At home while getting the trailer ready for work, Allan told me my good buddies were next door. I saw no humans, so went over to give love and biscuits.
Cotah and Bentley, how I miss having them as neighbors. “I wouldn’t mind a second biscuit.”
The Depot Restaurant
North of dining deck Coreopsis ‘Flower Tower’ is not quite as towering as in previous years. Some trimming
Allan’s little project by the kitchen door
Patti’s garden
We did some deadheading…after Stella, who has had a haircut, enjoyed her biscuit.
She is supposed to stay out of the garden on trust, now that the little fence has been removed.
Last week she broke off an Agastache!
“I halp!”
From Seaview to lower Long Beach….
….we enjoyed some cottages and some hopeful signs.
We saw a little free library that perfectly matched a house.
We saw our friend Wendy’s sign on two cottages and a rainbow flag on another.
Next (tomorrow), the rest of the day in Long Beach.
In the late afternoon, I started working on a compost project directly related to the second fish tote, which with its lid has been serving as a table for container veg.
I moved the containers, needing Allan’s left handed assistance only for the biggest container of beets.
You can see how beautifully the beets are doing in the fish tote that I filled with compost, leaf mold, and one bag of Gardner and Bloome raised bed mix earlier this summer.
In looking at the blog A Way To Garden, I had first come across this article about hugelkultur, the building of raised beds on top of logs. A bit more searching came up with several articles about using hugelkultur in large containers. Alder and willow were among the suggested best woods, and those were exactly what sort of rotting wood I had sitting around, and also some maple from a big old stump in Alicia’s yard next door. I started collecting it in a wheelbarrow. After the first batch, in a rotten wood pile I’d set up for insect life, I had to scavenge more eagerly. I found I could pry some bits off of the old Danger Tree.
I didn’t want to take too much because I am interested in the natural timeline of the tree breaking down. I then explored out past the fence in the wild willow grove.
There I found a big rotten trunk that let me pry some dead wood off.
It is a treasure to me to have such a wild area just outside the fence but on our own property.
I layered the wood into the fish tote.
It should or could be filled in between with wood chips, but I don’t have any so I crammed as much rotting little bits of wood in as I could.
Another brainstorm inspired me to google using wool in a container, and I found a source suggesting it could be placed at the bottom as an organic addition. Heather of Purly Shell Fiber Arts at the port had recently brought me two bags of wool, so why not?
I added one container of potting soil from which I had harvested beets.
In the wee hours, I fretted over whether I should have put the wool at the bottom and then the wood, but I wasn’t about to change it now.
Monday, 21 September 2020
I realized that, now that water season is over, I could enjoy Monday without a growing feeling of dead about watering in Long Beach on Tuesday.
Tony came by with some delicious Cox’s Orange Pippin baked goods. Scott is going to process and freeze the rest of the apples for more baked goods later. (I need to find out how he does that.)
Allan mowed.
Today was a compost day. I turned and sifted bin four into bins three and two. I was absolutely determined to end up with two empty bins (one and four) before big fall clean ups begin and before getting the hanging baskets innards from Long Beach. At least, I hope to get them. I’ve sent a text, and phone message, and also asked a crew member to please pile up the innards for me (soil and plants) when they take the baskets down.
The process included trimming back Geranium ‘Rozanne’ and more in the canoe bed to acquire some green to layer with the brown compost material in order to speed up decomposition.
Thus did I achieve two empty bins.
I could see the canoe more clearly with the geranium cut back.
Before and after
I will leave the geranium at the south end of the middle bed for now because I like its wildness.
The product of bin one was sorely disappointing, though. This is all I got.
The bins have been dry and consisted mostly of brown material and had not been turned for weeks, if not months.
Into the fish tote it went.
Needing more soil, I scoured through the greenhouses for tomato plants that were clearly not going to give me many more tomatoes in the cooler weather, picked what they had and used the soil to almost fill the tote, then added the bale of raised bed mix and a bag of Harvest Supreme mulch. It had begun to rain and I was too drenched and cold and dirty at the end to even think of taking an after photo.
