27-30 October: Halloween preparations

Friday, 27 October 2023

at home

Allan ran errands, including a trip to the library. Now, except for The Night She Disappeared (a bit too much…..plot …for my taste in psychological suspense), which I just finished, these are my library books in waiting, with not much time to read after Halloween.

I read the very satisfying I Found You that same day, much enjoying the delight of reading a book straight through, and started the brand new non-fiction book Your Face Belongs to Us, which I won’t mind dividing the reading of over three evenings.

Ilwaco

When Allan went to the library, he drove around and took photos of the Halloween decorating progress around town.

At dusk, he took recycling to the bins at the east end of the marina…

and saw the moon rise.

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Saturday, 28 October 2023

at home

Last night was cold enough to blight some of the tree dahlia foliage yet still leave hope for the buds.

I prowled around the garden looking for Halloween decorating materials for the Corridor of Spooky Plants™. The lily stalks, which I often use, are still green and thus it’s too soon to cut them.

There is water in the very bottom of the deep path…

…and the frog bog once again has standing water, which should now rise and stay there till May or June.

Now that cold weather is approaching, the hardy fuchsias have all decided to bloom at last. This one has not had a flower all summer long.

The Spooky Plants Halloween ambience is also created by tall branches stuck into the driveway garden and tied on to various stakes and to the Davidia tree to create a woodsy effect as one approaches from the west. Allan helped me cut some branches and drag them forward and I cut some and also dragged some windfall branches….

…and tied them in.

Some branches are stashed in water barrels to later make an enclosed feeling along the driveway, which cannot be done until closer to the big day or we wouldn’t be able to get our vehicle out of the garage.

a big branch of Cornus ‘Hedgerows Gold’ waiting to be put into place

Allan was inspired, as he cut some branches from Alicia’s back yard, to dig top a big clump of grass that had been impeding his mowing. She is a conscientious neighbour about cutting down branches next to a shared fence, so those branches are fair game for Halloween.

the clump before it was chainsawed and dragged away

The willows will be ideal for Halloween.

Black Lake Witches Paddle (also known as ‘Sup Witches)

While we were busy decorating, folks gathered on Black Lake for a Witches’ Paddle. Our friends Pat and David Tollefson went to observe and to take photos. Her photos were by far the best of any I saw of the event. She kindly gave me permission to share my favourites.

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Sunday, 29 October 2023

Ilwaco

We needed more leaves for Halloween. I spread them in the driveway to make the trick or treating experience more like going into an autumnal woodland. Before we headed out on this errand, we had a chat with the J Crew, across the street, who are busy decorating for their theme this year, Finding Nemo.

Doug hanging up some jellyfish in the plum tree

We headed to the Ilwaco community building, passing city hall with its candy drive sign that encourages people to donate candy to help those of us who have hundreds of trick or treaters, which can be a financial burden to some households.

Despite its many maple trees, the leaf situation at the community building was sparse, same with our other Ilwaco leaf spots. We had to strike out further afield.

Long Beach

Of course, when we got to Long Beach, we had to do some work to make the drive worthwhile. I figured we would get good parking at city hall to tidy the east side garden there. I was wrong.

Nevertheless, we managed to clip back some spent hostas…

…and do some weeding, and I trimmed the hydrangea where it was overhanging the parking lot and an adjacent rhododendron.

We next raked maple leaves in Fifth Street Park, saving walkways, lawns, and beds from smothering and also gaining a tarp full of leaves for Halloween.

I cut some gunnera leaves that were blocking the side path next to Benson’s Restaurant.

after

Just as we were about to leave, I remembered how yesterday I had been wishing we had trimmed the tall Helinathus ‘Lemon Queen’ in the NW quadrant. The whole bed, which I would leave standing all winter if at home, will need cutting down before we retire. So today I did part of the trimming of Lemon Queen. You probably can’t tell where I trimmed it, which is a good thing, because the naturalistic look can remain until mid to late November.

I will be using all these ingredients for decorating tomorrow and Halloween day.

Ilwaco

Back home, we drove around the flatlands of town to admire more decorating.

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Monday, 31 October 2023

at home

The candy drive donations were delivered to our porch. Looks like citizens were generous this year, which is a good thing, because even with two household bringing us similar sized donations, and the two big bags we and Patty purchased, we might have run out before the end of the evening.

We continued to prepare. I spent six hours, Allan just a little less. And tomorrow will be maybe three more hours each. This is many hours of preparation for a trick or treating evening that is four to five hours long. I am pretty obsessed with my Corridor of Spooky Plants™ theme, which I also sometimes called Into the Woods. I can’t seem to relax and do it half-arsed, keep wanting to make it better and better. The payoff is that I like to think that someday there may be children who have grown to the age I am now who will remember it as a magical experience.

So while Allan set up the chipper shredder with its tragic but not gory figure, cut down some willows for me, and later tested and strung lights, I arranged the plant materials stuck into buckets of soil and made three haphazard ghosts of old, pale flowered sheets. I got all the last minute decorations for tomorrow into the garage, ready to go.

In Alicia’s driveway, the chipper tableaux awaits being placed on her lawn tomorrow, and the trailer has hydrangea flowers and leaves to be added to the driveway display. We would hate to come out to the front yard tomorrow and find someone had made off with the chipper overnight!

The autumn leaves that I will put out tomorrow, now that Allan has most of the lights done, are what make the driveway look woodsy. Various other elements will be added that I don’t want to leave out overnight. Although I would like to have more of a squeeze effect with plants, the modern costumes are sometimes so huge that they wouldn’t fit in a narrow space.

