real time reminder:
The day that this post publishes is Edible Tour day. See you there?
Wednesday, 22 July 2015
Every year seems to have one day that drags on till dark and qualifies as the longest day, and today may have been it for 2015.
Copy editors: I know I change tenses a lot. I don’t mean to switch from past to present tense. Sometimes, a work memory is so immediate that I switch to present tense as I relive it.
Ilwaco
Allan watered our volunteer garden at the Ilwaco Post Office garden while I watered my potted plants and ladies in waiting at home.

Allan’s photo: lily buds dropped on the ground. The stripping is too thorough to be a deer. You can see his and the cameras shadow.

at home: Nicotiana langsdorfii has been a champ in the garden this year, whether here in the drier front garden or in the more lush back garden.

Jenna gives this one and the one across the street from her shop extra water, so it is thriving. Too bad all the merchants don’t do that for their adjacent planters…It would be so easy.
A planter that gets watered daily does better than one that is watered every third day, which is what the city budget and our time allows. Just sayin’….it’s not that hard to take a jug of water out to the planter by one’s business…or is that too much to wish for? The Portside Café owners also give theirs extra care, and it shows.
The Planter Box
On the way north, we stopped at the Planter Box to get some new plants for the biggest Long Beach planter. I was impressed with how lush the plants look; it is not easy at all to keep them all watered.

Planter Box: me and co-owner Theresa; it’s a family business started by her dad and mom, who have almost retired.
With some plants acquired, we went onward to our first job.
Golden Sands Assisted Living
I hope that our four flower quadrants in the courtyard at Golden Sands remind residents of cottage gardens they once knew.
This was actually a short day for the north end jobs, because we did not have Marilyn’s today; we do it every other week now. So we went straight from Golden Sands to…
Klipsan Beach Cottages
Photos taken after an hour of weeding and deadheading; Mary and Denny keep the gardens well watered.

We planted the Clematis ‘Rooguchi’ that we acquired at the Basket Case end of season sale.

It was a hot day. The refreshing splash of the pond waterfalls helped. That’s a plastic fern hiding the pipes…good idea.

The A Frame deck: I often think it would be nice to be a guest here, sipping a glass of cold white wine and just chillaxin’.
Long Beach
First, we went to the city works yard and got several buckets of Soil Energy mulch from my pile. Allan took some to Fish Alley to top off the four barrels there.
At last, we took the crapulous old Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’ out of the Lewis and Clark Square planter.

after; we had picked up some soil at LB city works to fill in. The white is sluggo, because we found lots of snails.
Because it did not end up looking as full and wonderful as I had imagined, I wished I had brought more plants.
Next, we went to Oman Builders Supply to get some lumber for a home project which you will be reading about soon-ish. It’s for an idea proposed by Pam of Seaside. $200 plus of lumber later… A worker there had brought her new puppy!
Ilwaco
A brief stop at home to unload lumber and pick up the water trailer battery and some hoses….

Even thought the foliage does not look impressive, I was thrilled to see a flower on one of my pineapple lilies.
Allan did his usual hour and a half watering session of the Ilwaco trees and planters while I watered the boatyard garden.

We have had no rain to speak of. Across the street, birds were pecking at ice from one of the fish trucks.

Allan’s photo of a local fellow heading back from paddling out in the Port of Ilwaco. (I bet Allan wished to be boating instead of watering.)
My mission now was to water all of the Howerton Avenue gardens at which I have hose access: Time Enough Books, the port office and Nisbett Gallery gardens, and the Bruce Peterson gallery garden.

As I walk east, I ponder this scruffy little spot. I decide to imperialize it by throwing a bunch of poppy seeds in here this fall. If we get some rain…could be good next spring into early summer.

a soothing view while I unhook the port office hose to hook it up to a faucet closer to the Howerton gardens.
As I water the gardens by the Nisbett Gallery, Don comes out to chat and tells me he has been watering them also, and he means absolutely drenching them. He unhooks the hose for me and hooks it back up at the port office, bless his heart.

looking west along the Time Enough Books garden, which has extra cool plants because we’ve been doing this one for years. Sometimes bookstore owner Karla adds some extra water, too.

I show Don where someone snipped themselves a bouquet of lavender. Do they think I won’t notice? I notice everything. If everyone did that, there would be NO flowers left.
Allan, having finished the Ilwaco planter watering, is coming along after me. His plan is to use a long series of hoses to water the gardens at the west end, and to also use it to water Salt Hotel’s curbside garden to pay them back for their water generosity. They’ve been letting us use their hose and water to water two businesses other than their own.
I do a bit of trimming and weeding the garden above but I give it up and move on when a drunk guy who has hunkered down between two buildings starts yelling at me. Not a pleasant working environment.
By now, I have realized Allan is having trouble because he is so far behind me. I call him and he tells me what is going on: Because the owners of the business close to the garden will not let us use their water, Allan is hooking up to a faucet at the docks, but wrestling with three hoses takes time. Then he found that even three hoses was not long enough to reach, so he borrowed the Salt Hotel hose. The Salt hose sprung a leak and he said he felt responsible because he has been using it to water for the last few weeks. But the leak looked like the hose had been burned…but did he have to get them a new hose? I said Oh my gawd I am too tired to even think about that, but if it looked burned, it was not our fault. (He talked to Salt owner Laila and she agreed, but he still felt bad.)
Here’s how he did it:
I leave him to his struggles and walk several storefronts to water the Peterson Gallery. Then, even though I am so tired, I unhook the Peterson hose and haul it several storefront west to the bank, where I have found a faucet that I can use just to get enough water for their street trees, so they won’t die in this drought. This will save Allan some time and I know he must be exhausted.
When he gets to the Pavilion, I water the garden there with his hoses while he takes the Peterson hose back to hook up to THEIR faucet. I lack manual dexterity and am lousy at threading and unthreading hoses to faucets. I imagine how good the gardens could be if I could devote the time we now spend hose watering to garden design and care instead.
I am so tired, I can only imagine how tired Allan must be. Fighting with four hoses is like being stuck in a nest of (nonvenomous) snakes. I can’t help him water the east end garden, so I leave to walk three blocks to home. (Using the water trailer would take him twice as long, because he has to wait for the tank to fill, and then wait for the water to pump back out of the tank onto a garden.)
By hooking up to the newly discovered (by us) dock faucet, Allan is able to give the east end garden a proper soaking for the first time this summer. He had been hauling 20 or more five gallon buckets there once a week and tipping them out onto the garden. (Picture also having to lift 20 heavy buckets of water out of the trailer.)
I walk home past “the lost garden”, thinking about how it once was carefully bordered with rocks, that now show because it has been strimmed. The woman who created it is long dead, and the garden is gone.
Allan gets home after dark. Next time he will take another length of our hose and he’ll know his routes and the lengths he needs, so it should go faster. Thus ends what I hope will be the longest workday…
Oh my goodness–that puppy at Oman’s is my neighbor Tessa’s new puppy!
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Oh it all makes sense now!!! Because they told me pup has an Albanian name. So I met Tessa briefly and didn’t know she was your neighbour.
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Love the shots of your own yard…..it is beautiful.
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