Summer winds down

On Saturday, my friend Candi and I spent a nice morning poking around in Edmonds, north of Seattle.  She lives in Poulsbo and took the ferry over from Kingston. It was busy and crowded on the main street.  Edmonds was once just a dull ferry dock town, but it's posh now, with expensive boutiques, galleries, restaurants and the best farmer's market I've ever seen in the northwest.

This must be partially due to the success and fame of Rick Steves.  Edmonds is his hometown, and he has a large store there called The Savvy Traveler. The quaint streets are planted with perfectly coordinated flowers, and unusual pocket gardens with rare plants tucked here and there. Everything was still fresh and pretty, even late in the summer.

It was inspiring and discouraging. We decided we are "so over" our boring, dried-up gardens, full of flopping daisies and pooped out vegetables (well, at least for another season.)

On Sunday the weather was finally cool and I got motivated outside.  The soil was dry as dust, and I dug out an ugly corner crammed with unhappy things like matted grasses, invasive ground cover, poor strawberries that never made fruit, and oh yea, some of those big iris.

Since I couldn't just throw them away, I took a bag of iris roots over to my neighbor's house. Diane  will find them when she gets back from vacation tomorrow.  In the flower gardening world, "sharing" big iris is like sneaking a 10 pound zucchini on someone's porch under cover of darkness. Ha!

I divided up all that nice drought-resistant grass and replanted it. It will fill in quickly. There's no need to buy any new plants around here, and now it looks like someone actually thought about this bed, instead of an old hodge-podge. 

Like this!  But we are own worst critics. The late garden is still attractive, even with the bare spots where I got annoyed and hacked things off.

Common but pretty flowers...

Only 5 plums on the tree this year, but a bumper crop of apples. Go figure.  It's too bad each and every one has a secret worm hole.

My new friend

About a year ago on a drive home from Twisp, I spotted this metal crow for sale at a produce stand.  It was too much money, but later I wanted it.  Of course no one else was foolish enough to buy it, so I brought him home with me last week.  He can hold peanuts for all the scavengers I feed in the winter.