I'm afraid I've been tearing up the pavement between my home in Woodinville, WA and my parents' homes in the Spokane, WA area. If I win any award it should be for my knack for avoiding the worst of all the road construction this year! I suppose the hours of saved time was reward enough. I can't remember the last time they did such an extensive year of road construction, not since the 1980's at least!
So, since my garden this year was rather sad, and indeed, some of the beauties that graced the Garden D'Lite in the past are sadly no more, lets just give you a gander of what the other end of this big ass state has to offer. If you were to drive from the ocean to the very edge of the Washington State line bordering Idaho it would take you 6hr 19min with no traffic delays at the freeway speed limit of 70mph (112.65Kmh). Like most Washingtonians I go 5-10mph above that.
Without further ado.....
the visited greenery of
P R O X I M A B L U E
Dad's house overlooks a small valley surrounded by wheat and sunflower fields. Unfortunately, the sunflower fields were past their prime.
The view of the hill behind me, a well-maintained Ponderosa Pine forest. Forest fires are the biggest threat to living here.
Glacier Lily (Erythronium grandiflorum)
Lanceleaf Springbeauty Claytonia (Lanceolata spp Claytonia)
Yellow Fritillary (Fritillaria pudica) A little blurry, sorry.
What's been lurking in the silty sand above the water discharge pipe?
Something A Fowl!
I woke up one morning to find this mob of turkeys harassing a pair of rural kids waiting for the bus at their stop. This is why you always carry a walking (ahem, chasing stick) with you. The younger and older boy were back to back swinging their sticks to keep the turkeys at bay. I was about to head out to help charge off the turkeys myself when the school bus showed up and the bus driver starting honking to scare the birds away. This doesn't happen every morning, but one should always be prepared to battle turkeys! This is a new normal. These turkey mobs used to be regularly shot, cleaned, and frozen for year round consumption that it was rare to see them anymore by the 1990s.
The secondary prints, as some my guess, belong to a large raccoon.
So there you go, a brief trip to sunny Eastern Washington. Not pictured is the crazy dust storm I had to fight through one night. The emergency alert on my phone almost gave me a heart attack! ("Take shelter NOW. Imminent threat to life and property!" it said.)
First you see a giant wall of swirling brown coming at you blotting out the sun and then it hits you! It's like being put in a blender with dirt and rain, but they're moving so fast they don't mix. The ground was so dry the streets turned into rivers and you hoped that it wouldn't get high enough to lose traction between the road and your tires. A falling tree tried to take me out but I hit the brakes fast enough and thankfully managed not to get rear ended by the person behind me. I was half there through my half hour journey when I came upon powerlines on the road. A string of us then had to carefully backup for over a half a mile without going into the ditches on the side.
I wanted a hot shower when I got to dad's house but NOOOOOOO, instead there were a bunch of turkeys in my parking spot and the power was out, which meant the well pump was also out. So SOMEONE is getting solar panels with a back up battery schematic specifically outlining the parts they need to fix that nonsense so the pump can operate for up to 3 hours after a power outage!
Well that's enough of that!
☙❧
On Sunday, the Garden Photos Event will be in Devon for Ms Scarlet's display, so please stop by to take a gander at her bush.
Jeepers! Some of you thought my goannas were to big to handle, but that mob of turkeys? Definitely would carry a stick. (Like I used when walking through the rough bush at our former home;just to encourage any snakes to move on!)
ReplyDeleteI think I'd rather fight turkeys than kangaroos. Are the roos all over Australia or just in one area, like the outback?
DeleteTurkeys are feral?!! Good heavens - the only time we get to see them in the UK is shrink-wrapped and frozen for Xmas.
ReplyDeleteAnyhoo - it may not actually be your garden, but woodland flowers are always a joy. How much do I adore Erythroniums? Let me count the ways... We would love to grow them, but a) they're rather expensive over here in the UK, and b) I don't believe they're ideal to grow in pots. Lovely pics! Jx
Yes, turkeys are native to North America! The colonists used turkey feathers for writing quills and exported them to the UK for such purposes as well. One of the many resources from the new world.
DeleteI'm glad you enjoy the simple pleasure of native shrub-steppe flowers. The soil has a lot of natural crushed granite, so they like crunchy soil.
Apparently the intrepid early explorers of the New World sent live turkeys back to Britain, where farmers bred them and domesticated them, and developed bigger, fatter, table-ready varieties - and cages of birds from that husbandry went back to the USA as livestock as early as 1608... Jx
DeletePS I might yet give Erythroniums a try - with some "crunchy soil".
Wild turkeys? No thanks. The racket that pheasants make is bad enough.
DeleteAnd as for Erythroniums in pots, Jon, I can't remember if I mentioned it before, but I have one that's been stuck in a small clay 'trough' (sharing with bluebells and violets) for about five years without a change of compost and it comes up a treat every year! In fact, I was so impressed with it this year that it's going to feature in my GPE post later in the month!
OK - you sold it to me. Next time I'm in a garden centre, I'm hunting Erythroniums! Jx
DeleteYe Gods you live in the wilds, Melanie!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad the prints belonged to a Racoon and not a bear - though a bear would see off the Turkeys!
The view of the valley looks beautiful - I hope the fires keep away from it.
And as for the emergency alert - yep, that would scare me silly, too - more likely a mudslide here than a dust storm though.
Take care, m'dear,
Sxx
I think other Americans sometimes forget that "The West" (aka True West) is still very much wild. If I were to describe it without saying what state I was in, they'd assume I was in the Canadian Yukon, which to be far, is a two-hour drive North.
DeleteA neighbourhood close to me is similarly overrun with feral turkeys. Occasionally, there are photos in the newspaper of someone who can't get out of his car in his own driveway because of a threatening big bird. Some people claim to be "terrorized" by the turkeys.
ReplyDeleteClearly, they still have too much dinosaur DNA in them! Despite being a vegetarian now, I will still kill and cook a bird that thinks it can get away with harassing me!
DeleteI'm a vegetarian too but I would quite happily throttle a few of those turkey bastards if they got in my way, sounds a bit ghoulish, perhaps just flap my hands at them like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. I do like a pine forest, there is one near to where I live, however 'funny goings-on' happen there usually with dog walkers, think Dinah's Goannas but with people!
ReplyDeletePoor Tippi! While I like Hitchcock's movies that was really too much what he made that poor woman go through! I doubt it was a pleasant working experience for the birds either. I believe in "Live and let live" as long as it doesn't overly infringe on the well-being of other lifeforms.
DeleteI was probably one of those "funny goings ons."
DeleteStill lovely! I absolutely loved the Glacier Lily! And I adore a good forest to explore in. But the turkeys. Saved for consumption? They must be gamey tasting? We had wild turkeys at the first Casa du Borghese, but they looked much different then these.
ReplyDeleteIsn't everything bigger in the West? ;) I think IDV's houseboy Gavin is from around here.
DeleteOh, one after my own heart. Truly lovely stuff. We have turkeys out at the prairie. I love watching the mothers guard their babies. So many predators, though. And those woods... give me ideas!
ReplyDelete