The back garden at dusk, while I collected some tall sanguisorba stalks to add to the spooky display:

We are going to go on a little blog break now of a few days while we focus on the final touches for Halloween, enjoy the dazzling spectacle of hundreds of Halloween trick or treaters, and then recover from Halloween. I’ll add “if we’re spared’, which is how folks of the Hebrides end any sentence about making plans (as related in Lillian Beckwith’s Hebrides autobiographical novels). “See” you in a few days…if we’re spared.

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26 October: some small Long Beach progress

Thursday, 26 October 2023

I had fully intended to not go to work again till after Halloween…until I realized I had not yet turned in the quarterly Business and Occupation tax form which, even when we don’t owe any tax, is due on the last day of the quarter, AKA October 31st. In order to make the trip to Long Beach worthwhile, I decided we would deliver it and work for a couple of hours on Sunday. Then this morning had surprisingly nice weather and a dry but chilly hourly forecast, so I prepared the form, during which time Allan mowed the lawn at the J Crew Cottage and hooked up our work trailer, and off we went to work today instead. Before we even left Ilwaco, the forecast started to look mistaken.

Fortunately, we left the rain behind in Ilwaco.

Long Beach

One we got to downtown Long Beach (with no clear work plan), I saw a tree bed that needed some santolina trimming….

…and a planter that needed its tatty foliage of Gladiolus papilio pulled…

…and two big Geranium ‘Rozanne’ in the planter by Hungry Harbour Grille, which still was floriferous but would look bad if we have a freeze this weekend, and we wouldn’t have time to go to town during our Halloween prep days to tidy it.

Allan trimmed back the much too rampant golden oregano in the planter by Sweet Phees…

…and while he used the battery powered blower on the resulting debris, I zipped off some teucrium on the corner of Fifth Street Park NW…

…whose main garden bed is still looking colourful and very fine, even though the taller plants (aster, Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’, Solidago ‘Fireworks’) have stopped blooming.

I am pleased with the vigor of this Melianthus major. (Most passersby don’t know that its leaves smell like peanut butter.)

We then dropped off the B&O form and did a bit of cutting back at city hall.

I don’t know why the north wall has not yet been repaired from when a vehicle heading south jumped the curb and drove into it about a year ago.

The temperature was dropping by then. We finished weeding the north parking lot berm…

… and dumped our debris at city works.

An acidanthera blooms on the debris pile.

Allan shopped at V’s Market for milk and treats on the way home. Our friend Patty had shopped across the river and would have some eggs, onions and bananas for us later on.

Ilwaco

At home, I got a tarp of green debris from work (Geranium ‘Rozanne, santolina, Solidago ‘Fireworks’ and Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’) layered into the compost with browned decomposing debris and wool.

To water seedlings in the greenhouse, I walked by the tree dahlia. I can clearly see the fat and promising buds, usually way up high, because some of it got brought low by a windstorm. I am in suspense about whether cold weather this weekend will blacken the buds before they bloom. It rarely blooms before Halloween.

This plant with a white flower was given to me by Jane, the Mulch Maid, but I cannot remember its name.

Our friend Mads had dropped off some corn stalks for our Halloween decorating. When Allan went into our garage with its semi-transparent door, the stalks looked like a big spider lurked outside.

We drove to the port for our weekly bucket of bunny poo. On the way, we saw stacked crab pots waiting for the season to begin.

I walked by one of the curbside gardens on the way to the bunny poo bin and noted that the lavender, cut back by a volunteer last spring, who did not know that you do not cut lavender into old wood, did not survive.

Someone may have done some recent weeding!

lavender dead as the proverbial doornail

Although the other two lavenders of this trio that I had been planning to replace in 2023 (but resigned because of reasons in June 2022) are woody and not things of beauty, at least they are not dead stumps.

You might think I feel sorrow, dismay or anger at how these garden beds have been neglected since that June. By now, all I feel is a kind of contemptuous superiority (not an exemplary or admirable emotion) at how much better they were under our care and how foolish it is to let them be butchered by non- gardeners. It is so obvious that someone killed that lavender that someone should volunteer to dig it up, since no one seems to have taken on the paid job yet.

The blue Fearless Leader dwarfs the smaller boats at the marina.

By the port office sat a huge houseplant with a free sign on it. So we took it home to rescue it from a cold night. I wondered if someone had been planning to pick it up. But then why was the free sign still prominently displayed? Well, it’s a rescue, and if we hear of anyone who planned to get it, they can come get it from us. Meanwhile, do you know what kind of plant it is? Houseplants are not my forte. [Later: I found out. It’s a croton, and I will have to invest in an indoor plant light if I want to keep this plant happy in our rather dark house. I like a dark house and have been told living with me is like living with a vampire. The plant will not appreciate that.]

We took it for a ride in our trailer, all around town, to see if anyone called out, Hey, I was supposed to have that! On the way, we saw more signs of Halloween’s approach.

The work board tonight, with just six more weeks, probably, left for Long Beach.

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25 October: more greenhouse tasks

During yesterday’s cold rain, Skooter and Faerie had some detente on the bed.

Wednesday, 25 October 2023

at home

I saw something exceptionally cute and delightful on Facebook, posted by a local jewellery artist and dog groomer, Tina Jordan, with the caption “Fairies might live here”.

I immediately recognised this as one of the Bolstad beach approach planters (with its plaque from a long ago volunteer).

photo by Tina Jordan

She kindly gave me permission to share the photos here.

With a surprisingly clear and mild day, I dragged the big red banana into the greenhouse.

