prequel: work, winter into spring 2005

Allan moved in on his birthday, January 2nd, and went into sort of a state of shock about living in such a small space and also about how COLD my house can be in winter.  (No matter how we tried, we never got it above 50 on a cold day.)  His arrival unfortunately was followed by a cold snap which did not help.

Normally I would have taken more of January off but I wanted to impress him with the gardening business so that he would not feel he had quit his other job for nought but love.  (He had spent years assembling bicycles for Fred Meyer stores, but due to the incursion of cheap Wal-mart bikes, the job had been in a disturbing decline.)  So we started back to work early in the month. Our first job, while both of us had bad colds, was to spead yards and yard of horse manure all over Laurie’s garden beds by the bay. Sophie went with us one day. Below: Allan on his first day as a professional gardener.

introduction to gardening

mulch on Laurie’s winter garden

Below: Laurie’s garden in winter, being well mulched by manure, and plagued by moles, with the barn in the background and to the right, Allan having a brief lunch break at the car. It was so cold that we would warm our hands up on the car engine after we arrived at work.  What an initiation!

lunch time

Our next big project was to gather ferns in the woods at Discovery Heights for replanting in the gardens there.

fern gathering

dragging ferns

planting ferns along the middle garden at Discovery Heights

We operated out of Allan’s small Saturn with a utility trailer hauled behind. Between working, we went back and forth to Tacoma several times in the spring moving Allan’s stuff down. One memorable late stormy night, we turned back at the Willapa curves by a tree over the road and had to go back through Naselle and along the river route. After the trauma of trying to turn to car and trailer in the dark with possible traffic coming up behind (and no cell phone signal, of course), we decided to rent a U Haul for the rest of his stuff.

Below: Another spring project: creating some garden beds along the fences at Garnette S’s Seaview garden. I mucked out the stalls from Bennie, the carriage horse, who lived right next door, to improve the soil in the new beds.

Seaview project

Most of the during and after photos of the project are gone but the creation of long beds along this fence, and inside and outside of the other long fence length, took about a week. This was another of those gardens that I created but don’t maintain….

Seaview project

Below:  Narcissi (planted very late in 2004) in the middle garden at Discovery Heights.  Before long, a big gate would go in almost at the end of the garden.  After cleaning a couple of houses in the late 70s in the gated, exclusive Broadmoor neighbourhood of Seattle, I had sworn I would never work in a gated neighbourhood again, but I could not resist this garden.  Later, the gate made sense to me because until it went in, drivers went speeding up and down the curves of this hill for fun.

Narcissi at Discovery Heights

At this time, I don’t think anyone lived at Discovery Heights yet, and the Coastal Ridge townhouses were just being built.

Discovery Heights lower garden with baby plants and narcissi

Below:  J9’s dog Sophie on one of the days that Allan and I dogsat her by taking her to work with us. I accidentally made her look like a bad dog by asking her to sit for the photos….on top of the flowers.

my good friend Sophie

Meanwhile, in other spring gardens…

tulips at the Shelburne

Joanne’s garden all cleaned up for spring