January in the garden, part two

I relished almost a week of rainy weather during the second half of January.  On the nicer days, I had to go out and garden.  I just can’t sit in and read all day on a nice day, much as I would like it.  In my 20s and early 30s, I was quite capable of staying in no matter what the weather…until the fateful year, round about 1988, when I became obsessed with gardening.

Friday, 16 January 2015

The big gardening excitement today was that MaryBeth came over with some sizeable peony starts.

peonies from Debbie

Peonies are terribly expensive to purchase, so I was pleased indeed.

We had a good visit and then walked around the garden so that I could pickaxe out some starts of Darmera peltata for her.

Allan’s photo; Smokey is walking behind me and so is MaryBeth.

handing off the Darmera to MaryBeth

Saturday, 17 January 2015

The weather cooperated for reading, as these photos from inside the house show.

view to the south

patio water gardens (and the last of the paperwhites, done)

just the weather I wanted to see

bogsy woods telephoto

Monday, 19 January 2015

All of these gardening days are actually half days, as we are still firmly on night owl staycation time.  Weather forced me out on the 19th to weed here and there in a scattered way.  And I got the peony starts planted.

hellebore in the front garden

west side, some curly teucrium piled to give to Debbie for plant sale

west side, some crocuses in bloom

spot of sunshine (and I like the way the soil looks so rich and crumbly)

Clematis ‘Freckles’ has been blooming for week after winter week.

I should order one of those Clematis for Klipsan Beach Cottages and for the Anchorage for some midwinter joy.  I am pretty sure I got it from Bluestone Perennials, but a search shows they don’t carry it, so maybe I got it at Joy Creek Nursery in Scappoose, Oregon.  They do, indeed, list assorted Clematis cirrhosa in their catalog (and I would like to acquire more cultivars for the winter blooms).

buttery ranunculus

Often while I am gardening at home, I see the Life Flight helicopter go by, and it gives a moment of sadness as I know that it is a scary emergency for someone.

It is going from the hospital in Ilwaco to a larger city hospital inland.

My young Garrya has winter tassels.  I’d be thrilled were it not for the sad fact that the leaves are all spotted and ugly. I wonder if I should pick them off?

sad looking leaves

I have too many weeds to pull to fuss with picking leaves off of the garrya.

I had piled some fairly dry wood into the fire pit and had a strong urge to have the first campfire of the season…

It looked enticing….

until I realized there was standing water in the lawn all around it.

still too wet

Tuesday, 20 January 2015

I went out with no firm project in mind and then suddenly decided that I would dig an edge outside our west fence all down the Nora side, to make weeding easier.

beginning the afternoon project, with Smokey in attendance

a half-mooned edge

This is only about one third of the wood that I picked from Nora’s back lawn and brought in for our campfire stash.

storm fall of alder branches

Meanwhile, on an outing to town, Allan found that some tiny crocus are blooming in the Ilwaco planters.

Allan’s photo: By the Ilwaco Pharmacy

Allan’s photo; we hope passersby are noticing and enjoying.

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

I had an audience of noisy crows while I weeded.

I tried out the panorama feature in my new-ish iPhone.

As I worked in the shady southeast corner of the garden, by the gate that goes to the gear shed next door, I found that the sword ferns are already started to unfurl.  This seems early to me.

Early unfurling. There will be a lot of sword fern trimming when we go back to work.

Allan gave the lawn its first mowing of the year.

Hellebore buds in foreground

freshly mowed, and a barrow of weeds

fragrant winter Lonicera (honeysuckle) in bloom…The hummingbirds were feasting from this.

As dusk came, we were able to get a campfire starts and had our first hot dog roast of the season with the help of some of the dryer wood that I had stashed in the dry storage behind the garage.  The evening felt balmy and the chorus of frogs was loud beyond the bogsy woods.

Thursday, 22 January 2015

I continued weeding along the east fence and next to the bogsy wood.

moss in the bogsy wood, and some shells that Sheila once brought me from Mexico.

This area was the focus of my attention.

