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Archive for Jul, 2022

Saturday, 23 July 2022

Master Gardeners of Grays Harbor and Pacific Counties present:

Our first garden was in Montesano, a town just east of Aberdeen. The home is next to Vessey and Sons contractors and its work yard full of big trucks. How enviable to have such a great source of wonderful rocks (which we assumed, perhaps correctly, were sourced by the Vesseys). As Allan and I tour together, we notice similar and different things.

As always, the tour program is a keepsake booklet with each garden getting two pages.
Each garden got this nice sign as a memento.

This was my first foray into rollator touring. I’ve been in many gardens where it would have been a struggle to get through with such a device. This one was a dream to start out in, very easy to navigate.

A place to show painted rocks

The front garden is a parklike setting with shrubs and trees and beautiful rocks with pools of bright annuals.

The front entry garden with annual accents segues into a flawless lawn with massive boulders in the center.

Spectacular and enviable boulders!

At the front of the house, annual color brightens up the weedless beds.

Walk through to back yard

The back garden is set up for entertaining in sun or shade.

A shed with a garage door like this would be ever so useful to us!

The business work yard also has landscaping.

This was the only Montesano garden on the tour. We were now off to Aberdeen, a city that I love. We saw some wonderful old houses as we drove west through Montesano, and I wish we had stopped to photograph them, but the lure of garden touring was too strong to allow for getting sidetracked.

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21 July: mostly watering

Thursday, 21 July 2022

Long Beach

We deadheaded the front of the welcome sign. The back has still not been dug out.

We watered all the downtown planters. Someone had helped themselves to some lavender. I learned that bees love lambs ears. I didn’t know this, but they were all over it.

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20 July: lots of jobs

Wednesday, 20 July 2022

After a quiet Tuesday off, in which I avoided the strong wind by reading 1/3 of a long new scintillating biography of Barbara Pym, we embarked on a busy work day.

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Monday, 18 July 2022

Long Beach

a hitchhiker from home
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17 July: edgy

Sunday, 17 July 2022

At home

I shifted the top dry compost materials from bin three to bin two and revealed what looks like a lot of promising stuff to be sifted.

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Saturday, 16 July 2022

At home (mostly)

Without a project for the day, I turned to compost bin B and the pleasure of sifting compost. I sift it to a fairly rough texture because I, using it as mulch. Each photo shows a wheelbarrow full that I got from the bin, including an empty one that I dumped before I remembered to photograph it. The final three are for Allan to move to the fire circle area for me, and one of those is just some biosolids mulch, not my compost. I’ve been having dizzy days and moving wheelbarrows can feel a little scary.

What is it?

Allan went to the library and on the way he saw a tour group near the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum. This is a new even this summer, a once a month walking tour of Ilwaco by a local historian. I want to go but felt I would slow things down or be too noisy with my rollator, so I was pleased to see someone pushing a rollator or wheelchair. I also feel so socially inept at the thought of having to converse during the walking part of the tour. It turns out Allan wants to go, also, so that would give me a bit of a buffer. We really must do it. The schedule for it can be found here with only one more chance, which we may have missed out on as there is limited space!

He helped me by moving two bird baths to where they will show better.

He also fixed a gate topper where a flimsier piece of wood had snapped.

We had a campfire dinner.

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Saturday, 16 July 2022

At home (mostly)

Without a project for the day, I turned to compost bin B and the pleasure of sifting compost. I sift it to a fairly rough texture because I am using it as mulch. Each photo shows a wheelbarrow full that I got from the bin, including an empty one that I dumped before I remembered to photograph it. The final three are for Allan to move to the fire circle area for me, and one of those is just some biosolids mulch, not my compost. I’ve been having dizzy days and moving wheelbarrows can feel a little scary.

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Friday, 15 July 2022

At home

I strained a stinky bucket of comfrey feed, made of comfrey leaves (right) steeped in water for a few weeks, and fertilized almost all my potted outdoor plants with it (diluted). It’s an aggressive grower so I have it off in a weedy patch outside the garden.

A good thing about having the rollator with me is it provides a comfy seat from which I rest a bit and observe the garden, as in this pause near the fire circle before embarking on my big project of the day. A bird, whose identity I do not know, serenaded me with a beautiful song.

My big project today was to dig up an area of Iris ‘Black Gamecock’, a moisture-loving iris with a short period of bloom, which is hard to weed under my contorted filbert and doesn’t offer enough interest for most of the year.

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Thursday, 14 July 2022

Skooter woke me up meowing after I’d only had five hours of sleep. Did he perhaps know I had gotten him a vet clinic appointment for his flea allergy shot today? I couldn’t get back to sleep for thinking about the scheduling of the workday.

We left home an hour and fifteen minutes earlier than usual for his appointment. When I told the vet tech that he’d been eating more than a usual amount of food, they decided to keep him for a “senior exam” and blood work. So we left him and went to work.

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13 July: curving path

Tuesday, 13 July 2022

At home

For awhile, till work project season returns, we will sometimes get an extra weekday off.

Allan photographed the interesting way Callistemon ‘Woodlander’s Red’ emerges from hard little buds.

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