We had a delicious dinner of salmon from the Norwoodswith everything else homegrown: potatoes, chard and beet greens cooked with runner beans (well, the turkey bacon wasn’t home grown) and Allan’s Cox’s Orange Pippen apple crisp, the last two pieces.
As for the tomatoes, I brought them inside to ripen. I live in hope.
Allan put up our new signs, evidence that his wrist, while not 100%, was feeling better.
I was moved almost to tears when a car pulled up in the street and a woman called out, “Thank you.” Still ever so sad about RBG.
I spent two hours in the afternoon slicing food for the dehydrator, mostly apples and two trays of zucchini and tomatoes.
In a bowl, mix the zucchini slices with a little olive oil and whatever seasoning you want. They dehydrate down to small morsels of utter deliciousness, and the tomatoes taste as good as sun dried tomatoes from a delicatessen.
The garden provided another cucumber, flowers, and greens for salads and Our Kathleen had provided cabbage.
The dark tomatoes to the right are Chocolate Cherry, my favorite. I’m saving seeds.
One kitchen counter is full of plates of tomatoes ripening.
Sunday, 20 September 2020
We’d had some rain.
Tony and Scott came over by invitation to pick some Cox’s Orange Pippin apples.
Scott and Rudy
I said, “You don’t need a mask, we’re so far apart.”
the best apple
We knew we would get a delicious treat in exchange for the apples. Scott and Tony are amazing cooks.
Onyx from next door was hanging around in the garden. He used to be my friend, but since he and Skooter are enemies, he doesn’t let me pet him anymore.
Allan made his boat shiny with a couple of coats of table top style clear epoxy. After a few weeks (!!) , during which it has to cure, it will get a topcoat of a few coats of marine varnish.
The garden looked autumnal today.
Kniphofia ‘Earliest of All’alder leaves on gunnera leaves Future fern bed under the Bogsy Wood plant table
I started a fish tote and compost project in the afternoon, which will be in tomorrow’s post.
We finished the jobs we ran out of steam for yesterday evening. No port gardens this week until the form is approved by the Far Away Powers that Be—the form mostly about what we would pay the employees that we don’t have. I am glad the watering season is over; if not, the plants would be in distress while we are in limbo. It had better get sorted soon though as this would be a good time to divide and transplant some plants to make the gardens look better.
Mike’s garden
I had intended to deadhead the big patch of cosmos at Mike’s. Instead, because there were so very many deadheads and it didn’t look half bad, we decided to leave it be.
The smaller cosmos in the front corner did get deadheaded. Allan’s photo Red hesperantha, a reliable late bloomer (Allan’s photo)
Allan tidied a woodsy spot….
…and raked the path.
When Mike came home for lunch, we talked about politics, as usual, and we ended up following him to his office by the port where he supplied us with. Biden Harris and an Inslee (for Washington governer) sign. We were all pleased with this. He tucked them into our trailer with proper social distancing.
J Crew Cottage
Light rain at the beginning of the work day had had me concerned that I hadn’t mowed the J’s little lawn last night. The weather cleared enough to do it. Allan usually mows, but I’m stepping in because of his sore wrist (which is improving). I saw the situation he’d been mowing around, a Japanese flowering quince that had previously been more espaliered against the fence, and decided to fix it.
Certainly made mowing easier. Pulled the montbretia, too.
We weeded and tidied the front garden. It was nice to have time to do extra things.
Path
After work
With only two jobs to do, we were home early.
I decided to trim some tatty Geranium ‘Rozanne’ in the front west garden bed.
After photographing a hummingbird at the top of the Cox’s Orange Pippin apple tree….
….Allan puttered around until he suddenly realized the library was about to close, so off he went to return books and pick up some holds…
…and then took our recycling to the bins at the port.
