Planting day, gazeboed, and sunny sunny summer

WHEEEEEE! Oh, man, it is sunny and warm and feels GREAT! I just LOVE this time of year: not too many bugs, the butterflies are out (saw my first one, an Alaska blue, down by the post office a few days ago--here's another nice photo), no smoke, hardly any rain, very few tourists, and it's not too hot! Well, the frost the other night was a bit chilly, but still!

A whole bunch of people turned up (late, of course, most of them--no need to hurry) for planting flowers around the village on Sunday. (This was the first EMCE event.) Mayor Hannah and Monique went off to Plant Kingdom to buy a bunch of flowers for the Eagle and the village, so at first it was just me and my nasturtiums and sunflowers and Scott Allen. Then Kate showed up, and then Maggie, and then the ball got rolling. Richard Gumm brought a bunch of vegetable-rated municipal compost. George Gianakopoulos showed up in straw hat and with a humongous amount of nasturtiums, marigolds, lettuces, sunflowers, and mysterious mixed whatnots from Calypso Farm, donated to the village! Dwight Deely brought petunias. Then Hannah and Monique came back with a whole flat of lobelias and some other goodies. (I took a bunch of photos, but now of course I can't find my camera so you'll all have to wait until later to see the festivities.)

So we were mixing dirt and sand and compost and peat and putting it in buckets and pots and old oil drums and boxes and who knows whatall and then planting a dizzying selection of flowering greeneries. Hannah and I planted stuff in the buckets around the old post office/library annex (that's officially the Old Post Office Espresso Library Annex, or OPOELA for those of you who like acronyms). Scott drove Kate and I down Village Road, stopping every twenty feet or so so that we could unload yet another basket or bucket and place it by the roadside. It was a blast, and I forgot clean about going over to Molly's at 3 to review the paperwork for our ECA nonprofit status. I was planting until after 6 pm!

Kate and I went down to the park and planted a couple of the planters. One of them we stuffed full of sunflowers. Somebody, Ruth, I think, had prepared the soil (but there was no sign of the perennials we'd planted last year, so they may have gotten dug up by accident, alas). She'd planted a park planter before the big frost, but everything looked pretty good, actually.

We brought eight hanging baskets down to the gazebo to hang up once we get hooks (and the rafters have been varnished). The old partially collapsed 55-gallon oil drum that was there and filling up with leaves we cleaned up a bit and filled up with dirt, and planted with a selection of mystery plants. Plus a nasturtium. Or two.

Hans has been working like mad on the gazebo, and now all the copper is on the cupola and the edge of roof, and a lot of the siding has been given its first coat of stain (I did a bunch of it yesterday afternoon and will finish it up tonight). He finished up the bracing yesterday (it looks so COOL!) and is going to work on the rough sanding tonight. Kate gave him some iced tea from the planting day; we drank some that day and then took the rest home. I took home the leftover pots and flats and a few flowers that didn't get planted, and then yesterday planted the remainder. Hannah and I brought the last few pots over to the OPOELA.

And I finally planted my garden, such as it is, with some of the leftover lettuce starts. My sunflowers and nasturtiums are finally coming up--I've got flats and flats of them. I'm going to be in real trouble once they start needing permanent homes. The squash seeds I saved from last year, French ronde de Nice that I got originally from Seeds of Change, FINALLY started to sprout. I was afraid that they'd maybe not ripened enough and were infertile, but nope, it looks like I'm going to be zucchiniing the neighborhood later this summer...