Having read that it is best to have it be dormant for as short a time as possible, I will wait till the leaves start to die before I cut it back and push it under a bench…and then I will be able to get into the greenhouse again. That might be this weekend, when the temperature is predicted to fall to 38 F.

Allan helped me by pulling potted cannas out of the water boxes. They also went into the greenhouses.

I dug up and potted up some pieces of my beloved Canna ‘Stuttgart’ as insurance.

Some went into the greenhouse and some onto the front porch. Last winter, the ones I left in the ground came through a cold winter just fine…but I want to be sure I don’t lose it.

I pulled the crocus out from the roots and planted them in the garden.

When I first began to work as a gardener on the Long Beach Peninsula, in 1994, I spent some time as helper to a garden designer named Dale Browse. She gave me the idea that it is great to plant crocus in the middle of the garden beds because they will show before other plants get going. I planted them in the middle of this bed, where I removed phlox not so long ago.

I left a substantial amount of Stuttgart in the garden.

Kniphofia rooperi, Salvia ‘Amistad’, Canna ‘Stuttgart’

Rosa rubrifolia, a tall panicum and Canna ‘Stuttgart’

Now I have a very stuffed full greenhouse until the cannas and banana get cut back and put under a bench.

Allan started our Halloween decorating with the pumpkinhead ghost on a garden tuteur.

This year, it is a backless ghost because our ghost fleece got tattered.

I wonder if I could make a ghost or some cobwebs out of all the wool that I have? Now there’s a thought. (If you are a local or a future visitor with some spare old white sheets, we could sure use them for next year.)

Grevillea ‘Victoriae’ near the pumpkinhead ghost

We both got somewhat rained on.

I worked on my project of removing from the patio blah pots whose original treasures have passed away.

The soil emptied from pots went into one of the fish totes, mixed with some bunny poo.

I still have a long way to go on the patio project.

A future project is to dismantle the water boxes and replace them with a metal water trough (which we need to acquire) before the wood suddenly collapses.

Some sights around the garden:

Aster ‘Harrington’s Pink’ and a tall white sanguisorba

Callicarpa ‘Profusion’

Cosmos

Verbascum ‘Southern Charm’ (second bloom after being cut back)

Iris foetidissima

Miscanthus ‘Cosmopolitan’ and callistemon by the driveway

The east bed, with many plants not cut back, was in swaying motion on this windless day because of birds going after seeds.

When Allan went to get the mail at dusk, he saw that our neighbours five doors down, Richard and Tarri Rubio, had added to their Halloween preparations.

an almost full moon!

I will get busy on our Corridor of Spooky plants this weekend. I can’t set it up fully till right before the event because partially blocks access to our garage.

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22-23 October: in the garden and at Black Lake

Sunday, 22 October 2023

We had some excitement in the morning when we found that the cats had figured out how to open the cat treats.

I was frustrated in my reading plans by good weather which simply required me to do some outdoor projects. Allan and I began by collecting leaves for our Halloween tableaux, first maple leaves at the community building….

…and then by a curb wall at the physical therapy building, which has the not pretty alder leaves, which will add volume.

Maddeningly but I suppose admirably, the usual batch of maple leaves at the Black Lake parking lot had already been cleaned up. Usually the city is not so quick and efficient about it. Perhaps it was another leaf collector.

We saw a startling thing when driving by the fire station. Our volunteer planter had had its Salvia ‘Hot Lips’ and diascia removed (I would have liked to salvage the plants for either the garden or my compost bins, had I known).

Three more pots have been added, and I gather the fire chief is going to plant them and water them. That’s a Good Thing.

at home

We stored the leaves under cover on Alicia’s patio.

Her cosmos is blooming.

I dug, transplanted, and potted up some divisions of an astilbe that had been in two much sun, a project that had been on the work list for awhile.

I separated narcissi bulbs from the roots and replanted them, which reminded me to plant another batch of narcissi that I had loose in a pot.

I admired my Salvia uliginosa, blooming with its exceptionally nice blue flowers, albeit sideways and not standing proud.

Allan mowed Alicia’s front lawn and our lawn. He noticed many crows in the evening in our alder grove.

The cosmos started late but is continuing late:

cosmos

Cosmos backed with Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’

Salvia ‘Amistad’ just before sunset

Kniphofia rooperi is finally done after a long and grand show of flowers.

The work board tonight:

I did not reduce the Long Beach weeks left from 7 to 6 this week because I have a feeling it might be seven weeks before our almost-retirement, depending on the weather and how soon gardens start to go dormant.

Monday, 23 October 2023

Black Lake

While I read, Allan went to Black Lake and cleaned up the boat he keeps there.

the cross county team running by with McPhail’s cranberry bog in the background

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21-24 October: “A Northern Wind”

Saturday, a bit of Sunday, then Monday and Tuesday, I read the almost 600 page history of England (1962 through January 1965), A Northern Wind by David Kynaston.

Faerie would prefer sharing the lap with a smaller book.

She did manage to squeeze in next to the book.

But after the first couple of hours, she abandoned me for the more spacious quarters of a bed.

The preface captures why I love Kynaston’s histories so much. This is the eighth book in his series. In the author’s introductory words:

“Tales of a New Jerusalem, a social history of post-war Britain, about how and why ‘1945’ became ‘1979: not quite a predestined story, indeed a story involving considerable happenstance, yet one where major, plate-shifting historical forces were at work, mainly in the direction of greater individualism. Tales also seeks to show – through as wide a range as possible of contemporary sources, including diaries and letters of the obscure as well as the famous, local papers as well as national, tabloids as well as broadsheets, Coronation Street and The Archers as well as Panorama and party political broadcasts-what Britain looked like, sounded like and felt like during these three decades or more, not least as a monocultural society gave way contentiously but unstoppably to a multicultural one. A partial and incomplete evocation, inevitably, but worth the attempt.”

