Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Tell The Truth Tuesday -- The Trouble With Gardening Under Douglas Firs

The last three weeks have been a black hole of lost time. On Christmas Day I came down with a bad cold. I thought at first it wouldn't be too bad, the first three or four days I was only mildly ill. But by New Year's Eve I was flat on my back after unbelievable congestion and a fever hit me like a ton of bricks, and turned my head into an enormous, dripping, slurping, sweating, throbbing, disgusting snotball. I spent two days in bed not eating, barely aware, followed by a long, slow claw-back to a semblance of health. I'm actually still coughing as I write this post.

On New Year's Eve we got a powerful windstorm, which Nigel says woke him up when he heard what sounded like a crowd of people running across our roof. I was too sick to be aware of it, I never heard a thing. But I did see the effect the next day. The storm blew thousands of twigs and lots of large branches off the Douglas fir trees that surround our garden, and sheared off one of our fence posts and toppled a fence panel (the fence that separates us from the angry, barky dog).

The fence got fixed within a couple of days (Latticetop Fence Company), but it's two weeks later now and I still haven't cleaned up the branches. I got out of breath just walking around taking these pictures.

Branches blew onto the porch even though it's under a roof





The lawn strewn with twigs and branches

The Douglas firs are a constant source of cones


The biggest pile


Branches in the stream




The fence, which at first looked like a bull had charged through it, has since been fixed (Nigel went out and stood the fence panel back up for this picture)

Have you ever been too tired or sick (or just plain sick and tired of gardening) to clean up after a storm? What's the longest you've left debris in your garden?

Do you have some other ugly garden truths to show us today? Or are you too distracted by what's blooming on Garden Bloggers Bloom Day? I don't have much to show on this January day.