6 March: Sunday jobs

Sunday, 6 March 2022

Ilwaco Post Office

Our volunteer garden at the post office is one of two jobs we like to do on a Sunday when the building is closed.

After weeding and trimming the santolinas

This looks suspiciously (below) like the dreaded orange montbretia is making a move on the garden. The corms did not look quite right though. I will deal with this later!

We planted California poppies (Jellybeans and another multicolored mix) under four of the ten Ilwaco street trees, where lots of narcissi are blooming….

…and I was sorely annoyed by someone having picked themselves a bouquet.

I always notice.

I do not give a hoot about the argument that someone must have needed a bouquet. The flower display is supposed to be for everyone.

Ilwaco Community Building

This is the other job we must do on a Sunday when the library and other services are closed and there is enough parking for our van and trailer. There used to be a Quaker meeting in the meeting room on Sunday afternoons, pre-pandemic.

The tiered garden still looks battered where someone official cut down a couple of mugo pines last year, leaving ugly stumps. This is the first time I have WANTED salal, a plant I like only out in the woods where it belongs, to fill in. The theory was that the mugo pines blocked the windows of the lower level of the building too much. Then why were they planted there, I wondered? And if I worked in that office, I would have enjoyed the green, filtered light. Allan cut some of the tall salal whose shabby stems have not filled in.

He did the first weeding this year of the tiered garden while I cut back some lavender on the lower edge.

The lower tier has loads of orange montbretia. Years ago when the garden was being made, I implored the designers not to re use the soil that was infested with montbretia and bindweed. Oh well!! What with the masses of salal deliberately planted in almost every area, my goals with this garden are minimal, which fits well with the budget.

A man was sitting for a long, long time on the bench by the library entrance, where free Wi-Fi is available, so we moved on to another job because that did not allow for social distancing in that small area.

Long Beach

We weeded the welcome sign.

The back of it is so infested with horsetail roots after its year of neglect that we can barely get a tool into the soil and are going to ask the city crew to dig it completely out when the narcissi are done blooming and can be moved.

Although the front does have horsetail, it is not as bad, being warmer, sunnier and less wet of a garden.

Having that many narcissi looks spectacular now but will be a problem later when the foliage has to die back for the health of the bulb. We used to grow red and yellow tulips and just pull them out when done…until the deer discovered them.

Downtown, Allan planted poppies under two street trees and then joined me in weeding the east side of Fifth Street Park.

We checked the beach approach garden with the thought of pulling crocosmia and trimming ornamental grasses, but there were too many pedestrians on this sunny Sunday. We did see a killdeer on our detour.

I planted some red poppy seeds in the Veterans Field corner garden and we pulled just one section of crocosmia out of one of the parking lot berms…

…and dumped our debris.

Ilwaco again

We returned to the community building, where the sitting man had just left, and cut back ferns in the library entry garden…

…and were glad to call it the end of the work day. After a pleasant enough afternoon without much wind, the temperature rapidly dropped.

Today’s work made a satisfying reduction to the work board.