The previous books are “A World to Build and Smoke in the Valley (gathered together in Austerity Britain); The Certainties of Place and A Thicker Cut (gathered in Family Britain); Opening the Box and A Shake of the Dice (gathered in Modernity Britain); and a snapshot of four months on the verge of the semi-mythical Sixties’, On the Cusp.“

Here again is why I adore his books in the very first paragraph of chapter one:

“All So Worrying

“Oh such golden weather now, exactly right for the Harvest decorating, in the morning at Church, which we did, with many others,’ gratefully recorded Madge Martin, married to an Oxford clergyman, on 6 October 1962. No such cheerfulness this Saturday from the elderly Georgiana Tench, holed up in a convalescent home, probably in south-west London. ‘Mostly dry, with some sunny periods but some very dark & dreary ones. I have not felt very well, & found things very dreary – so much alone.’ Loneliness, too, for middle-aged Jennie Hill, living with her tyrannical mother in a village near Winchester, but for the most part managing through the daily round to overcome bouts of depression. Today, just three short sentences: Usual Sat work done. Busy day. Good Dixon TV programme.’ A trio of female diarists, then, none of them with exciting prospects or an obvious claim to posterity’s attention; but, like my grandparents living in small-town Shropshire, the ‘Sixties” belonged to them as much as to anyone else.“

And later, in a cold winter:

“In Chingford, serious angst for a middle-aged housewife, Judy Haines:

I talk too much.

Forgot to use my lipstick for Choir. John [her husband] didn’t see it mattered; and to make up my mind to cancel Choir and go home for it or go in. I felt flat. Went in because I couldn’t face going home to silence. Glad I went. The usual silence from John on way home.

Didn’t want supper. Went to bed. Couldn’t sleep. What to do about it? I can’t take a job until I find someone to do my present”Cook-general’ one. I can talk less. Then I can’t be snubbed.“

I would like to read every word you ever wrote, Judy Haines. I wish I had known you.

From the first volume onward, Mass Observation diarist Nella Last was often quoted. I was led to her published diaries which were a delight. Most of the other “ordinary people” diarists have not been published. It would be my dream to go the Mass Observation archives and spend a year just reading the diaries.

One of the continuing themes is the slum clearance and building of tower blocks and modern housing for the former slum dwellers. Those slums, many with shared outdoor privies, were a community of neighbours and shops and pubs, and I have wept in a previous volume over the words of lonely old people shunted into a tower block and losing their community.

“Joseph soon afterwards embarked on a tour of slum areas to see for himself, he ‘discovered’….that elderly people liked their slums but that the young didn’t, even though they had covered them in the veneer of an affluent society.

For the moment, though, the irresistible force was with indiscriminate, year-zero, carpet-bombing clearance.” Whole blocks were knocked down. (This is also a running theme in the telly series that we just finished twelve seasons of, Call the Midwife.)

This rends my heart to bits:

A “Council’s housing committee in June 1964 in the context of plans to demolish the much-loved prefab bungalows, with their well-tended gardens, on the Beckett Park Estate:

Perhaps it would not be out of place for somebody in this chamber [declared Councillor Vyvyan Cardno] to question the rightness of these multi-storey flats. I know that both sides of the chamber are proud of them. …….

But the people who have been living in homes and gardens – I don’t mean people who are being removed from slum properties, but the people who have spent up to the last 20 years in delightful little houses and gardens. To them it is a nightmare. And anyone can – as we all do – visit people in these houses. We visit these houses; we meet the people in the gardens, and we meet them outside their houses and inside their houses, with the doors open. You canvass a block of flats; you go up the stone stairs, and you meet locked doors; and a face comes round the door rather like a slug from around a stone.”

And, of course, this resonates with me: “…living on an estate full of flats literally heightened the chances of being overlooked in an intrusive way from flats in the block opposite. ‘I don’t care to be overlooked by anyone,’ said an older working-class man. ‘Not nice to feel you’re overlooked by friends or anyone. All times, I’d like to be absolutely private.’

Can you imagine losing your little house and garden due to well-meaning government clearance? It actually happened to Bryan’s family and to Allan’s family in clearance for a college and a freeway in Settle, but at least they got payments and were able to build and garden anew to their liking, not being shoved off into a high rise.

It continues to break my heart to read about the slum clearances and makes me think of the song Tower Block Kid.

Other factors which delight me are ongoing mentions of certain favourite writers of mine like Barbara Pym, Iris Murdoch, and Virginia Ironside. An example from the terribly cold winter of 1963:

“Barbara Pym, still making in early February a few final revisions to her new novel before sending it hopefully to Cape, related to a friend abroad a somehow quintessentially English snatch of conversation.

Mrs Parry-Chivers, wife of the vicar of St Lawrence the Martyr, Brondesbury: ‘How are you off for candles, dear?’ Pym: ‘Oh, all right, thank you, and we haven’t had any total blackouts yet.’ Mrs P-C: Well, don’t forget there’s plenty of candles in the church, dear – I should take some if I were you.’

…And “‘I gather from photos,’ reflected Iris Murdoch next day about the Rolling Stones, ‘that they carry ambiguity of appearance to lengths which might satisfy even me.'”

And if perchance you are a fan of The Beatles, they figure large in these years.

Having seen the film Quadrophenia more than once, I was fascinated with further reports of seaside holiday battles between the Mods and the Rockers, which make our Rod Run look tame.