Onyx from next door kept me company for awhile.

Onyx

contorted filbert at the end of the center bed

Sunday, 25 January 2015

a sunny day

a rare sighting of Calvin in the garden

I have found a spot for the two heavy blue wooden chairs, where they will not have to be moved when the lawn gets mowed.  We will use all light, inelegant plastic chairs back by the fire circle (and I won’t have to worry about them getting smashed by falling branches during windstorms).

a most satisfactory idea

Mary in the garden

Calvin and Smokey

I’m pleased to see Calvin getting braver.

Calvin and the brothers, Smokey and Frosty, are ten, and mother Mary is possibly as old as thirteen.

Sunday was actually hot, in the low 60s.  I turned out a compost bin and further tidied up the debris pile next to Nora’s driveway.

compost bin, before. It is supposed to spin, but doesn’t.

Now that we are no longer collecting compost from the local coffee shop, I have extra bins so I also dragged two of the plastic bins up and placed them right behind the house for composting yard waste (thus decreasing the size of the debris pile).

The job of digging out that non-rototing deep bin plumb wore me out.  Allan came home from his outing and helped me finish, thank goodness (thank Allan, actually).

Aftereward, I went back to the bogsy wood to cool off by looking at water.

still water in the bogsy woods

inside the south fence, from the bridge

I had been wanting since autumn of 2010 to have a bench outside the south fence, by the meander line.  Finally, I had one to spare: the bench that used to provide a sit spot where the blue chairs are now.

mission accomplished at long last!

I sat out here very content while the sun went down and because I was quiet, the frogs started chirping…although not in the big pool right in front of me.

the seasonal pool at the meander line

 

If i hadn’t pulled some grass last fall, that pool would be like this area to my left.  (Better for frogs to have some wild areas.)

Mary joined me.

She approved of the new sit spot.

 

evening willows and water

looking west

looking east

I could just see, beyond the green gear shed, the roof of the community college annex where I had planned to sign up for a water colour class.  I think it was starting tomorrow and I had simply not mustered up the energy to take it.  I treasure my evenings so much that I did not want to give any up, and I did not feel up to the conversational aspects of taking a class.  I have to admit that the Waterlogue phone app has satisfied some of my need to see how scenes would look as a watercolour.

“painted” with one click. I know it is cheating!

Looking straight south…telephoto

I feel I am sitting a bit below the street by the port buildings.  Where I sit used to be waterfront; everything to the south was built on fill in the 1950s.

setting sun over Cape Disappointment from my new sit spot

It would have been the perfect evening for a fire, but we had a party to attend at the Sou’wester Lodge instead (see tomorrow’s post for that).

Monday, 26 January 2015

Still working in the back corner.  This used to be Mount Sod, where the grass dug up from the front garden ended up.  When we began the garden in November 2010, we dug up the front lawn so that I could plant bulbs right away.  The back beds I made with soil piled on newspaper right over the sod.  I planted potatoes in pockets of soil in Mount Sod and they worked very well at cleaning the pile and turning it into good dirt.  But now I want it completely de-spudified so I can plant shrubs and trees.  It turns out to be quite hard to get rid of every last potato.

questing for potatoes

I am moving some of the spuds to the debris pile behind the garage, and I’m trying something I read about: planting some of them in cardboard boxes.

Allan gave me some boxes from his shed.

Planted with Yukon Gold and red fingerling potatoes

The boxes, with soil in them,  will get buried by debris, and maybe they will make it easier to harvest potatoes at the end of the season.  I might try the same thing with some squash plants, and the foliage can cover the debris pile for the summer.  My eventual plan is to put a cute little garden shed here to provide privacy between the two houses.

a hellebore to enjoy while digging for spuds

On the 26th, I had some reading weather (at last!).  On the 28th, I swanned about with Nancy, and on the 29th we worked.  When we got home from the workday, I heard an ominous dripping sound from under my bathroom floor.  Worse yet, I remembered I had heard it in the wee hours of the night before and thought it was merely the sound of drizzle.  Allan crawled under the house and found this:

29 January: a sad sight indeed

It was hot water, too.  We had early baths and then turned the water off till the next morning.  The next day, we got a notice from the city that they thought we had a leak somewhere.  That was kind of them, and is also an ominous hint that our bill may be high.  (I hope they  had JUST read our meter!)

