Got My Garden Plot… Then Took a Walk

I got a lot of small projects done at the office, and then headed out around 2:30 pm to go over to the Hanna & Herbert Bauer Memorial Garden, right next door to the Yolo County Mental Health Department building, a community garden.  I met with a gal named Rebecca there and put a deposit down on a plot that looks to my eye to be about 10 feet wide by 8 feet deep.  I’m planning to get back over to it sometime this weekend to measure it out and get it ready for my seedlings.  The plot I chose (#3) backs up against a fence, so I can use that as a trellis for beans and other vines.  And the plot was the only “abandoned” one from last year that had been cleared out by the previous owners.  Some of the other old plots were covered with dead matter and weeds.  To have a plot in the garden you have to promise to keep your plot growing and keep it from encroaching on other people’s stuff, AND you’re supposed to help keep the common area and pathways clear.  Well, obviously that didn’t happen last year, because much of the space is a ghastly mess. The garden supplies all of the tools, and an on-hand gardener who will answer all your planting questions… should be fun!  I’ll set up a page for the garden and take photos of it periodically, so you can see how it’s progressing.  Here’s what it looks like now:

my plot

After I’d signed up for my plot, I headed home, but stopped briefly at William Land Park and the middle-sized pond for a short walk.  Little-by-little the flowers are starting to open up in the surrounding gardens… but their beauty was kind of shattered by the fact that some nincompoops were playing their twangy electric guitars – and not well – from the hatchback of their car in the parking lot.  The noise permeated everything.  Gad.  I go out into nature for QUIET, not to listen to some grating guitar noise.  People must’ve complained because the park rangers came by and told them to turn off their amps…

I watched a little male Anna’s Hummingbird fly back and forth and “chortle” to another hummer.  He’d sit on one branch, make his angry kissy sounds, then fly across the path to another branch, and do the same thing there.  Back and forth, back and forth… until the other bird got tired of his chattering and left.  I also got to see an egret, the Green Heron (which is kind of a “resident” there now), the ubiquitous ducks, geese, and crows, a Northern Flicker, a Yellow Rumped Warbler, some Mourning Doves, and some Robins.  Clouds were piling up over the eastern horizon, and Marty said that as he was heading home from work in Folsom there were some loud claps of thunder and a little smooshy hail… I think the clouds are awesome and got a bunch of photos of them.

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After just an hour or so, I headed back to the car and went on home… to crash for the day.