Beyond the diaries, the book delves into racism, anti-immigrant prejudice, and politics local and national. Often the paragraphs are so dense with information that I have to read them twice, and the effort is always worthwhile.

A continuing saga is the reduction of the British Railway, meaningful to me because when I visited the UK in 1975, many small routes had been discontinued, making a Britrail pass an exercise in frustration when I wanted to get down the mid coast of Wales. And it includes a mention of a favourite poem of mine:

‘What do you think of Beeching?’ Larkin asked Monica Jones on 28 March, the day after the publication of the almost instantly famous/infamous report on the drastic reshaping of Britain’s railway system. *”I remember Adlestrop”, he added, ‘takes on a new meaning, not to mention Sunny Prestatyn.”

…..”A third of the rail network to be closed and ripped up, many line to remain open for freight only, a total of 2,363 stations and halts to be closed.” This television broadcast “which included melancholic verses …. beginning They’re closing the stations with beautiful names, Appledore and Chasewater and Saffron Walden…” gave the title to that chapter. “They’re closing all the stations with the beautiful names.”

And more about the beautiful names:

“Nostalgia indeed, an emotion unerringly tapped into by ‘Slow Train’, the song of lament by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann which formed part of At the Drop of Another Hat that autumn and namechecked such doomed stations as Kirby Muxloe, Blandford Forum, Chorlton-cum-Hardy (no churns, no porter, no cat on a seat), Dogdyke, Tumby Woodside, Trouble House Halt and Windmill End.“

From a chapter on unions, the obituary of union leader Jim Jones would not be a bad one to have: “‘He never shifted from his commitment to socialist ideals, immovably determined, sometimes difficult even with his closest friends, rarely disposed to take criticisms lightly, sometimes lacking charitable humour, but always with unflinching integrity. He was not the easiest companion, yet he was the kind of man anyone would respect.'”

So…if any of you might be inspired to read Kynaston’s books, I would be pleased. So far I have never met another soul who has read them or even heard of them.

I found on Goodreads a link to this excellent review which expresses my great worry about whether or not both Kynaston and me have time and life left to get through the series as planned. He is older than me by a bit, and can I live and read till 85 years old to get to the final volume?

I have more books to find that were mentioned by Kynaston, notably The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson: “focussed in the most mundane details about the extent of the wasteland on which the Warwickshire cottager could run his pig, or about the number of days on which Cornish tin-miners supplemented their income by pilchard fishing, or about the wording of the by-law protecting the Northamptonshire labourers’ liberty to cut rushes at Xmas and not after Candlemas’.” A must read! “It was a form of moral respect that took the trouble to itemize the precariousness of others’ lives and to appreciate the kinds of courage and endurance needed to sustain them.” Written in a review by another historian, Stefan Collini, that is perfection in a sentence.

Because I will also be scouring the notes for more book suggestions, I can predict that Kynaston will influence my winter reading, as he has done several times before. And after some time has passed, I will start hopefully searching for when the publication date of his next book might be. Meanwhile, I have ordered the first book of his history of London series.

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20 October: two exhausting things

Friday, 20 October 2023

We went to the post office first because Allan had notice of several packages.

Our volunteer garden there was supposed to have not just white cosmos.

I had been tracking my much-desired book, which had recently left Las Vegas, after coming from the UK and through various other places, and here, to my delight, it is!

But I couldn’t cancel the good weather work day to start reading. I need at least two days of reading weather as it is almost 600 pages packed with information.

Ilwaco Freedom Market

We weeded and, later at the end of the workday, added some mulch to the edges of our garden bed expansion of earlier this month.

And we met a cute dog.

Across the port parking lot, crabbers have begun to stack their pots, ready for the season opener probably sometime in December.

Long Beach

We did a hard project in Veterans Field with lots of digging and pulling. Pearly everlasting, a native perennial that blows in from the dunes, had gotten firmly entrenched in the arc garden during our previous retirement year. I had let it grow because it fits with the sort of red white and blue theme, but now it is much too rampant and had to go. Although we worked so very hard, I know there are still roots in there so I hope the next gardener realizes it needs controlling, preferably better than we did.

The crew had mowed and string trimmed a lot of grass into the garden.

Some folks stopped to chat…

…and a duck strolled by, talking with its friends about finding the World’s Largest Frying Pan (which is one block south in Fifth Street Park).

We dumped a lot of debris at city works and picked up mulch.

Then back to the park to fluff it up.

That was exhausting!

Ilwaco

A ghostly apparition now greets folks driving into town.

After going home and emptying buckets out the trailer, we had many and many huge bags of raw wool to pick up from Purly Shell, a valuable ingredient for my compost bins and also useful for mulching tender plants left in the ground over winter.

We saw a heron on the docks.

At home, we put all of the wool in bin four, still bagged, filling it up. It was wonderful and a delight to acquire and also exhausting. The bags are not especially heavy. I think I had just run out of steam.

We found a treat, made from outrun apples that our friends had recently picked, on the front porch–delicious.

I fervently hope for two uninterrupted reading days.

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19 October: some autumn clean up

Thursday, 19 October 2023

The Red Barn

We just did some weeding of the narrow garden bed. Cosmo came out to say hi. He will turn his back on cat treats in order to get love.

We did not think of photographing the garden till we were driving away.

The barn owners also do crabbing and are preparing for the season.

Diane’s garden

Holly got her biscuit.

I did a bigger autumnal clean up of the septic vault garden than I had planned on. During the time of many many bees, a lot of weeds got in there under the good plants.

