13-14 July: more compost and company

Saturday, 13 July 2019

at home

The newly doubled rain barrels are working well.  More misty rain had fallen before we woke up….

…and then the temperature went over 70 again.

Skooter learned a move from Frosty.

Seven years ago, our garden was on the local tour.  It is amazing how low the plants looked back then when it was but a year and a half old.  Now that I have enabled video on this blog, I can show you the musician, Randy Brown, improvising a song about our garden those many years ago.

Today I got to spend the day in the mature garden where the edges have grown in to give privacy and enclosure, always my goal.

Lezlie came over with Winston and a flat of cat grass for our soon to be arriving new cat.

We toured all around the garden.

Winston wanted in.  Frosty, who likes dogs, quietly observed. Lezlie had afternoon plans for her own garden.

Lezlie said, “You are always welcome to visit if you are north of Cranberry Road.” Like me, it is a big deal for her to go to the other end of the peninsula.  She added, “I planned this trip like getting out the buckboard and hooking up the horses.”

Allan, who likes to go on trips, had gone boating. (More on this when he has time to write it up.)

I weeded until time to share a meal with friends from the north (further north than Cranberry Road, from the land of cities).  Allan’s boating trip was local so he was able to join us at

At the Helm Hotel (The Waterline Pub).

At the Helm

the view from our table

Alan and Debbie

You may remember Debbie and Alan from bringing us the Mighty Mac chipper not long ago!

crab quiche

Alan’s appetizer

Debbie and I share a lot of the same ideas about gardens and I hope I remember correctly that her favourite on the tour was Steve and John’s bayside garden. I felt I had been on most of the tour because of the all-revealing preview photos; Debbie and Alan filled me in on what I had missed.  What an amusing hour or two we had talking gardens.

at home again

elephant garlic and red poppies outside the fence…

I sifted out two more wheelbarrows of compost from bin one.

one

two

evening light on the garden

Sunday, 14 July 2019

I looked forward to a visit from Debbie Teashon of Rainy Side Gardeners and Jeanne from Portland.  I must admit that, although I was weeding for a midweek visit from friends, I had stepped up the effort because of Debbie’s visit; she is a professional garden photographer.  Sadly, instead of the longer visit we had planned, she had to rush home (four hours or more away) because her dog was doing poorly.  Happy news is that the dog turned out to be okay.

Allan and I still had a good tour around the garden and long garden talk with Jeanne.

Although I later felt verklempt about missing out on Debbie, I went on determinedly with my compost sifting.

Another barrow-full went along the front garden edge.

I had a little bit left for the shady north bed in front…

but not quite enough, and I had come to the end of bin one.  I started with bin four last weekend and, from the four bins, I had gotten twenty wheelbarrows of sifted compost.

The unfinished compost now fills up just two bins, with two empty for the first time since we installed the four bins.

I fussed over my new feature made out of a hollow stump with an insert holding water.

Flowers in the back garden (east bed):

I ran all the sprinklers just in case we don’t have more rain.

It feels satisfying to have found time to weed almost the whole garden without stress.  Thank you to the rain that gave us an extra long weekend.