Today, we took a drive to the northern end of Oak Harbor to pick up our generator from the repair shop. As former city slickers, we never thought we would every own a generator, but the last two Whidbey Island winters have brought a few too many power outages.
Luckily, our friend, Aimee, had a generator she wasn't using, but it turns out, it needed a new carbonator.
Seeing that we were already in the area, we took the opportunity to pop into a local treasure for gardeners, Mailliards Landing Nursery, to see whether we can at least pretend that spring is around the corner.
Although we were greeted with a gorgeous display of pink and white heather, alas, spring has not arrived at Mailliards.
But the visit did remind me what a great resource this nursery is and how much we have relied on it as we build our garden pretty much from scratch. Not only have we been able to buy high quality garden soil to start remediating the glacial till that makes up our garden, we have also bought pea gravel for a new outdoor seating area and have appreciated being able to dispose of of garden waste in their recycling area.
Jean-Michel decided that the pear, apple and Italian plum trees would not produce all the fruit we would need for eating and preserving, so before we fully moved in, he went to Mailliards to buy an assortment of fruit trees. Now, we have a mini orchard in our front year complete with peach, nectarine, Asian pear, a fancy plum and a fig tree.
Today, we we were looking for a "vigorous" vine to climb up a new portico in the front of our house. We are leaning towards a jasmine of some sort. We have not had much luck with clematis. Although Mailliards did have a few options, we decided to wait until things warm up and more plants arrive. Mollie did enjoy a bit of running around between the plant tables and a friendly butt scratch from the helpful person in the store.
Well, let's hope when the groundhog appears, there will be only a few weeks left before spring arrives to what is currently a pretty soggy Whidbey Island.