Posted in journal on Feb 27, 2022| 4 Comments »
Friday, 25 February 2022
Port of Ilwaco
We started with the garden bed that would have the most impact because it had the most ornamental grasses to cut back. Today, with warmer and more comfortable weather, we weeded as we went along the garden beds.
(more…)Posted in journal on Feb 26, 2022| 4 Comments »
Thursday, 24 February 2022
I had hoped to spend the day rereading the Joan Aiken novel, Foul Matter, in one sitting today. It was not to be.
Port of Ilwaco
The weather was cold and clear. We doggedly and determinedly got through the workday.
(more…)Posted in journal on Feb 24, 2022| 8 Comments »
At home
We may have blog break coming up, having caught up with “real time”. The weather turned mighty cold, down into the mid twenties at night. At last I had a staycation extension that involved little but reading. Meanwhile, here are some photos I took while out covering tender plants.
(more…)Posted in journal, tagged Bolstad beach approach garden, Coulter Park, Long Beach (Washington), Long Beach 2022 on Feb 23, 2022| 7 Comments »
Thursday, 18 February 2022
Long Beach
I had actually been thinking of more ornamental grass shearing at the port today. However, I had heard it might snow on Monday, and the grasses that are still uncut would look pretty in snow. So we went to Long Beach instead.
(more…)Posted in journal, tagged Long Beach (Washington), Long Beach 2022, Long Beach planters on Feb 22, 2022| 11 Comments »
Thursday, 18 February 2022
Long Beach
We worked our way from south to north on the street trees and planters.
(more…)Posted in journal, tagged gardening, Howerton Avenue gardens, Ilwaco boatyard garden, Pennisetum macrourum, Port of Ilwaco, Rhododendron falconeri, Rhododendron sinogrande, spring clean up on Feb 21, 2022| 5 Comments »
Wednesday, 16 February 2022
Port of Ilwaco
Ilwaco boatyard
We returned to the boatyard to finish up, including a bit more ceanothus pruning, considerable digging up of Pennisetum macrourum (beautiful but too much of a runner) and the shearing of the huge patch of P. macrourum at the south end (too too much for us old folks to dig up.)
(more…)Posted in journal, tagged Ilwaco boatyard garden, pruning ceanothus, santolinas, spring clean up on Feb 20, 2022| 15 Comments »
Tuesday, 15 February 2022
Second notice: Folks who subscribe via email, I apologize for the inconvenience, but we are going to start using the “read more” button because of some pirating of content. This means you can’t read the entire post in email anymore, and will have to click through to the site. I hope it won’t cause you any trouble. It should still be readable on your smartphone. Also, please, let me know if it works; is the content under the read more button hidden until you click?
Port of Ilwaco
With cool but not windy weather, we got a lot done at the boatyard garden. So far, the nicely mulched garden was easy to weed. I’m wondering if weeds we buried will emerge later. The horsetail certainly will. Our main tasks were trimming ornamental grasses and shearing santolinas into balls so they will be architectural.
(more…)Posted in journal, tagged gardening, Long Beach (Washington), Long Beach 2022, Long Beach City Hall, Long Beach Peninsula, Port of Ilwaco, spring cleanup on Feb 19, 2022| 9 Comments »
First notice: Folks who subscribe via email, I apologize for the inconvenience but we are going to start using the “read more” button because of…reasons. This means you can’t read the entire post in email anymore, and will have to click through to the site. I hope it won’t cause you any trouble or stop you from reading. It should still be readable on your smartphone through your web browser.Also, please, let me know if it works; is the content under the read more button hidden until you click?
Sunday, 13 February 2022
This morning, a blue wall appeared over the crab pots next door. Last summer, we had a back drop of uncovered crab pots with colorful floats inside. I like the blue tarp wall also. It speaks to me of living in a working class town instead of the kind of place where you see fancy blue painted stucco walls.
(more…)Posted in journal on Feb 18, 2022| 11 Comments »
Saturday, 12 February 2022
At home
When I went outdoors in the mid morning, I saw that the wonderful wall of crab pots had appeared in the gear shed back lot next door!
(more…)Posted in journal, tagged Fifth Street Park, gardening, Lewis and Clark Square, Long Beach (Washington), Long Beach 2022, Long Beach Merchants Center, pruning hydrangeas, Third Street Park, Veterans Field garden on Feb 17, 2022| 3 Comments »
Friday, 11 February 2022
Long Beach
We started on the SE quadrant of Fifth Street Park. I pulled some tatty hesperantha out of a planter next to the park…
…and weeded the street tree nearby, which has a continuing infestation of creeping sorrel that got worse with last year’s neglect. Before and after:
Allan string trimmed the bed in the park under three maples. It is a mess that I rebelled against weeding a few years back, and we had resorted to flattening it with the strimmer a couple of times a year. The bed is sodden with some kind of sprinkler or nearby pond leak, and the weed roots are all entwined with the tree roots. I have campaigned to have the entire bed removed, as even the trees are unhappy in the sodden muck.
Meanwhile, I weeded the new-in-autumn-of-2019 bed that had had a year’s worth of weeds in it when we came back to it in autumn 2020. It will take some time for the effects of a year of reseeding and spreading weeds to be undone, which is one of the reasons we decided to take the job back on. The deer have, unfortunately, discovered the tulips in this bed. They looked pretty last May…among the weeds, which were taller than the tulips then. I remember how it felt to drive by, see the mess, and not be able to fix it.
Just as we were about to move on from this park, I remembered the hydrangea in the corner. If it is not pruned down, the flowers won’t even show because of the lower branches of the adjacent maple tree. And it had not been pruned since 2020.
We then dumped a load of debris in order to make room for the next project.
Third Street Park was next because we managed to snag the one perfect, elusive parking spot for pruning the hydrangeas along the north side of the park.
A rhododendron that had been sickly and got cut down has put out a new poorly-placed sprout, and the stump has some interesting fungi.
Working in Long Beach often attracts an audience.
Although I could spend hours more thinning and perfecting each hydrangea, we don’t have hours more.
Our trailer was full again. We took another load of debris to city works, just about eight blocks away, and this time we saw our good friend Terran of BeeKissed Gardening, waiting to get a load of biosolids mulch.
For our last portion of the day, we parked by the old police station, which is now a visitors’ center and Long Beach Merchants building (with printing and other business services). I trimmed a hydrangea and did some weeding behind the Lewis and Clark Square wall, which has plaques for each future town they visited on their journey of exploration.
I weeded the two beds in nearby Veterans Field and planted some white phlox and some Shasta daisies.
Allan took on one of the most unpleasantly stabby jobs of the spring, cutting all the rugosa roses (‘Blanc Double de Colbert’) to the ground on the south side of the building. (Longtime readers may recall that weeding the beach approach was the worst spring job…but we’ve made it clear that we won’t do that extensive job…we are just too old and tired! We will trim back the ornamental grasses, though.)
The blue window trim is falling off into the garden.
Getting the thorny debris out of the trailer with thick welding gloves in our final offload of the day is no fun.
I was sure we were going to get the trailer stuck in deep mud. Allan was right; we got out just fine.
The work board tonight:
Tangly Cottage Gardening 