Allan used the blower to tidy the edge.

Meanwhile, he had done a Bad Aster removal project…

…and a bit of tidying of the roadside garden.

Diane and I talked garden plans while Holly hoped in vain for a second biscuit.

Long Beach

Lately on every trip to Long Beach, we have looked for a parking space by the Wind World Kites planter. Today, we got one and pulled the crocosmia, which Kite Guy loves because it creates shade and privacy. He chatted with us from his shop. I will miss seeing him and the way he always says, “There’s the hardest working girl in Long Beach!” We also cut back some old lavender, which the crocosmia had bullied out into the traffic sight lines.

We dumped our debris at city works and picked up buckets of mulch. I noticed the power of horsetail in a pile of red crushed lava rock.

Next we did some weeding and cutting back at Veterans Field. Allan worked on the corner garden…

…while I weeded and mulched part of the arc garden.

Ilwaco

We picked up bunny poo from Purly Shell, next to the marina.

I noticed a curbside garden, now unmaintained for a year and a half, with a triangle of dandelions, nature’s design.

Our neighbours Richard and Terri, five doors down, have added Halloween decor.

I added the clean debris from Vet Field to compost bin one, after chopping it smaller.

The work board tonight:

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18 October: a transplant project

Wednesday, 18 October 2023

J Crew Cottage

Across the street, we had a little project to do as well as weeding the garden. The previous homeowner had built the whole garden on top of heavy duty landscape fabric, which we have been slowly removing in places to make the plants happier. Inside the front gate, an azalea was planted on a hump right on top of the fabric. It had been bugging me for…years…and I had decided we must dig it out, hack the fabric out, and replace it with some fresh soil at its proper level. So we did.

before

planted on a hump

It pretty much just popped off the top of the fabric.

We also took out some blue fescue, to the right, above, and moved a Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’ into its place. The grass was a low item in the center of a garden bed.

The fabric was thick and horrible to remove. Allan did it.

The azalea, limbed up a bit and replanted in the same spot:

We weeded…

….and Allan dug out some toadflax that had reseeded into the driveway bed.

I had asked Jodie, “Do you love the Panicum ‘Heavy Metal’ along the driveway as much as I do?” I love it a lot. “Not as much as you do,” she said cheerfully. Because it does flop forward and loses its verticality when it gets wet. I will try to keep it trimmed back as much as the J Crew would like so that they love it, too. Another thing I am sure they don’t love as much as I do is the verbascum that has reseeded in the back garden. (I did not plant the orginal plant.). Allan edited it back from the driveway.

We were about to drive away when I remembered the two big strands of Himalayan blackberry that I had seen hanging down on the west side. Allan got it from the porch with the long handled clippers.

On the way out of town, we watered Wendi’s planter.

As we drove to our next job, the temperature made me feel I had put tender plants into the greenhouse too soon.

Long Beach

I weeded and edited the garden bed on the east side off Fifth Street Park, a bed which I planted very minimally when Parks Manager Mike decided to clear it of an old shrub in autumn 2020, just as Allan and I were about to retire. I figured I should leave it mostly for the new city gardener to plant. Well, all it did was go to weeds the next year and since then has pretty much had a wildflower meadow look. I put in a Stipa gigantea and some Solidago ‘Fireworks’ for height but I might take the latter out for the sake of whoever might take over our job when we retire…again.

At the end of the day, we brought buckets of mulch to finish off the battered looking bed.

Meanwhile, Allan weeded under a street tree.

I did a quick check, mostly just admiration, of the garden on the west side of the park.

You can see how wonky a piece of fence is that got knocked into by a vehicle. It will really show later when plants get cut back for winter (which will be our last task before retirement; if we were keeping the job, we would leave some it standing till late winter).

Allan had walked a half block north to pull crocosmia out of the planter where the carousel used to be. (I miss the old carousel. Its absence is one thing that makes it easier to retire.)

While he finished that, I weeded a tree bed that had, irrtiatingly, turned into a sheet of grass and chickweed with the recent rains.

Allan pulled some Gladiolus papilio that had popped up through a blue star juniper…the gladiolus having spread on its own and the juniper not planted by us, in a narrow bed that still needs a big tidy and that I will not miss at all.

Back in Ilwaco, we mulched the J Crew Cottage garden and Allan mowed Alicia’s back lawn.

The work board tonight…

…and a new batch of books from the library, to join the previous batch of unread books. I crave reading weather. Rebel Writers is a book I bought from the UK, because it has a chapter about Virginia Ironside.

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16-17 October: further greenhouse project and a book

Monday, 16 October 2023

at home

Even though I had planned to read My Struggle Book One for most of the day, the dry weather drew me outside. I continued to put plants in the greenhouses, first shifting the scented geraniums and pelargoniums with showy foliage from the main greenhouse to the long shelf in the lean-to greenhouse. The lemon scented one has tiny hard crinkled leaves, while the peppermint one, my favourite, has big soft fuzzy leaves. Starting the winter storage a bit early gives me time to actually organise it instead of doing it in a rushed cold weather panic.

I even have room on the right side to put my trays of potted gunneras if the winter gets too cold for them.

I dragged some of my larger potted plants to the back of the main greenhouse. My Charles Grimaldi brugmansia and a white datura have been disappointing this year, neither growing tall nor flowering.

I hope that next year, being more retired, to lavish them with attention and make them happy.

I brought in all my potted salvias, including this black flowering one, Salvia discolour.

Twice the sky got extra dark and rain bucketed down. Inland, Battleground and Vancouver had tornado warnings (mild ones, which did not materialise).

view from the main greenhouse

Cannas get stored under the benches. I may have put them away much sooner than necessary.

