Tuesday, 24 February 2015

On the way to work, the planter at the Ilwaco Post office has narcissi and the buds of Tulip sylvestris
In Ocean Park, we had to fuel up with some coffee at the Kiss of Mist espresso drive through.
Marilyn’s Garden, Surfside
I was curious just how long it takes to get to Marilyn’s, our furthest job from home, so I let Map My Walk map our drive.
This is a good time to sadly reveal that the blue line has NOT meant Allan’s walk as compared to mine. Turns out the blue line is just a “segment” of my walk (or ride) that appears if I run my cursor over a list of segments on the side of the app. Sorry to have misled you all!
Map My Walk is also a little weird in that it implies I hared around all over the place on this job, into the house, and over into the neighbours’ yards. I swear that never happened!
If I can trust the mapping distance, it says I walked 4.08 miles, 9,754 steps, in three and a half hours at Marilyn’s garden. It certainly felt like that long of a distance is possible with the backing and forthing to put debris in the trailer.
I was thrilled, upon wading into the garden to clip, to find that the akebia I planted two or more years ago has finally evaded the voracious deer and climbed up an old snag tree.
The neighbour had wanted us to take down that snag and I kept it as that akebia was struggling to hard to get going on it.
Today, the neighbour wanted us to get rid of the English Laurel that has sprouted up (probably from a seed from a big one in her yard) near the property line. I said if it was on her side, she was welcome to cut it down, but if it was on Marilyn’s side, I wanted to keep it. While I am no big fan of English Laurel, I am a huge fan of “blocking the eye” at a garden’s edge unless there is a gorgeous view beyond, and it has been very hard to get anything evergreen other than slow growing evergreen huckleberry to “take” along this line, what with the deer chomping down the escallonia and other solutions that I have tried. I said we would keep it clipped, and asked Allan if he would bring it down to the height of the gutters.
I was weeding by the driveway. Soon I was crying out “Noooooo!” as he clipped the first of the three sprouts much lower than I had wanted.
So who wins the battle of pruning, the one with the clippers or the one who protests the loudest? At least the other two uprights were clipped the way I wanted them.
As you can see, by then we were done cutting down the ornamental grasses, which all needed clipping. It was a joy to take down the Solidago ‘Fireworks’ and Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ that just broke off easily at the base with no clipping required.

At the back: This juniper (Moon-something, ‘Blue Moon’ or ‘Moonglow’?) has resisted deer nibbling, as has the little Ilex ‘Sky Pencil’.

Another successful deer resistant plant is this Ilex, or is it a boxwood? I fear I don’t know how to tell them apart.
Nothing but the big ornamental grasses have been truly successful at making a visual wall at the back of the garden, and of course, they are only tall in summer. I had thought of leaving the Buddleia (a sterile kind) up…but I just couldn’t.
I was delighted to have time to do some weeding and still be out of there in time to make it to the dump. I had not that we would get done that soon and figured we would have to keep a trailer load of debris overnight and deal with disposal tomorrow.
I had a visitor while doing the final weeding.

little dried figs
You can see the fig tree on the left against the house.
We worked at blazing speed and we were done in time for a trip to the dump, a 14 mile, 42 minute drive.
I have thought of making a debris pile at the south end of Marilyn’s garden, just where the garden slopes down. That is always BEFORE I realize again just how much debris the spring clean up creates. The dump scale showed we offloaded 240 pounds of debris.
We had time to do one more job at the end of the day.
Long Beach: Sid Snyder Way beach approach
We had some planters to clean up along this road to the beach. The first one was so bothersome to me that I thought “I am gonna have to dig this one out…next time”) and then found myself walking back to the van (which was parked by planter number two, on which Allan was working) to get the pick.
I have friends who smoke who will pinch their cigarette butts out and carry them away in their pockets rather than litter like this.

The very last planter is still done by volunteers…the only one that’s true of…I was not going to clean it up but I simply had to.
By now, Allan had joined me and he took care of the second to last planter.

left: I got to cross two jobs of the work list tonight! right: The March schedule is already filling up.
At home, I had the best news of the past week. Bob Nold, of the Miserable Gardener blog (one of my two most favourite blogs), has a new puppy. You can meet Mani the puppy right here.
Next: a slide show post of Marilyn’s garden in 2014.
The maths added up….or rather subtracted down.
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So nice to see a garden waking up; we’re still buried in snow here.
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I was thinking of you and your seemingly endless snow!
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