Falling into Winter
There is really no “down” time at illahe, despite the weather or the season, there is always something just starting into bloom and late November is no exception. I’ll share a few of those treats in the gallery below, but I thought I would drop a quick note before the Thanksgiving holiday week to wish everyone well and let you know what we have been up to.
Denver was awesome! The Rocky Mountain Chapters symposium was a fantastic day filled with excellent lectures, wonderful plants from several local vendors, Alplains seeds for sale, a book sale and the wonderful Denver Botanic garden as a backdrop. Back home it’s beginning to feel like the transition from the fall into winter now. Still very mild temperatures here for the most part although we did get a touch of frost this week. I thought I would pop on here with a little nursery update as we go into the heart of the holiday season. We are still shipping plant collection boxes, and tools for the time being I would suggest ordering soon especially if you are looking to give a gift for the christmas season. I will post up another holiday offering for a quick early December shipping run for those looking for stocking stuffers or the rare bulbs that we don’t ship during the summer season. Stay tuned for that.
This little Bidens ferulifolia, the Apache beggerticks is always late to the party, deciding to show up and bloom as the rock garden wanes into late November
In the nursery we are busy with a number of projects, the work never ends, just the temperature and humidity at which you are doing it changes. I fired up the geothermal house for the first time this fall, I still have a few tender bulbs I haven’t tucked away for the season and I was watching the mercury plummet as the sky cleared for an evening this week. The system works exceptionally well this time of year as the stored heat of a warm Oregon summer is all loaded up in that thermal mass underneath the greenhouse. A quick flick of the fan switch and I am assured that the house will stay frost free when needed. I have an excellent presentation on this greenhouse system so hit me up if you have a garden group or club interested in a zoom presentation I would be happy to set that up. I also added a chimney extension to the pellet stove in the geo thermal house this fall. While the system worked fantastic last year, I was searching for more efficiencies to add in and after finding that the chimney pipe would get some backpressure when we had a strong (and often bitter cold) northern front move in. I decided to add an extension and a draft reducing chimney cap. This addition will make the stove even more efficient and also less subject to fluctuations when the north wind blows hard.
I have some fun projects planned for this winter, I was able to find some pumice locally and picked up a good amount to do an extension to the shady rock garden, a long overdue to project due to some complications with a failing retaining wall on the neighbors property. Two new raised planters featuring pumice will flank the North doors to the geothermal house. If you have taken the tour of illahe you have heard me talk about the two giant black cottonwoods that used to grow where the rock garden is now. I had them removed over 10 years ago now and the roots of these massive trees are just now finally starting to completely rot away. That has led to a few sink holes in the garden and a good impetus to redo a few beds to raise and reset the rocks. I was always impressed with Truls and Emma of Wild Ginger Farms lewisia mounds in their garden near Beaver Creek. So I am thinking some sort of an homage to that with the redo. Work on the solar system to power the geothermal greenhouse will continue this winter in an effort to design the greenest, most efficient greenhouse we possibly can. Hopefully the weather cooperates enough for us to get the bigger infrastructure project underway this winter. A lathe house is needed for the summers heat and that is planned for the area to the West of the bulb house that used to house the berry collection and now an over grown Seabuckthorn shades the brambles and grape vines that were allowed to go unchecked while we expanded the nursery the last few years. Click here for the gallery to see a few of the seasons flowers and the projects were are up to:
In other news…………Don’t worry I am scaling back on the political rhetoric. Maybe out of exhaustion, maybe out of fear for the fact that we no longer have the illusion of freedom of speech in this country, maybe out of frustration for having to even say this stuff in the first place. I would strongly recommend you exercise your 2nd amendment before its too late for that. Long after the detention centers have been emptied of deportees, the Peter Thiels of the world will want them generating revenue so they will turn to the '“other” Americans they can find some fault with besides the color of their skin. Those American concentration camps will be used on the ‘legals’ who dare to speak out or think. I am off next week so I will say Happy Thanksgiving, I hope you get to spend it with family if that means something to you. Maybe take a moment to think of what you are thankful for and think about those this season that won’t be with family, whether it’s due to manning an armada gathering on the shores of another soon to be Banana republic, because they were blown to bits in some religious conquest of a desert land, or running for your life from a tyrannical government, stepping over bones in the Darian gap, or being nabbed in the fields and on the farms and sent to the concentration camps, or because they were eaten by the capitalist machine or left penniless by the broken american health care system and spit out on the streets to sleep on cardboard. Stay thankful.