11 February: Long Beach hydrangeas and roses

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.

After an entire year of not being weeded or trimmed

The sea turtle bench is by local chainsaw artist Joshua Blewett.

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 did not plant the ivy!

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: