An article for fans of our new favourite show, Detectorists:
‘Roman haul’ turns out to be TV show Detectorists prop
A guest photo from Steve of The Bayside Garden, featuring a hellebore:
Hellebore ‘Snow Fever’, photo by Steve McCormick
And here, especially for Steve, is his favourite cat, Skooter.
Tuesday, 6 February 2018
I looked out my window and saw a visitor back in the bogsy woods. Allan got some photos.
a Big Bird
I had decided that tomorrow would be the first work day of 2018. Today, good weather allowed me to get to the bottom of one of my compost bins, in preparation for bringing home more clean debris from work. (By clean, I mean no invasive weeds and no diseased foliage.)
Skooter helped.
glorious sifted compost
I got to the bottom of bin three.
Allan’s photo
added fresh newspaper to keep weeds from coming through
I shifted enough debris from bin two to keep the newspaper layer in place.
Today’s other project was to coppice two golden Leycesteria (‘Golden Lanterns’ and ‘Jealousy’) and a smokebush.
Leycesteria ‘Golden Lanterns’ before
and after
Behind the bench: Leycesteria ‘Jealousy’ and the cotinus, before the chop
after
I had not liked the twisty shape that the cotinus had. Chopping it down will give it a new chance and should result in showier foliage. (Allan chopped that one for me, because I was getting tired.) I wanted all fresh green stems on the leycesteria.
I walked around admiring a few plants.
Hellebore ‘Appleblossom’, with a sneaky mollusk that I did not see till I looked at the photo.
Hamamelis (witch hazel) in the front garden
and a very red Hamamelis in the back garden (from Dave and Melissa, with a tag too faded to read)
Iris unguicularis ‘Mary Bernard’
Todd gave me that Iris, and has provided a guest photo all the way from Hawaii, where he has been visiting his twin sister.
photo by Todd Wiegardt
Meanwhile, Allan had run errands and had taken some photos of a certain garden that I have been asked to take on again. Here is a hint:
The photos told me a lot of my cool plants are gone, and someone has planted calla lilies all over the place, to my horror (because they take over and are SO hard to remove).
It all depends on whether I will be given free rein and a plant budget…I KNOW that I like the person I’d be working for.
While picking up some library books, Allan got some photos of the Ilwaco Community Building garden.
the tiered garden
Crocus tommasinianus
tommies with Oregon grape
The ramp railing post has been broken out again. Allan informed the city works crew.
I hope (and dread, and am excited by) that we will start work tomorrow. Allan heard a drip under the house and we called our friend and plumber, Don Anderson, and for awhile wondered if we WOULD be able to work tomorrow, having given him such short notice of our new problem. He called and will come at ten in the morning, so if all goes well, staycation is over.
I made out the spring clean up work list:
The right hand column is the at home list that did not get done because of shingles and weather.
Just for the most bookish:
I have been working on a new project, adding to my Goodreads (for posterity, I suppose) my lists of books read from my old notebook. As I get each year done, I will add a bonus post, just for myself and for the avid readers among you. My reading habits have changed drastically over the years. So tonight will be the first of those posts, of books read in 1982. I am going to be writing over twenty of these posts (!!) and am going to do sort of a strange thing, which is set them to publish all on the same day (eventually, as I write them), so that I can find them all together. Just because I got three done already, there will be three tonight.
Tangly Cottage Gardening 