16 March: BadAster project

Wednesday, 16 March 2022

Long Beach

In Fifth Street Park, Allan tackled the corner of bad asters with the slayer and the “double tool”, a two sided hand tool. We hadn’t weeded it last autumn because we thought it would be someone else’s problem this year, maybe someone who likes the short, running aster (Aster douglasii, I think). Of course, when we took the job back on for this year, it became our problem, and I think this aster is a bully.

We had picked up some mulch before starting the project.

Meanwhile, behind where we parked, I saw a terrible looking street tree bed. We had weeded all trees but this one last autumn. And we had forgotten to do just this one when we weeded again in February. There had been fresh mulch on it last autumn so we had thought it had been weeded, but we now realized the 2021 summer gardener had just put mulch on top of stripped off weeds with the roots still there. It took over an hour to weed it, and I forgot an after photo! Trust me, it looks better but not perfect. The weeds are now firmly entrenched.

During

Also during

Allan lowered the cut on a miscanthus that he had trimmed in the autumn.

I also got some but not all of the annoying spreading wild allium out of the large beds in Fifth Street Park.

It will be an ongoing process to keep that wild garlicky plant from taking over, especially after it was let go rampant for a year. It probably looks like a weed grass to people till it has an unimpressive little flower. A few years ago, a friend who worked with us one day said she wanted to get rid of it all by thorough digging. I said sure, that would be great, but I knew that no matter how thoroughly she went after it, and she did work with determined skill, it would be back the next spring…like horsetail. And so it was and evermore shall be. Its bulbs are tiny and number in the hundreds or thousands.

We dumped our very heavy load of debris at City Works. One of the city crew members had asked us for a map of where the faucets and the turn off valves for each block are, something the retiring parks manager had forgotten to show them. We know where the faucets and valves are but since each planter and tree is plumbed a little differently, we started working our way through town weeding and deadheading (me) and making notes on a clipboard (Allan). We enjoyed the narcissi along the way. A few tulips are managing to bloom despite the deer. Fortunately, the deer don’t bother the daffodils.

The deer are even eating crocus and grape hyacinth foliage. That’s new.

The planters at intersections get hit hardest by deer. Fortunately, the mid-block planters are not bothered, so far.

We got the notes taken and deadheads plucked on two and a half blocks and will finish the diagram notes next week.

After erasing the aster project from the work board…

…and after taking the above photo, I remembered to add Ilwaco street trees to the work list. As of last Monday night’s city council meeting, we officially have the ten street trees back under our care.