Tangly Cottage Gardening

Saturday, 17 January 2026

at home

On this springlike Saturday of velvety weekend silence in the garden, I finished the compost shifting from bin one to bin two. First load:

I bucketed the first load (four and a half five gallon buckets) to where I had transplanted a small conifer in the willow grove garden. On the way (using the short big wheeled rollator as an excellent tool for moving heavy buckets)….

…I saw a crocus in flower…

…and on the way back I saw a pair of Parahebe ‘Waterfall Mist’ blooming whitely on either side of the entry to a short path .

For the second load, Allan helped by moving the wheelbarrow.

I had now achieved the goal of getting all the compost materials into one bin! First time in years, maybe the first time ever in this garden.

Bin one:

Bin two piled high:

I then did a five minute metronome walk, 80 beats, I tried 90 but my walking form just fell apart at that pace. I chose a route going around the house, mostly on sidewalk, a bit of lawn and a bit of gravel, and Alicia’s long driveway. I passed Allan fixing a plant table….

…and the next time I came around, he was waiting on the front path with his camera. “No pictures, I’m miserable and in pain!” I said grumpily. (Sorry, Allan.) However, afterward I felt pretty good and my knee didn’t hurt much at all, so I will try to increase the time by a minute or a few per day.

I thought that the old table that Allan worked on was going to end up in the garbage for being so rotten, but no, he repaired it beautifully.

Skooter waxed cute today on the patio by his favourite catmint….

…and on the first bridge.

I have been enjoying paper whites, a gift from our friend Teri, blooming on the table next to my desk.

out and about

At the post office, Allan noticed a miniature rose blooming in a planter. Someone had left it on the post office bench some years ago and we had planted it.

He tidied the fire station garden a bit. Both of our volunteer gardens need attention that I haven’t had the oomph to give. I would rather be reading, but perhaps tomorrow we will do some cutting back at the post office garden so that early crocuses show.

Speaking of reading, this springlike weather makes me fear winter is over, yet I urgently need more reading weather. Nothing too dire, nothing too cold or windy, just some rain during daylight.

music note:

Because I am a good neighbor, I don’t listen to music on weekends when it is quiet outside. It did occur to me that my walking route would be enhanced by music with a beat and even looked up dance music with 80 or 90 beats per minute. Most of it is 120, no wonder it’s for dancing (or running—those were the days!) and not walking. Then I remembered something I learned in a documentary about house music. One creator said that house music has a “beat of one”. It’s 4/4 but the first beat is strong. My physical therapist told me that all my metronome beats have to be the same intensity or I will step harder on a louder note….so I guess house music wouldn’t work for walking practice.

Thursday, 15 January 2026

Spring-like weather inspired me to work on shifting compost from bin one to bin two, resulting in two wheelbarrows of roughly sifted compost being bucketed into the garden.

Before:

First barrow full…

Second barrow:

After:

One more nice day and I might get to the bottom of bin one, thus achieving the most unusual and perhaps unheard of feat of getting all the compost into just one bin. I used to find it hard to get one empty bin out of four. Often, four would be full with no room for turning.

The only reason that one bin would be achieved is that, being almost retired, we brought much less clean garden debris home from work last year. Having less compost is not really a good thing.

My only other photos today show Canna ‘Stuttgart’ and my hardy banana looking almost summery due to lack of frost….

…and borage unseasonably blooming…

…and Faerie being cute.

Music notes: In looking for one of my favourite songs, Village Green Preservation Society, to add to a play list, I found another song by the Kinks, also about a village green. I had never heard it before and enjoyed listening to it (to drown out noise from the south) while turning compost. Lyrics are here.

I have been enjoying some reading weather with a new batch of books from the library (no, I still have not managed to throttle the flow, but it is slowing down).

I started, then stopped reading Why We Broke Up, even though I like the author and artist, when I found out the boy in the story is a high school basketball star. BORING. Sportsball themes are a dealbreaker for me in reading.

Reflecting Nature was a good read. I do wish we could afford to do a giant cast stone wall by our south fence!

Having enjoyed the Osbournes’ telly show, I liked Ozzy’s memoir quite a lot even though I was never a fan of Black Sabbath. I did listen to some songs after reading and was surprised at how many of them are melodic ballads!

The book began promisingly with the trials of getting old. Ozzy says,

“Just before I turned seventy, a thought suddenly occurred to me.

I wonder when it is you start feeling old?

I mean, there I was, six years older than my own father when he left this world, and as far as I was concerned, I was still basically a young man.

Okay, so my hands and legs were a bit shaky thanks to my Parkinson’s. I was going deaf. My short-term memory had been on the blink since about 1992. But I could run around the stage at Donington Park for two hours, shooting a foam gun at the crowd. I could belt out ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Crazy Train’ without dropping a note….” It seems gardening was not enough for him: “The original No More Tours had been in the nineties, before I realised there’s only so much time you can spend in your back garden wearing wellies before you lose your mind. But this time, with my seventieth birthday approaching, I was serious about slowing down.”

