An El Niño Winter

It's an El Niño winter here in the Northwest. We love 'em, albeit a bit guiltily, since this means most of our bad winter weather is pushed south into California! So far we've had only one wind storm of any consequence & our electricity was only out a few hours. Just about any wind storm around here means downed trees & loss of electricity. Our power has been out as long as 3 days over the years, which means life goes on in a nearby motel since we can't flush toilets or have running water.

We've even seen the sun on numerous days, which is unusual in this part of the country. The 100 yd. walk to our mailbox up on the one lane community road, which is fortified every summer with new wood chips on a path, seems hardly damp. Most winters we have to don garden boots to slog through the low spots which get boggy from the incessant rain.

Soon we'll be seeing whales as their spring migration to Alaska begins a bit early & yesterday I sent for a new, larger hummingbird feeder to replace a smaller one that is less popular with our little friends & also easier to clean. I go through about 6 lbs. of sugar, from the middle of March to the end of June, when they go farther north, but this year they'll probably appear sooner too.

Photo: In an ordinary winter our wood-chipped path to the mailbox is only navigable in boots.

Who Cleans Up The Storm Mess On Private Roads?

Another wind storm, but miracle of miracles, the power did not go out. We did get more branches down on our little neighborhood private road, & a couple of small trees would have come down too had they not collided on the way down & ended up creating a hazardous "archway" across the road. Another good gust could bring them both down--hopefully not on someone's head.

The county is good about clearing away downed trees on county roads, but those who are out very early in the morning usually carry chain saws to clear a path before the road crews find them.

There is an unwritten rule that if it's your trees or branches it's up to you to clear them out of the way. The trouble is we have much vacant land on the island, mostly woods & owned by absentee owners. So if you want to get through you saw through it & move it yourself.

Decades ago the property owners in our neighborhood apparently encroached on someone else's land to cut a road through & there are still bad feelings on the part of the owner's son. It's just a small strip of land fronting the county road but he can't sell it because our road bisects it. If anything he'll gloat over any tree hazard that would hinder our access so it'll be up to us to clear them away. So far no one's stepped up. We'll have to wait until the next wind storm.

First Storm of the Season

When my Christmas Cactus blooms I know we can expect the beginning of the storm season.

Last night we went out to dinner on the mainland. When we came out of the restaurant it was sunny, although we could see storm clouds to the south, the direction from which most storms hit the island.

Sure enough, by the time we got home 30 minutes later we found ourselves right in the middle of a strong windstorm. There were fir needles & branches all over the road, & in one section the fire department was diverting traffic & cleaning up a tree that had gone down.

We were about a mile from our house by then, & it was getting dark when we noticed none of the houses had lights. That always means we'll be out, since our neighborhood electricity is always the first to go out as well as the last to go on.When I checked with PUD (our Public Utilities District) their phone recording said 51 people were out.

We keep a latern & oil lamps in the dining room within easy reach, so I read by oil lamp for awhile then decided to go to bed. We didn't get power until 5:30 the next morning.

When we ask PUD officials why we're always the ones to go out they never have any other explanation than "there's lots of trees". Well, there's lots of trees all over the island & when we look across the sound there's lots of trees on that island too & they rarely go out. This winter I'm keeping a close count on days we're out & then raise some stink about it.

Giving Up On Composting

Yesterday I helped load my composter into another woman's van & saw it disappear up the driveway. From now on I order commercially prepared compost--delivered.

One of the "rural" lifestyle habits I adopted when we moved here was composting. Our soil is glacial till & needs massive amounts of amendments to get anything to grow. Since I have massive amounts of spent perennials every fall their logical use is as compost. First I tried just piling it up in an unobtrusive corner of our property, but of course that didn't work since, as I subsequently learned, compost must be turned, watered & nurtured with the right mixture of ingredients. I had to have a professional type composter.

Pouring through catalogues I found a drum type that you put yard waste, etc. into & then hand cranked to turn & mix it. It came in a narrow rectangular box & I laboriously put it together all by myself. David just shook his head. We stuck it around in back of the garage in a niche that fitted it perfectly.