Friday, 30 January 2015

To the rescue!

The plumbing situation had us up very early.  (Allan got a call-back from Taft at 7 AM).  Neither of us had a whole lot of energy as a result.  The air felt rather chilly till I actually got going on a task.

I puttered around with weeding.

I set myself some small tasks that would give satisfaction.

the weedy base of a rose

That is a very mean rose, and yet is sentimental to me as it’s a white rambler that I started from a cutting from Maxine’s garden.  Maxine, Jo’s mom, was my first gardening client on the peninsula.

I trimmed the lower branches in order to access the weedy grass.

very satisfying

Allan tied down some branches from the Paul’s Himalayan Musk rambling rose.

Mary enjoyed the sun.

looking north through the contorted filbert

hellebore admiration

Smokey and Frosty get a visit from Onyx

We decided to have a fire.  It took the bellows to get it going.

I had just been reading an enjoyable psychology book called The Upside of Your Dark Side.  One thing it said was that sometimes we want something more than we actually like it when we get it.  Tonight’s fire was sort of like that, as the temperature had dropped and it was not entirely pleasant to sit out.

We did enjoy toasting and eating spicey cajun sausages.

I have Googled what we can toast on a fork that is healthier for summer campfires as we cannot live on a diet of roasted hot dogs.  (Bell peppers and apple slices are one suggestion.)

Moon over the gear shed.

I liked the glow in the window of the gate-door.

We did not linger outside after our campfire dinner.  I was hoping for rain on Saturday as a large stack of books had been accumulating during all this gardening weather.

Saturday, 31 January 2015

Still no rain!  I worked on a blog entry about January outings for awhile but could not stay indoors.  I did not have a big plan so just started some weeding in the front garden.

before

The carex (Ice Dancer?) all along the edge looks tatty, so I chopped it hard with hedge shears.

Early crocuses have nicely clumped up. I have gotten NO snowdrops so far in my own garden, and I find that disturbing.

I was inspired to radically thin my clump of Rubus lineatus.   I’d planted it with a casual feeling that it would die in winters anyway, as it had died in winter every time I planted it in my former garden.  However, it has thrived and it is spreading vigorously.

From summertime: “That tall…um..Rubus something?? that I wanted for a long time and now have might be a bit vigourous.”

In my former garden: “Rubus linneatus…amazing leaves. Also had it, and it died, and I just bought it again….a familiar theme.”

The new leaves have a pretty little white feathery effect, provided by silvery-white undersides, when they start to emerge.  I don’t have a good photo of that.  Wikipedia commons does:

So in the winter, I could see how it was spreading into other things, including my very special new tree (protected by bamboo).

The bamboo to the right protects my variegated Davidia.

All the stems of the Rubus came up with a good yank except for this one, on the edge of a hellebore, that needed some hard shoveling.

The Rubus is now strictly editing. (In the foreground is a bamboo pole for a lily support).

Got lots of rooted clumps with sprouts at the base. Planted some in the bogsy woods…to regret later? and saved some for Debbie to collect for the plant sale, if she wants them.

end of day; Allan had kindly dug out some running clumps of the carex (also saved for Debbie).

a young witchhazel just coming into bloom by the front gate

My BIG plan for January had been to get a load of maybe five yards of mulch delivered to build up the edges of some of the garden beds.  I delayed too long, and now rain (reading time!) is predicted.  (Surely on Sunday!)  A load of soil blocked our garage access and needs to be moves as quickly as possible.  I think I will just get one yard at time at the end of work days since my BIG plan did not come to fruition.

To close the month, we went to a musical performance at the Sou’wester.  (See tomorrow’s post.)  I have extended staycation for at least one more week.