Friday, 12 May 2017
Our dear friend Jenna (Queen La De Da) sent me this photo of a stunning Davidia tree, taken on a recent trip; it’s at the McMenamins Edgefield lodging in Troutdale, Oregon.
I woke early Friday to heavy pea sized hail, and was so glad we had gone to see Steve and John’s garden yesterday. All day, heavy rain squalls kept me indoors finishing an excellent book. I re-read it because of having recently enjoyed the Dear Bill Bryson homage to it. Allan ran errands, including the highly useful task of getting new tires for our utility trailer and a stop at the Ilwaco Timberland Library. A librarian said she loves the blushing rhododendrons by the front door. The evening was spent writing up the blog post of the Bayside Garden visit; this involved much enjoyably instructive backing and forthing of emails with Steve, to get plant IDs.I’d been feeling a bit puny after working in bad weather so this had been a perfect day off.
Saturday, 13 May 2017
After a night of waking now and then to incessant rain, I was surprised to find good weather in the late morning. My first goal should have been to finish the big west back garden bed. Of course, I wanted to do a more excitingly weedy area and thought of the bogsy woods instead, until I found all this:
So weeding the west bed it was, after all. I did complete that task, not as nicey nice as if it were a job for a client, but good enough for me, for now, to erase it from the work board. I found that the slugs and snails had been very much interested in my 33 Nicotiana langsdorfii. I think they will snap back. I’ll spare you sad photos. Each now has a dose of Sluggo.I learned that my Unloader brace makes a huge difference, by neglecting to wear it for the first couple of hours in the garden. The pain surprised me. I had forgotten. Putting on the brace helped enormously.
Meanwhile, Allan had gone over the river to shop and get an oil change, leaving before I woke up. In the afternoon, he attended an event at the museum in which local students painted pictures of shorebirds:
When he returned, he took on the daunting mowing job of making our path to the Saturday Market through the back meadow yard next door:
We like the meadow effect but also like to be able to walk through, and keeping the lawn short by the fence helps to daunt the bindweed that lurks beneath this lawn.Allan ended his varied day with a couple of hours of weeding at the Ilwaco Community Building garden, his own particular job.
He had thought he would get the whole job done this evening. I had known he could not possibly get the whole job done. I wish for his sake that he’d been the one who was right.We are watching Home Fires, season two. It was early last fall that I discovered season one, thanks to a recommendation by J9. This WWII series led me to the book Jambusters, on which it was based, and thence to my beloved Nella Last’s wartime diaries, and then to the glorious history series (Tales of a New Jerusalem in three volumes so far) by David Kynaston, and on to whole winter of other interesting books about WWII civilian life in the U.K.
It is just such a darn shame that there is no season three of Home Fires.
That does look really soggy. Everyone else seems to be having a drought.
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It has never been this soggy before in May.
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