To make a rather long story short, I never really did get the kind of compost you're supposed to get from a composter, nor did I really have a knack for composting. I tried. I put yard waste, grass clippings, vegetable peelings, strips of torn newspaper, I watered it & even added "compost booster" in my composter, but it never worked properly & I was never able to figure out what I was doing wrong. But David never said "I told you so." Bless him. So I finally gave up composting.

We have a wonderful FreeCycle group on the island & when I listed it I received many calls from the composting crowd. The lady in the van was the first to come & I'd really like to know if she has better luck with my composter than I had.

Coyotes Still Make Appearances

Every once in awhile I look out my office window & see a coyote emerge from our woods onto the driveway. There's no way to tell if it's the same animal, but I was able to get a rather poor photo of him the other day. He looks a bit mangy & not exactly well fed, but there are certainly enough feral cats around here to sustain him. Seeing him reminded me I haven't seen many of them lately.

There used to be an occasional article in the local paper about pets disappearing, especially at night. In one case a woman actually caught a coyote running away with her small dog & chased him until he dropped the dog in order to escape. The dog survived.

Our dog goes into orbit when he sees wild animals in our yard. Of course he has no conception of the fact that almost any of them could tear him apart within minutes even though I'm sure he'd put up a good fight. I'm especially concerned about raccoons, for when I attempted to identify on the Internet some scat I found I learned it probably belonged to raccoons & that raccoon scat was highly toxic; that is, it harbors some dangerous worm disease that both humans & other animals can contract. So I have ceased to view them as benign visitors.

Cleaning Out The Spent Garden

August is a bummer for gardeners. By this time we've had a taste of the coming winter, with chilly night and morning rain (sans wind, thank goodness) that turns muggy during the day. We still look forward to September, however, which is our Indian Summer, challenging late June for our nicest weather.

It's time to clean up dead flower beds, a job I dislike almost as much as cleaning and weeding in the spring. It makes me wonder if I'm really the gardener I like to think I am.

Much going on island-wise. We're getting a new bridge onto the island, which all of us are saying it's about time. The bridge was built in the 20s and has been used up until about the time we came, 15 years ago, by mostly weekend visitors and cabin owners. But we've more than doubled in population and a good portion of the residents actually now commute to Seattle or other points south so there's constant traffic on and off the island, day and night. We desperately need another bridge. But the bridge entails more than the bridge itself, so the shoulders of the road are torn up for miles for construction of passing and turning lanes in an attempt to ease other traffic problems. We'll see.

The Heat Brings Bees And Tourists

It got up to 103F in Seattle yesterday, setting a record. Here on the island it "only" got up to 90F. It still cools dramatically at night, though, so if you open the windows and get a cross draft going the house is cool by morning.

Maybe it's my imagination but it seems my lavender is buzzing with more bees than usual. The rest of the island is complaining about the tourists and it isn't just the traffic. There are some public boat launches in residential areas and it seems people are overloading parking areas and being rude to residents. Crab pots are being robbed and boats are launched at odd hours when most people are in bed, with little consideration given to those who might be sleeping at 5:00 a.m. I'm thankful we don't live in such an area.

Our only access to the beach is down a steep road--one that washes out periodically when we have a particularly wet winter--and then down some steep stairs to our private beach. Our homeowners association owns the beach lot, which isn't very big, but at least it's there if anyone wants to use it. Last time I was down there a huge tree trunk had washed up during a storm the previous winter, and while it offered a place to sit it took up quite a bit of the beach. When I suggested we have someone in to float it away I was told island residents did not, as a rule, remove driftwood from where it washed up, preferring to leave the beaches as natural as possible, so that was that. On the other side of the island, where there are fewer gale force winds, there is actually a small cove named Driftwood Beach because it consists mostly of washed up trees. The cove acts as a natural collection point for them. An aerial photo of the beach was on last year's telephone directory. It's very picturesque.