A busy marina
I continued gardening, which at almost dusk consisted of admiring the garden.
Aster ‘Harrington’s Pink’
Allan returned, looking somber, and asked if I had looked at the news in the last couple of hours. No. Then he told me that Ruth Bader Ginsberg had died. She was one of my most admired and revered people. I wept because I imagine how badly she must have felt to not make it for four more months, and that she did not get to retire in 2016 as she had planned. And from fear of our country going backwards with the threat of an imbalanced Supreme Court. Here are some of the images that deeply moved me tonight as I dived into social media to commune with friends. You can click them to embiggen them.
Perhaps my favourite image can be found right here. May her memory be a blessing.
The day began with the conclusion of our bureaucratic hassle. I had a phone call to get help filling out the baffling form required by the Powers that Be about payment to the employees that we do not have nor ever intend to have.
Tedious. Now we wait for the Powers that Be to take our filing fee (!!) and approve the form so we can do to that particular job.
It made for a delayed start to the work day.
The Depot Restaurant
We weeded and deadheaded, but the only photos taken show a blackberry clipping that Allan did by the giant wheelie bin.
Patti’s garden
Stella got her biscuit but did not make it into the photos.
Morning glory from seed
Patti said earlier that she doesn’t like the tall plant on the north side of the flower garden, Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’. I forgot to ask her if she likes it better now that it is blooming.
Lower left, sweet peas planted late in the year that are just starting to bloom cosmos
We pulled or cut back some of the cosmos that looked tired and had so many deadheads and so few buds that it wasn’t worth deadheading them.
Cosmos
Centaurea ‘Black Ball’
After Patti’s, we made a stop at North Jetty Brewery to buy some Ledbetter Red beer as an early birthday present for Our Kathleen.
The brewery has a window where one can safely pick up an order with minimal social contact.
This was pretty much within my pandemic protocols comfort zone although without the extreme social distancing that I like best.
The Boreas Inn
We did our weekly tidy, although not the string trimmer edging Susie was hoping for because Allan’s wrist is still sore and I have not practiced his upside down strimmer technique (the strimmer head held upside down, not Allan).
If the Boreas, which is for sale, does not sell by next spring, I must insist on moving the lupine out of this bed so that it will have some interest after early summer.
They take up a lot of room and then the leaves look so tatty that they must be cut back, and then the bed is a big bore for the rest of the summer. The lupines could go off to the side somewhere. This year, we missed perennial moving-around time when gardening was declared inessential from late March to early May; a lot of plants that needed moving around at the port did not get moved for the same reason.
We had a trailer load of debris from Long Beach to dump, so City Works came next. I gazed longingly at the concrete vaults that we don’t have the ooomph to lift and take home before they get smashed up.
In the pile was a sad rhododendron that I rescued.
I cut the branches off to see if it will come back from the stump.
We drove north to deliver the gift to Kathleen, who was pressure washing her cottage with a quiet electric pressure washer, proving that pressure washers do not have to be noisy and obnoxious.
After a bit of a scenic tour up to the next crossing road, 227th, and back down Sandridge Road, we got back to work.
The Red Barn
Our good friend barn cat Cosmo appeared. (There are two barn cats who keep each other company. One is so shy we have never seen it.)
My Covid protocols require disinfecting hand after petting cat, in case of human germs from other petters.
Cosmo left Skooter a long message on our work trailer.
Diane’s garden
Holly got her biscuit.
Some containers:
Prolific strawberries
The roadside garden:
pink achillea and santolina
The septic vault garden:
We weeded the gravel along the front edge….
…and when Diane came home, I told her my idea of making it a Beth Chatto-esque gravel garden next year. She liked my idea, saying there are already good plants seeding in there.
home
We had intended to do Mike’s garden today but felt that five thirty PM was too late to go to a private garden, so we ended the work day. Alicia and Brian had arrived next door for a visit. Skooter was pleased to see his friends.