As his health problems increased, he had something to say about the state of health care in the USA.

A Beverly Hills doctor asks him how much some previous procedures had cost. “He couldn’t believe it when I explained to him that when you get work done on the NHS – even the most complicated surgery, using the very latest technologies – Her Majesty’s government (as it was back then) picks up the tab.

‘You Brits are lucky,’ he told me. ‘Over here, you’d be getting bills ’til the day you died.”

And later, “People in Britain don’t realise how good they’ve got it with the NHS, they really don’t. In America, they’ll check your bank balance before they check your pulse. I suppose all that money is why they keep inventing world-beating new treatments. But it gets a bit much. Especially when you’re also dealing with the health insurance system. After any kind of surgery, you’re getting bills from everyone in the room. Plus a bill for the use of the room. Then another bill from the guy who sends you the bills. And of course everything’s marked up by 10,000 per cent. Each screw they put in my spine probably cost a couple of grand. I mean, I’m very lucky, I can afford it. Some people wind up bankrupt.”

I found the book entertaining, endearing, amusing, and surprisingly poignant.

I spent an entire rainy day perusing a book about one of my most admired gardeners, who I had been fortunate to hear at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show decades ago; his lecture and photos changed my gardening life.

Faerie found the gorgeous and enormous book to be annoyingly big and heavy.

It even has some fold-out pages.

Our Timberland Regional Library has it. My list of must have plants got longer.

More books yet to read…From Strength to Strength is about finding meaning in “the last half of life”, not sure how helpful that will be because for me it would be more like the last tenth of life. I did read Growing Conifers, helpful in finding evergreens that will grow in shade and in damp ground.

Then two interlibrary loans arrived, the next Lees-Milne diary (number eleven of twelve) and a book of short stories by Tom Cox (favourite author of 2025!) so the other books will have to wait.

Wednesday, 14 January 2026

Ilwaco

I had been looking forward to reading Lees-Milne all day long. It was not to be. One of our cohorts called a spontaneous rally which we were able to join because it was just five blocks from home.

I had to tuck in against the building to keep the cold north wind out of my ear and got to meet a nice young dog, Sierra.

Two passersby, tourists who had signs in their vehicle, joined us for an hour.

Wendi’s planter, on the same street, still looks good.

Allan filmed a little video which I posted to TikTok, here, pretty much to show how tiny a tiny town rally can be. (The flu has hit hard here, thus two women who usually would attend were out sick.)

at home

The drizzle stopped. Allan took a walk all the way down Willows Walk West (the caption says “east”, unless I can figure out how to edit it, oops) and into the willow grove to see if the paths were no longer splish splash lakes, and indeed, they were walkable without splashing. Turn your sound on for our winter garden ambience!

Tuesday, 13 January 2026

at home

Briefly, as I’m in a bit of a blogging winter slowdown this week….Allan heard frogs near the house and walked into our willow grove to listen for frogs in the bog.

I love the twisty willow trunks and the schefflera which us taller than us.

I feel we have improved video sharpness and clarity.
Sound on if you want to understand why the AI interpretation that Facebook offered me for this video is so funny.

See comments for the AI.

Saturday, 10 January 2026

Here is the rest of my current collection of garden signs, the sharing of which I started last week. Six on Saturday is hosted by Jim of Garden Ruminations.

I do like words in the garden. In fact, a couple of my signs have faded away, one that just said “….sipping the cold soup made from the chrysanthemums of dreams…” -Paul Carroll” and one, about planting seeds, faded away from my veg area: “Think small. Planting tiny seeds in the small space given you can change the whole world or, at the very least, your view of it. -Linus Moody”

However, I still have six more signs to show you!

One, on the west main entry gate to the back garden:

“Be untidy. Nothing is more beneficial to insects than long grass.” –Monty Don

Two:

A sign in the far back woods.

“Some people spend their time dreaming of a paradise in heaven. I would rather try to create it here on earth.” -Jenny Ferguson

One photo, of three signs (or four):

Three: (in an earlier version, replaced when it wore away and needs re-lettering again):

Four:

I loved this quotation for a long time and had it in my previous garden, too.

It was in one of Mirabel Osler’s wonderful memoirs, maybe A Gentle Plea Chaos, or one of its two sequels. I was poorer then than I am now, and yet I don’t remember pondering then how rather classist it is to think that everyone can have a garden “at any price”. There were a couple of years of paying off my then-spouse’s medical bills that my garden budget ran to a bag of potting soil and two six packs of cosmos. So yes, most of us DO have to keep a garden account. And yet, her words still speak to me because I do choose the garden over other forms of entertainment (including travel). And it is worth it.

Five: This is one sign, two sided, that I put on display only when I have open garden days; it would not last outside in rain. It is leftover from an Earth Day rally in 2016. I made the second side around a little poster that I bought.

Six:

Finally, a very simple sign that gives me a great deal of pleasure and amusement, in the quite messy area of compost bins and potting up.