Last month I was stung by a bee while I was cutting flowers. I felt something on my back, and assuming it was a fly I shooed it away only to get stung in between my fingers. Wow, did that hurt! I'd forgotten how painful a bee sting was, but a baking soda paste relieved the pain. Now I'm afraid to pick some lavender with so many bees buzzing around.

Harriet & Charles Raise A Family

Harriet and Charles are our resident robins. For weeks they had been trying to build a nest on the window trim on every single window of the house. They started on my office window. I noticed it when, out of the corner of my eye, I became aware of bits of dried grass constantly floating down from somewhere above. I finally stepped outside to see what was going on and found a very frustrated robin going through the motions of gathering dried grass and string for a nest, only to see it drift downward when the slightest breeze came up. This was becoming a drama we couldn't help but follow so I named our uninvited house guests Harriet and Charles.

Harriet tried the dining room as well as windows at the rear of the house only to meet the same futile result. Then, coming around the side of the house on the far side of where she had begun, she really set her mind to it. We watched her progress & kept shaking our heads as stacks of dried grass piled up underneath the ledge where she'd decided to build. But this time nothing discouraged her. It was going to be THERE and that was all there was to it! Each spring for the past 3 years we've seen robins attempting the same futile task, but of course we don't know if Harriet was "it" or one of several. In any case she finally succeeded. And the truth was, it was rather ingenious because it was nearly invulnerable and invisible from a bird's eye view. Branches from nearby trees hung over the roof in that area, but not close enough for predators to attack from above, nor could they crawl up from below.

She settled, she laid her eggs, she incubated them for 2 weeks, then one morning we saw 3 small beaks sticking up from inside the nest. A few days later they had grown enormously and started perching on the edge of the nest, waiting for Harriet to feed them. She finally got a little impatient and pushed the biggest one off. He fluttered to the ground, peeping and hopping around, finally finding his way around the side of the house to the edge of our bank overlooking the sound, and then over.

David was concerned and tried to reach the poor thing, but Harriet seemed to oversee it and the 2 others who followed soon after. David was highly critical of what he considered the cavalier treatment she gave them and sure the little ones were doomed. They disappeared for a few days, but one evening I looked out at a patch of new grass that David was watering and saw a family of robins looking for worms, the speckled breasted ones waiting expectantly to be fed by the adults. It looked as though they had all survived--at least for now. According to an article I found in Wikipedia, only 25% of young robins survive the first year.

Record Setting Hot Spell

I picked these daisies from my garden early this morning before they had a chance to wilt. The temperature today, and probably tomorrow, is expected to get up to 90 F in Seattle. It rarely gets that hot in Seattle and here on the island almost never. We have that wonderfully cool breeze off the the sound and no one, except businesses, has air conditioning. It's what I love about the Northwest. It cools dramatically during early evening and, leaving our windows open when we go to bed, we sleep under down comforters.

David is helping me more in the garden this year since so much of the work wreaks havoc with my back. Up to now I've forbidden him to do anything except under strict supervision because in total ignorance the first summer we lived here he pulled up all the lilies of the valley I had so laboriously planted several weeks before, thinking they were weeds. As calmly as I could--for he meant well--I asked him never to touch the garden again!

We are experiencing almost total quiet since Harriet and Charles, our resident robins, launched their fledglings from our window sill. Whether the youngsters made it in the wilderness is anybody's guess. More on that later.

Dog Days Of Summer

We're heading toward the end of July--about the time I usually decide next year I won't have a garden. Too much trouble for just a month of beauty, I find myself saying. However, I think most gardens look bedraggled by July & mine is no exception. Roses are about the only thing left blooming but it's nothing like the profusion in June. The lavender is blooming by the garden house, as well as the impatiens in the window boxes, altho I've trimmed everything else back since it's through flowering.

Our new sand filter is in & we're $7,000 poorer; then there's our new dishwasher which set us back over $1,000. The old one was 15 years old & would have cost about the same to fix, so it was a no brainer. It's a Blomberg--a European company I'd never heard of, but it's very silent & uses only 3 gallons of water per load. I'm liking it!