I was pleased that they had brought us some cat food, cat litter, and a case of Trader Joe’s finest plonk.
Skooter hoped to see his friend, Coco…
….and indeed he did, as these photos by Alicia show.
No five day weekend this week, as we will finish today’s work tomorrow.
Before bedtime, I had read a four day old letter from a big job that gave me so much anxiety I only got four hours of sleep. There was a form we had to fill out, which wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the letter contained the shocking information that if we hired any employees, which we have no intention of doing, the “prevailing wage” for “landscape maintenance” as set by the state Powers That Be (hereafter PTB) at $13.50 an hour. It was hard for me, and for other gardeners to whom I messaged the information, to figure out if this meant that our work client thought we were only worth $13.50 an hour. If we ever did hire someone, which we won’t, it would have to be someone who knows a choice plant from a weed, and that alone is worth more than $13.50 an hour.
Before bedtime, we got all our social security paperwork together and figured out if we could actually eke out a retirement starting in January on Allan’s 68th birthday. We could, sort of.
I only got four hours of sleep. Oh, I am repeating myself. I am tired.
I made a phone call at the ungodly hour of eight thirty AM and found out the $13.50 only would apply to this imaginary employee, which saved us from immediate outraged retirement, but i am still outraged that our work is considered by the PTB to be of such little value and apparently work test requires no skill or knowledge worth paying for. Then I had to wait another two hours for the appropriate person to be available to talk to about the form.
We still had to go online into the world of the PTB to file the form. I stared bleakly at the computer because I couldn’t even figure out how to LAUnCh the form. And this was supposed to be a work day.
Three phone calls later, I found out that we had to watch two and a half hours of interactive training videos about employees and other particulars relating to big companies and dump trucks and roadway building and delivery trucks. About five minutes of it applied to how to fill out our form, which was not unlocked till we were done with the videos, by which time the person who was going to help us fill out the daunting and baffling form had gone home. But at least the form was unlocked! More bureaucracy would await us the next morning. We cannot even work on our job till the form is filled out and approved by the faraway PTB. Even though it relates just to the hiring of employees, which we do not have, and which, as it turned out, we say on the form that we do not have.
I will give credit that the three different people we talked to on the phone at the PTB agency were kind, helpful, even a bit apologetic, and comfortingly funny.
Finally, in the very late afternoon, we were able to go do a tiny fraction of the work we had planned for today.
We did not have to water, as shown by Allan’s photo of the grey rain gauge.
Long Beach
We deadheaded the welcome sign, although not clipping every cosmos deadhead because there are so many now.
A gaillardia in the lawn nearby evokes memories of when the city used to plow and plant roadside verges of wildflowers.
Downtown, we pulled the Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ from under three street trees. I had seen how dead it looked in the Faux Rod Run video that I shared a couple of days ago.
We weeded horsetail out of Veterans Field garden beds.
Gaura ‘Whirling Butterflies’, ‘Jackman’s Blue’ rue ….is knowing that worth more than $13.50 an hour?
We weeded at city hall. I trimmed a variegated miscanthus back to the wall but forgot to take an after because of my anxiety that someone would come around the corner.
It was a brief enough work session so that I did not want to set up our cones. We’d had to dodge some unmasked people while doing the tree gardens, but it was not as stressful as being stuck into a planter with a hose on.
The hanging baskets from The Basket Case Greenhouse still look great.
They are sheltered from the wind on the entry ramp on the east side of the building.
I have a new hat, from The Sierra Club, not the Green Party.
The sun was setting.
While the air quality was still not ideal, the sky was no longer a featureless grey-orange.
We finished Fifth Street Park in the dusk, enough to not have to return to town tomorrow.
It is looking rather fine at the moment, even in the almost dark, except for this little bed.
