Saturday, 18 May 2024
Ilwaco Fire Station garden
Allan ran an errand and checked on our volunteer garden at the Ilwaco fire station garden, pulled a big dandelion and did some deadheading. I don’t have time for it this week. Doesn’t look bad in his photos.
Gary’s rose (one of the volunteers and the former mayor) is blooming despite the deer.
Looks like they got the weedkiller out again though. Why? Does that dead toadflax really look better like that?
The planters that hold the plants that came out of the north garden look pretty good. The north garden is still not concreted for their flag pole.(Again, I wonder why?)
(mostly) at home
I worried about the weather for our garden open and plant sale days, with some rain predicted. This year will tell the tale of whether I keep doing the sale into my 70s or whether I will just let the nursery license go because the payoff is not enough. It takes many many hours to prepare, plus keeping the leftovers watered all year. I should be able to insert my decision here today or tomorrow since this will publish the day after the sale. [Update: The amount doesn’t come to minimum wage per the hours of prep, not even including weeding and prettifying the garden, but it is still worth it for the fun factor.]
We transplanted a huge croton in the garage, then put it back in the house because the nights are too cold to leave it out till the sale. I like it but it is too big for our house. I also very much liked the pot it was in, which is why we transplanted it. I hope it doesn’t get shocky.
While weeding in the three big mostly sunny beds in the back garden, I contemplated shovel pruning two roses that are just pitiful. One is an old fashioned rose that is white and pink mixed, kind of striped, whose name I used to know very well. [I think I have remembered correctly that it is Ferdinand Prichard.] It is a blackspot magnet and even the flowers don’t look that good. The other is yellow rose, also a blackspotty and weak thing that I made from a cutting years ago. I thought it was ‘Graham Thomas’ but just read that it’s a climber, which this isn’t. I think they both have to go but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.
If I want another yellow rose, I would get (if I could find it) ‘Tottering By Gently’ just because of the name.
I was thrilled to see that I do have a Welsh poppy, because the garden in Long Beach where I once planted it and where I could have gotten seeds is no more.
Skooter supervised me for awhile.
I thought, I must take some photos of some of the plants I am enjoying, so I managed a few more.
I don’t grow bearded iris because I don’t like the way the leaves look after it blooms. I do like this iris with variegated leaves and blue flowers.
Then I got busy weeding again. Look at the size of this creeping buttercup, in a five gallon bucket. It snuck up in the middle of a Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’. (If I call Autumn Joy by its new name, Hylotelephium, I don’t think most people would know what I mean.)
I weeded from 11 AM to 6:45 PM with an accidental break when I went indoors, sat down, and didn’t get up for twenty minutes. I got the center bed done…
…and about a third of the west bed, but then moved to the east bed because it was furthest from the sound of a pressure washer. Why cannot someone invent a pressure washer that doesn’t make that certain sound when it changes its cycle. I don’t know that it is about that sound, but I’d rather listen to a chain saw or a jackhammer. It has one good point: for hours and even days after a pressure washer is turned off, I revel in its absence.
The west bed still has a couple of areas that will take awhile to weed. Here are its ‘Black Tower’ elderberry and Leycesteria formosa ‘Jealousy’.
As I finished the east bed, Allan was in the back of the east fence bed, hidden away near those crab pots, pulling bindweed off the fence that comes over from both properties next door.
East bed, looking north. The path used to be straight till this spring when we added the curved bed to the left.
The tall Angelica to the right, just before the bench, used to be in the center of the bed before we moved the path. That project was done so late that I am very pleased the path has knitted together so well. That is Allan’s good work.
Evening glow on the danger tree bed:
Looking south from the patio:
Allan had mowed Alicia’s lawn, which is now the best looking one on the block.
That’s because the perfect lawn (or so it looked to me, like a mini golf course) across the street got torn out by professionals last week in order to install (I wondered if maybe it would be a pollinator friendly garden but…drumroll…) a new lawn! Meanwhile Alicia’s lawn is now the prettiest on the block.
After all that weeding, I still had to water in the chilly evening. Brrr. I do hope that by the time you read this post, I will have my favourite patio plants but very few potted propagated plants left to water.
Tangly Cottage Gardening 