In between rain showers, I noticed some of the garden plants that I repeatedly walked by while collecting potted plants.

Salvia ‘Amistad’ and cosmos

Molinia ‘Transparent’ and cosmos

I suddenly realized that I completely forgot my summer project to paint the seat and sides of that bench to match the back, which Allan attached to it when the old cat bench rotted away. I thought the seat would look better black. I guess I forgot about it when I covered it up with a cushion. I suppose I must start a list of things to do in 2024!

My Kniphofia rooperi is losing its colour now.

I am going to dare to leave most of my beloved variegated Canna ‘Stuttgart’ in the ground, mulched with wool. It worked last year. I will dig one as insurance. I am also going to leave my green banana in the ground. It is so big now (although disappointingly not as tall as I had hoped) that it would take up too much room in the greenhouse. Below, the banana is in the center and was outgrown by Canna ‘Stuttgart’ and tall panicums. When I planted it in the ground this year I thought it would get enormous.

My abyssian banana will be stored in the cold greenhouse, which has worked out well for three winters.

I found an article from Lance Wright saying that in Portland, he left his out till almost Thanksgiving! It takes up so much room under a bench that I will do the same. This year, it is going under a bench in the front rather than the back of a greenhouse so I can get to it easily when its leaves regrow and start to push up the shelf.

I also brought more scented geraniums and hardy begonias from the front steps onto the sun porch. It has a sliding door to shut in very cold weather.

I may have made a mistake asking Allan to put the big Australian mint tree in there. Without a transparent roof, it might not get enough light, and it’s too late now to get it to the back of the greenhouse as I have in earlier winters. A skylight in that roof might be a good project to hire someone to do in 2024.

Faerie kept me company while I wrote this.

And then it was back to My Struggle, Book One (of six). I am now halfway through.

Tuesday, 17 October, 2023

I finished reading My Struggle, Book One, grateful for reading weather. Here is the paragraph to which a review referred and which, when I read the review, filled me with desire to read the book (and then I couldn’t find the review again). The minutae, the detail! I love it.

“I joined Yngve, who was standing in front of the household detergents section. We took Jif for the bathroom, Jif for the kitchen, Ajax all-purpose cleaner, Ajax window cleaner, Klorin disinfectant, Mr. Muscle for extra difficult stains, an oven cleaner, a special chemical product for sofas, steel wool, sponges, kitchen cloths, floor rags, two buckets and a broom from this aisle, some fresh rissoles from the meat counter, potatoes, and a cauliflower from the vegetable section. Apart from that, things to put on bread, milk, coffee, fruit, a tray of yogurts, and a few packets of biscuits. While we were walking around I was already dying to fill the kitchen with all these new, fresh, shiny, untouched goods.”

Some of his experiences as a teenager reminded me of those years when one is gaining a sense of self:

“And what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read but in the perception of myself while I was reading. I was someone who read Adorno!”

I had the same experience when I tried (without lessons or anyone to teach me) to learn to play the guitar: ” [other friends} seemed to have the gift, music was not distinct from thinking, or it had nothing to do with thinking, it lived its own life inside them. When they played, they played, they didn’t mechanically repeat some pattern they had taught themselves, and the freedom in that, which was what music was actually about, was beyond me.”……”The thought of this could sometimes weigh me down because I wanted so much to be someone. I wanted so much to be special.”

A page long description of his grandmother in her garden captures the essence of being a gardener “kneeling in front of a little hole she had just dug, carefully loosening the bag around the roots to plant a tiny tree, or glancing over her shoulder to check that the sprinkler has started to rotate as she turns on the tap under the veranda and then standing with her hands on her hips enjoying the sight of the water being hurled into the air, sparkling in the sunlight. Or crouching on the slope behind the house to weed the beds that had been made in all the dips and hollows of the rocky mountainside…”

….”you could hear the distant sounds from the town rising and falling like the swell of waves in the air, mingling with the hum of wasps and bees at work among the rosebushes against the wall, where the pale petals shone white and calm in all the green. The garden already had the character of something old, a dignity and a fullness that only time can create and no doubt was the reason she had positioned a greenhouse at the bottom, half hidden behind a rock, where she could extend her handiwork and also cultivate rarer trees and plants without the rest of the garden being marred by the industrial and provisional nature of the construction. In the autumn and winter we caught glimpses of her down there, a faint silhouette of color behind the shiny walls, and, it was not without a touch of pride that she remarked, in a casual sort of way, that the tomatoes and cucumbers on the table didn’t come from the shop but from her greenhouse in the garden.”

This is exactly how I feel in summer when I have top cross the street back and forth when working in Long Beach: “I always had a bad conscience whenever vehicles had to stop because of me, a kind of imbalance arose, I felt as though I owed them something. The bigger the vehicle, the worse the guilt. I tried to catch the driver’s eye as I crossed so that I could nod to restore the balance.”

And this…“I saw the rooftops in the residential area stretching down the road and remembered how I used to walk among them as a sixteen-year-old, bursting with emotions.

When everything I saw, even a rusty, crooked rotary dryer in a back garden, even rotten apples on the ground beneath a tree, even a boat wrapped in a tarpaulin, with the wet bow protruding and the yellow, flattened grass beneath, was ablaze with beauty.”

And this, which could describe my life in 2015 and now….”Lutefisk lunches with friends, well, that wasn’t a world I inhabited. Not because I couldn’t force down lutefisk but because I wasn’t invited to that kind of gathering. Why not, I had no idea. I didn’t care anymore anyway. But there had been days when I had cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered. Now I was only on the outside.”

