Wednesday, 20 March 2024
at home
I was surprised by dry weather and thought I’d have time to finish emptying compost bin two:
As I sifted, I had the same brooding thoughts as yesterday:
Working less means I will acquire fewer compost makings. Also, I have lost my source of bunny poo. (I don’t mean a bunny died, just that we no longer have access to its valuable product!) And I am not sure if I can get more raw wool. I only have three big bags left. WHERE am I going to get enough good compost makings?
The wool and bunny poo bring more worms than I’ve ever seen. The worm population explosion might also be from putting partly decomposed kitchen compost down deep in the bins.
While sifting, I try to retrieve as many worms as I can and return them to the compost bins. I read somewhere that compost worms don’t survive in the garden.
At the bottom of the bin:
I remember a dream I had as a child in which I was a worm happily living with a worm clan in my grandma’s compost pile in a tangle just like that.
I would like to find someone with a bunny, but no garden, on the southern part of the Long Beach Peninsula from whom I could get bunny poo without too much human social interaction…or someone with chickens. I would happily clean out a coop now and then to get some chicken poo. I could get endless horse manure from the Red Barn but have found it introduces too many weeds. Washed dairy manure (it gets washed into a pit when a dairy barn is cleaned) would be ideal, and I would love to buy some but don’t know a handy source.
Bin two, empty:
Allan’s photo of the compost and potting area from the roof:
Another potting area on east side of house:
And Allan’s garden:
I got this much roughly sifted compost from bin two.
I did some weeding in the bogsy wood and in the centre bed and just a bit here and there as I walked along admiring the garden.
Lots of pink catkins on the Red Majestic contorted filbert (Corylus avellana ‘Red Majestic’).
Lots of narcissi, my favourite flower:
Primulas:
Allan helped me by moving a box from a stump in the wayback sit spot (where I replaced the box with rusty bits…he was too fast for me to get a before photo with the box still on the stump on the lower left)…
…and the box is now on one of the rickety blue wooden chairs so no one will sit on them.
Here comes Spotty Dotty! I am relieved that she is fine, because last year I moved her.
In the willow grove, I was thrilled to see two different Cardiocrinum giganteum coming back. Not so thrilled to see the oxalis, which snuck in on something else.
A big alder branch came down near the flowering currant, which has been blooming for weeks.
Skooter walked with me and purred underfoot while I weeded.
The deep path water is falling.
I got four full buckets of weeds, including lots of lesser celandine (yay, me!), which goes into the wheelie bin.
The garden at four P.M., just before the temperature dropped and the rain came.
The garden from the roof:
I still am pondering the refinement of the paths.
I hope for some reading weather, because I’m over my head with the last batch of library books with gardening season here.
Lower left two are A Garden in the Hills and A Croft in the Hills, which I own, so no pressure. I will read George Orwell’s letters but may send James Herriot and Flannery O’Connor back and get them another time.
These two just arrived today, a Bill Bryson both Allan and I somehow missed, and three novels by Orwell in very tiny print.
Faerie and Zinc had their usual day.
…to …to the sheltered sit spot at the southeast corner of the house, where this was our view:
Tangly Cottage Gardening 