The Solidago ‘Fireworks’ looks all off balance there without the sweet peas that didn’t happen. I think later I will move it to the centre of that bed, or maybe one at each end, so at least it balances the one in the other bed, in case whoever takes on the job doesn’t plant sweet peas. (Isn’t thinking about that sort of thing worth more than $13.50 an hour?)
I know now that as business owners we can charge a higher rate than that despite how the state values our work, but I am still feeling insulted, especially when during those training videos I saw that other employees, like carpenters for one example, were valued at $45 an hour.
At least it looks like we won’t be pushed into retirement before we had planned. There are certain jobs I’d like to keep into my 70s. But I have to admit that the idea of retirement looked kind of wonderful last night at one AM. And three AM. And four AM.
in real time, a kitten non-report
About ten days ago, I found out that the kittens would soon have a test, the results of which would take ten days to find out they were or were not cured of ringworm. I’m not sure when the actual test took place. As this post “goes to press” we have brought in our kitten supplies from the garage so they don’t get damp with the change in weather and put them in the bathroom that will be the kitten room when Nickel and Fairy finally come home. It kinda chokes me up to see the hopeful bags of kitten food and special litter for kittens.
On this rainy day, I finished a gardening memoir that made me happy.
I loved it. The author has a blog called A Way to Garden which I have heard of but have not read, started after she wrote a book by the same name which I now have on order from the library. However, I have one of her quotations saved as a gardening favourite.
So memoirs involve a lot of introspection, sometimes leading to long pauses of navel gazing of my own. Pardon me as I go on to make this blog partly about me.
When she retired from a career at Martha Stewart Living, Margaret Roach had to figure out who she was without that identity. In a much more obscure way, I am having to figure that out about who I will be when I give up the identity of the Long Beach public gardener. And if I give up all public gardening…then, indeed, who would I be?
Her shutdown of income production seemed not as extreme as mine will be, when I read that she still had an apartment in New York as well as her little country house, but never mind. From a job as high powered as hers had been, it was a radical change.
I have added to my book list two books that inspired her…
I have heard of the Nearing book but have not read it.
I love this quotation and might use it for a garden open day during Lily Time.
Here begins a description of her little country house and here is the moment when I fell madly in love with this memoir.
Here is where I got terribly envious when I realized she was actually friends with two of my idols, Charles Withey and Glenn Price, two of the funniest garden lecturers I’ve ever had the pleasure to hear.
I had to stop reading for a few minutes to absorb my dissatisfaction that my life wasn’t her life.
Even with all that, she still felt the craving, “I want to be somebody.” With friends like that, she definitely IS somebody. (I am still trying to cope with my envy about Withey and Price!)
That she still felt that so strongly is comforting to me. “Am I a has been,” she writes, “because of the actions I took in coming here?” This is how I think I will feel post-Long Beach, and especially if we ever don’t have the port gardens. What will be left of my identity? In Long Beach, I have labored in obscurity, except for people who read this blog, but it has been my life focus for almost a quarter of a century.
I also appreciate her fears of falling while changing a lightbulb or walking on ice at her semi-remote country house, of lightning, of snakes (I did not know the East coast has a rattlesnake!), fears that resulted in her getting help from neighbors who then knew about her fears. I try to keep mine a secret but it’s hard when they are so obvious. It was comforting to read about her fears and not be alone.
I learned that tadpoles don’t turn into frogs for three to twenty two months, which explains the stubbornly tadpole look of the ones in my water boxes.
Also, this….music with words….
….which I gave up listening to in 2005 after getting out of a situation where loud music was used as a tool of sleep deprivation…and now I do hear all the other sounds.
A friend said “Margaret lets the garden tell her what to eat.” That is so true here this year, the first time I have grown food items for decades. I learned about vegetable broth….
…..and have to figure out how to make it.
I’m always pleased to find appreciation for May Sarton.
A memory that comes to me sometimes came to me with this passage….
