22 January: pond form and soil

Saturday, 22 January 2022

At home

Allan started working on his door project, then stopped to help finish the pond. Well, actually he did it all from that point on, although I had dug out another small wheelbarrow of sand to begin with. There was still water in the pond hole.

He went back to his door project ….

…while I messed around with planting some bog plants (I can’t even remember what the balls of mud are that came out of the grey tub.)

Allan rounded off the stern to his arbor-top tribute to Chinook canoes.

I arranged for some mulch to be delivered and tried to spend my last hour before it arrived by digging up some hollies and some wild running tall grass from the willow grove. I couldn’t budge most of it.

Impossible holly will have to be thwarted by clipping.

Some of the holly is outside our alleged property line (with which you know by now that we disagree). If it is not my holly, I guess I don’t have to try to control its noxious weediness??

Skooter got himself stuck in the Catio again (by asking to go indoors for a snack).

And then the mulch arrived.

I started moving it by wheelbarrow. It is a long way back to the willow grove from front driveway…at least 500 feet round trip. I wished we could have had some of the soil dumped on the southeast corner easement road…but there is too much gear shed stuff in the way of backing a truck in.

Although I was too tired to appreciate the garden much, I did notice this Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’.

The poor sad lawn is still trying to suck off my shoes.

After his door project came to a stopping point, Allan implemented an idea I had had: filling all our four to five gallon buckets and stacking them in the van….

…then very carefully driving around the corner to the easement road, where the van can be got much closer to our gate by wending around totes and pots in a way that van with trailer cannot do.

I had made only eight wheelbarrow trips by the time he drove out back. I really had wanted to see how long and how many miles ten trips would make. But it was getting dark, so I stopped to dump out the buckets he brought in the southeast gate.

His method of moving soil (which he says I should take credit for thinking of) covered half again as much ground and took half as long as my wheelbarrowing across the mucky soggy lawn.

Results of the van soil moving method:

Results of twice as long wheelbarrowing time:

There will still be some wheelbarrowing. This part of the project is supposed to be mine. Yet when I had tried to load buckets of mulch into the van, I found I was too exhausted to pick them up.

I did a map my walk of the eight wheelbarrow loads, which included the time spent dumping the many buckets from the van.

It’s just possible some mulch will be left over from the willow grove project and could be put in the front garden, requiring a blissfully short trip.

I will be depressed if we lose our view of the sunset over Cape Disappointment.

After dark, Allan painted the door that will replace a disintegrated door between us and the gear shed’s back yard. It’s handy to be able to step through a door there for bindweed control along the fence. He has added reinforcements to the back so this old door should last a few years.