Actually, I do have an idea why.

I will have to get these books through interlibrary loan (although I may buy them, but am on a budget of sorts). I already ordered the second one, and as soon as it is in transit, I will order the third one, and so on and on.

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15 October: greenhouses day one

Sunday, 15 October 2023

at home

As with yesterday, I was brimming with project energy.

I started by getting Allan’s help tipping a big pot of hardy hibiscus out onto a tarp so that I could remove all the parsley and toadflax that has reseeded into it while it sat on the patio. I can’t remember buying it, perhaps it was a gift from Ann Amato or Jane, the Mulch Maid. Or perhaps I did buy it from Secret Garden Growers or Xera Plants (if the latter, it would have been brought to me by Ann or Jane, because sadly Xera doesn’t mail order (which saves me probably hundred if not thousands of dollars).

I recently read up on hardy hibiscus and think it will do better in the ground. It gives me only one or two flowers in late summer in its big pot.

Below, the dormant hibiscus having just lost its leaves.

I put it out in the former phlox bed, in rich soil amended with bunny poo.

My goal is to have fewer pots on the patio. I am tired of the clutter and especially of big ugly plastic pots, my garden budget not running to fancy containers. I try to use the prettiest of the plastic pots, or sometimes the most weathered in hopes that they sort of disappear among the foliage. I tend to feel inferior when I see photos of other people’s more coordinated pot displays.

In the patio water boxes, tall cannas are blooming. In admiring them, I suddenly noticed that a Brugmansia sanguinea had finally bloomed as well. I think it might have been brought to me by a friend (Ann? Jane? Maybe Tony Tomeo?).

It is spectacular.

I will bring it over winter in the greenhouse, as I did last winter, and perhaps next year it will have many flowers.

I schepped all of the big black plastic tomato pots and dumped the soil, underlaid with a layer of bunny poo, into a couple of the fish totes. As happens, the soil sinks every year, especially since I originally put a layer of rotting stumps on the bottom of the totes to temporarily save money on soil.

I have gotten a lot of wonderful French beans and beetroot and chard and beet greens out of those totes this summer. My early peas were a failure because of a cold snap. My salad crops were also a failure, except for some arugula which I did not pick in time before it got too hot and spicy to eat. I hope to do better next year. I have some winter greens and radishes planted now, probably planted too late.

For many years, my gardening was strictly ornamental and it shows with my frequent failures at growing food.

Looking south over the fish totes, I had a good view of a gorgeous tall aster backed with a tall pink hardy fuchsia, with some drooping sanguisorba, that had once stood taller than me, in front.

It’s probably too late but I planted some mache, a winter salad crop, in the topped up tote, having mixed up the old soil and the bunny poo and some fertilizer.

When the tomato (and cucumber) pots were all emptied, Allan dumped a bag of potting soil into the little red wheelbarrow for me and I up-potted three flats of small gunneras into five flats of gallon gunneras.

Allan blew the leaves off of the greenhouse floor for me and repaired a fish tote picket fence backing that had blown over in the wind some time ago.

I got a packet of sweet peas planted that might winter over in a cold frame, as I have done successfully before to get an early start next spring. I use extra tall small pots, and in the window box liners, I optimistically planted some salad greens and edible pea shoot crops.

Because we have getting a fair amount of rain, I gathered up my tender succulents, mostly echeverias, and put them in the back of the greenhouse to stay dry and cool for the winter. I added smaller pots of tender plants, mostly scented geraniums. This may be a little bit early. It will be good to not have it happen in a big rush, with cold hands, especially if we got some frosty weather right before Halloween when I need time to decorate.

One thing I like about my newly tidied pot array by the compost bins is that I will be able to access it from both sides, including next to the new galvanised critter proof kitchen compost container. The container has a problem in that the bottom is, of necessity, full of holes. I had it sitting in a plastic bin to catch the compost soup but hadn’t figured out a way to empty the bin. Today I realized that the container will sit on the bottom tray of a worm composter than someone gave me, which has a little faucet to drain the liquid.

Now if I can just get it together to tidy up the last of the unstackable stray pots…

I had picked the rest of my cucumbers, which are probably all bitter and inedible. Maybe we will get lucky with a couple of them. What is the secret to growing good cukes that are not bitter? I think it has to do with watering.

Reading

Finally, I started to read My Struggle, book one, which I got with interlibrary loan (from The Driftwood Public Library in Lincoln City, Oregon).

It opens with his thoughts on death. I felt my head detach and float around the room, as happens sometimes when I read something that I find especially to be my cup of tea.

“The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death.”

…..He goes on to speak of the “collective act of repression symbolized by the concealment of our dead.”

“What exactly it is that is being repressed, however, is not so easy to say. It cannot be death itself, for its presence in society is much too prominent. The number of deaths reported in newspapers or shown on the TV news every day varies slightly according to circumstances, but the annual average will presumably tend to be constant, and since it is spread over so many channels virtually impossible to avoid. Yet that kind of death does not seem threatening. Quite the contrary, it is something we are drawn to and will happily pay to see. Add the enormously high body count in fiction and it becomes even harder to understand the system that keeps death out of sight.“

That was a surprising way to start the book, an “autobiographical novel” (so…what is real?) It was not until later that I realized that the book is called My Struggle, Book One: A Death in the Family.” The edition I am reading is the one on the left, but the one on the right, a first edition ($300!) has the full title. Mystifying.

I had wanted to read it all the way through in two days (it’s over 400 pages) but the fairly decent weather had been too enticing and the urge to do projects was too strong.

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