..a memory of painting a picture at about that age on a child sized artist easel that I loved, and my mother walking into the room and telling me with disapproval that my red and green house was all wrong because it was “Christmas colors”. I lost my love of the easel painting after that. Just a bit earlier, this book had included a pertinent thought…
And I know that is true. But I still remember that moment whenever I see a red and green house or hear “Christmas colors”. I’ve added that book to my list of reading, too bad the library doesn’t have it.
I have ordered A Way to a Garden, will read the blog this winter, found some videos of Margaret’s garden on YouTube, and found out she has a subsequent memoir called Backyard Parables, which the library has and which I am eagerly awaiting. It’s a joy to discover a new garden writer and to love a book as much as I loved this one.
We postponed work because of the lovely lovely rain, which reduced our fire danger but did not reduce to smoke below the “very dangerous” level to breathe. I do believe watering season is over, hurrah! So I erased the last two prospective weeks of watering from the work list.
The rain was glorious and soothed so much anxiety about the peninsula being a tinderbox.
Rain barrels which were empty are now full……or almost full. the red rain gauge
By the time the rain was done in the wee hours of the next morning, we had almost half an inch.
I enjoyed getting drenched while picking tomatoes and a cucumber and assorted flowers and leaves for dinner salads.
I placed three short (very short) videos on my Facebook gardening page, here
I just put links to them instead of putting them here because I am so close to running out of WordPress space and wish to postpone the day when I must buy another space upgrade.
Skooter was happy to stay indoors.
Two Books
I had made a list of memoirs to read from the book WhyWe WriteAboutOurselves. Recently, I read two of them.
Here we have a book about a woman who blew up her settled middle-aged life by having an affair with an old friend. And here are a few of my favorite bits.
As a night owl, I appreciate this about exercise classes at dawn: “My days are already interminably long. To get up before dawn to do something miserable like spinning and then have even more day left over afterwards? Which they wanted to fill with—something? One can only marvel at these people.”
This perfect image about walking around a lake pleases me because in Seattle, I lived two blocks from Green Lake, whose almost three mile long trail many people walk.
The book was an amusing light read, and while I could relate to some of the story, the author had no money worries so lived in a very different world from me at that age. I did kind of blow up my life at the same age…but I had to. (Part of the story is somewhere in the distant history of this blog. I never have figured out how people dare to write the whole story of their lives including the hidden parts! But I am grateful that they do.)
About comforting books:
Who is this David Lodge who is mentioned in the same breath as my beloved Wodehouse? I have not investigated yet, but I shall.
This is most definitely a decision I made shortly after age 50, although the circumstances were not exactly these:
I was reading along pretty happily until I reached a passage where the author tells of how Barbara Ehrenreich’s great book Nickel and Dimed made her feel guilty about having a house cleaner because it was oppressive and not sisterhood. I don’t want to quote exactly how she put that. She does hire a house cleaner and thumbs her nose at Ehrenreich by calling her house cleaner “the maid” rather than by name. . Fortunately, this was at the end of the book. Had it been at the beginning, I, a former housecleaner (known as “a jewel” to my clients, a couple of whom wept when I left Seattle) would have stopped reading right there.
The second book:
Here we have the memoir of a woman whose husband blew up their lives by having an affair, and the ten years it took her to recover. What I liked about it was the amazing Brooklyn four story house with roof deck and multiple stairways that she lived in with her daughters during her marriage and after the divorce, and the emotional journey of eventually selling it and having to sort through all her possessions.
I can very happily read hundreds of pages of that sort of thing. I also appreciated her financial struggles and her ruminations about mortality.
One of my favorite quotations appeared, one that is so appropriate to our pandemic times.
More about sorting things, in this case her cookbooks, added a book to my list of books to read, since we no longer go to restaurants and I have been doing more preparation of food from the garden.
So I do recommend this memoir to people who like that sort of thing.
The quite perfect book I finished on this rainy day needs a post all its own, tomorrow.
