that Y pulled out.
After a three and a half hour shift, we all ate some French Toast courtesy of mama E and headed to Kasugai Japanese Garden in downtown Kelowna. The garden was simply built with the essential elements that you find in a Japanese Garden, but we were able to identify a good list of hardy plants that we liked the look of as well as those that would be able to bear Kelowna’s weather variations. We loved the blue spruces, weeping larch, mugo pines, weeping mulberry tree, baby pink peonies, bright pink rhododendrons, and quite a few other plants. On our way back, we stopped by Byland’s and found a cute globe spruce that would be perfect to replace our Spirea bush around the corner from the showcase Maple.
After our return, we started chopping up the Spirea and cleared away all the branches except for the stump.
We dug out more of the upper and lower ponds before calling it a day!
The casualties of the day were an electrical saw that gave up after the Spirea trim, a pick-axe that lost a screw and a digger that broke – P had a hand in two out of three…
