I awoke early after the usual frustratingly short sleep with the thought that we MUST mulch Golden Sands Assisted Living courtyard garden with cow manure today! Last year the garden disappointed me, and I had big plans that never came to fruition of mulching in January….but could not tear myself away from staycation. Only if Raymond is at The Planter Box garden centre can the mulch be loaded into our trailer, and yes! a phone call ascertained that he would be available to load in the midmorning.
Upon our arrival at the Planter Box, I browsed the plants while Raymond helped another customer.
I could not buy ducklings but I did succumb to a small flock of metal chickens. Photos later in my garden.
I admired the selection of Japanese maples and wondered if my maple-crazy friend Judy could fit in just one more.
Enough pandering to my regular reader(s). I peeked in the first greenhouse…
This is the time when it is hard to make the big bucks in our business. Especially if the job has a smallish budget (as many of our clients do), how do we charge for hanging around waiting to get to the front of the queue and get the product to the job? I have never quite figured that out.
I heard the rumble of the loader and got outside just in time to get a photo.
Raymond explained to us the difference between plain old washed dairy manure and cow fiber: Cow fiber is actually steamed, killing weed seeds and pathogens. So from now on I will specifically refer to this excellent product by its real name.
[Note: In the course of writing this, I sent Judy a sneak preview of that Acer viridis and she is already planning where to put him!]
At Golden Sands Assisted Living, we asked that the back corner fire door be opened so that we could get the soil into the courtyard. Usually, we go down this long hallway with our wheelbarrow, but not with loads of manure!
Now, if I had designed the place I would have had a door right out the back of the building for quick access to the completely enclosed central courtyard building. But instead, we need to wheelbarrow down this carpeted hallway, being careful not to track or spill the mulch.
There are four quadrants of garden, one on each corner, that used to be a thin sad lawn til my mother moved in and we started turning them into gardens. The soil, if you can call it that, is terrible. Mom initially bought some bags of soil amendment for the northeast quadrant, the one she could see from her window, and Golden Sands provided a budget for some more bales of mulch (Gardner and Bloom Soil Building Compost) but it was nowhere near enough for the grey sandy rubbly dirt. We schlepped buckets of free horse manure from The Red Barn a couple of summers ago. Horse manure is weedy and highly inferior to Cow Fiber.
Using two barrows so that I could work carefully on where to dump the piles, Allan moved sixteen not too full wheelbarrows in (being cautious in the amount so as not to spill on the carpet).
Sadly, three scoops (over a cubic yard) was not enough to complete the coverage of much of the fourth (northwest) quadrant. We need more…. at least two more scoops to finish the northwest quadrant and all the way to the back of the four quadrants. I would love to get ALL the wild beach strawberry out; it jumps the edging right into the cultivated garden, but for now at least three of the main planted areas are better.
We will probably wait till very early May to finish the mulching so as to spread the financial shock into the next month…
The tulips already look better against the dark background:
This could be the most amazing deerproof, wind protected, tropicalismo exotic colourful oasis if only I had the time and money.
Then we went south again to check on the garden at Seanest, a vacation rental house. I knew it would need a good weeding as we had not made it there since the first spring cleanup.
When the septic system was redone a few years ago, this entry garden was designed by a Seattle gardening company. I’ve gotten rid of a couple of Phormiums since then and am finding this year, as last year, that the Cotinus is shockingly late to leaf out.
The garden used to be owned by artist Phyllis Ray and back then we did a much more floriferous garden. The new owner of the past few years would rather have a low maintenance garden, and that has worked out fine for us because it is hard to find time to water here. Nevertheless, it is not as interesting to me as it used to be and I have been considering passing it on to someone else.
When we walked around to the west side today, we saw a sad sight. At long last, and not unexpectedly, the driftwood temple that Robert had built in 2002 had irrevocably been damaged by wind. Allan had repaired it after the Big Blow of 2007, but this time new driftwood would be required, and we simply do not have time for that sort of project here.
While I weeded and Allan improvised a barrier to keep guests out of the danger zone, I decided this is the job on the chopping block. I won’t quit suddenly, but I will email the owner and tell her that we will keep the garden weeded through this year, but not in 2014…and that it would be wonderful if she (or the property manager) could find someone to take it over sooner. It is time to let it go…
I am sad! However, we are overbooked and the hour and a half spent weeding here would have much more satisfyingly spent at the far more creative job of Andersen’s RV Park. Andersen’s was our last stop of the day and we wished we had had more time there.
Those big narcissi are lasting a very long time.
Owner Lorna did get to the park over the weekend to see her tulip pots:
This row is not quite open:
And at last we planted about twenty different plants in various parts of the garden. I had almost suggest that we drive on home after deadheading the narcissi in the box by the highway. I felt I had truly hit the wall. And then I thought how frustrating it would be for the poor plants to go for a car ride again, like they did yesterday, and again go back home without getting their feet into the ground, so I conjured up that last hour of work strength and we got it done.
Now that there is a deer fence, I could plant a Rosa mutabilis in the bed above, an area which up till now has not been much used. One of the park workers, Al, had more energy than ten men put together and last fall he got the three raised beds at this end of the garden all cleared out and filled with good soil. He had returned this week from winter vacation and said he would be disappointed if we did not plant it up with something after all his work. Lorna likes peachy and apricot plants so along with the rose I planted two Agastaches whose colours will please her.
The three little raised beds are at the end of the picket fence garden:
Only with the new tall fence at the south end has that area at the far end become civilized, not browsed by deer from the woods and not encroached on by tall meadow grass.
The narcissi outside the fence are deerproof:
These are more of the really big flowered cultivars that Lorna (inspired by Martha Stewart) bought by the hundreds last fall.
As we loaded our gear a predicted drizzle began. That will be good for the sweet peas at my garden and the Ilwaco post office…
As Allan shopped at the grocery store on the way home (we’ve been so busy we were even out of bread) and I checked my email in the car I relished the sight of rain….
Even though I had big plans to do lots of Port of Ilwaco and Discovery Heights weeding tomorrow, a really rainy day would mean some pleasant hours of reading back entries in the Tootlepedal blog.
That reminds me, I tried to take a photo of a bird in flight for Mr. Tootlepedal, who features glorious bird photos daily on his blog.
How does he do it?? Without an SLR, I might have to try a sports photo setting.
[…] « more plants in the ground […]
LikeLike
[…] I dug lots of strawberry and rose campion out of the northwest quadrant. (I like rose campion but there is just too, too much.) With phlox and astilbe and Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ starts added, it is already looking better than two days ago when we ran out of mulch for this section. […]
LikeLike
[…] driftwood temple, which had collapsed last time we were there, is being rebuilt with plain wood which will be dressed up with […]
LikeLike