Alicia had made a brief visit last week and brought us some perishable groceries, and today Our Kathleen did the same, so between the two of them, we had bunches of bananas for the dehydrator. It has been in use lately for zucchini chips (so delicious that there would never be enough zucchini!), dried tomatoes, dried apples.
We found a treasure in amongst the groceries from Kathleen.
Reese’s!
Along with a surprise packet of Earl Grey tea, I enjoyed a restorative teatime before we added her ripe bananas to the Alicia bananas.
Skooter has been confined to his catios so that we can make sure he is not in the smoky air for great lengths of time.
Each day includes a brief excursion into the garden to water containers and greenhouse. Rain is expected for Monday.
The hydrangeas have recovered from heat wilt.
Evenings have included dinner salads of cucumber, tomato, scallions, greens and edible flowers; this weekend I started added squash flowers from some self seeded Halloween pumpkins from which it is too late to get pumpkins. The flowers are delectable raw in salad.
Monday, 14 September 2020
The rain did not come. With no wind, I decided it was safe enough to mow up the dry leaves that we had collected from Marlene’s lawn a week ago, before the fires, the smoke, the burn ban and power tool warning. I spread the leaves all over the lawn to be mowed and bagged.
Some went into my one black leaf mold bin and some went on the Bogsy Wood edge as a chopped mulch.
Some went under the big plant table where I am planning a shade bed.
My Salix magnifica is suddenly showing great distress from last week’s heat. It had been well watered throughout.
I am distressed because I love it do. It’s kind of unusual and rare, I think.
A blueberry bush has also suddenly turned up its toes.
I would love to have got stuck in to weeding and tidying the center bed…
….but since the smoky air was still in the “very dangerous” zone, I thought I should go indoors.
I admired a few plants first.
black taro and golden canna Kniphofia ‘Earliest of All’ and Solidago ‘Fireworks’Boltonia asteroidesPassion flowers
Indoors, Allan was storing the dried bananas.
Still no rain.
Instead of reading my latest book (more on this soon), I tried to order Dan Hinkley’s and Jimi Blake’s new books online and endured an hour of password and security notice messages for no good reason. I was then promised free shipping and gave up when I was about to be charged $15 shipping anyway. Allan found the books for me. He is so much better at shopping. I don’t go into buildings anymore so everything possible is bought online. The online vendors are the ones getting rich from the pandemic.
Then my iPad and iPhone both decided it was time to delete all previous email messages, including 10000 or so unread emails (you read that number right), despite all my attempts in mail settings to stop them disappearing. As they ticked away into oblivion I felt both anxiety and relief. But if you have emailed me recently, it’s gone….(The mysterious deletion stopped when it reached 2019’s emails.)
Then I tried to log onto the ilwaco City Council zoom meeting and was thwarted by “invalid meeting ID number.” Two hours of potential reading time had disappeared. Fortunately, tomorrow is another chance because we are postponing work till we have better air to breathe.
I will now make a cucumber tomato etc salad and have time read my book for one hour before dinner.
Later, here are Allan’s photos from his delightful rainy midnight walk to the post office.
Cosmos ‘Seashells’Cosmos ‘Cupcake and Saucers’Rosa rubrifolia hips Rosa moyesii hipsSeed heads of orach Water lily (Allan’s photo)SedumThis lavender could have gone in the silver and gold post. Persicaria ‘Firetail’ Hardy fuchsia Corylus contorta ‘Red Majestic’ and Stipa gigantea Sanguisorba ‘Lilac Squirrel’Aster ‘Harrington’s Pink’Cyclamen, from Our Kathleen dahlia (Allan’s photo) rose (Allan’s photo)Buddleia lindleyana (Allan’s photo)A succulent of some sort (Allan’s photo)Hardy fuchsia (Allan’s photo)Scabiosa ‘Black Knight’ (Allan’s photo) Fuchsia bud (Allan’s photo)
Tangly Cottage Gardening 