13 February: more than Long Beach

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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.

Norwood garden

We started work by pruning hydrangeas, privet, hardy fuchsias, and trimming ferns and epimediums at the Norwood garden two doors down.

Port of Ilwaco

We trimmed up the gardens on the north and south side of the port office.

Lavender trimmed, santolinas can wait.

Long Beach

The main goal of our day was to trim up and weed the city hall garden, because good parking spots can be had on Sunday.

When picking up our key on Thursday, I’d noticed the ramp garden was very weedy.

The east side garden had held up well from our autumn weeding and needed a miscanthus cut and a Japanese maple tidied. Found a bird nest!

North side had lots of reseeded shotweed from having been unweeded all last summer.

On the west side, Escallonia ‘Pink Princess’ trims up more nicely than Escallonia ‘Iveyi’ (the white flowering one).

The wind had become strong and cold, a sign of the rain and wind predicted for tomorrow. I bailed out on planting the last of my white phlox starts and was glad to dump debris and go home. Three workdays of debris:

Ilwaco

On the way home, we saw that the defunct old oil company building near the boatyard was torn down! I wish I could scavenge for useful rubble but had better not.

I may be the only one who will miss the old oil tanks. I found them picturesque.

At home, I had to add “city hall” to the work board in order to erase it. It was one of two jobs I had forgotten to list, the other being the Depot Restaurant. I hope there are not any more I have forgotten.