Mid-July and taking care of gardens

With the heat, there have been fewer visitors, but we still try to keep busy. There is no housekeeping service at HQ anymore, and they have no landscapers now. I think some of it is budget, and some may be that it is just hard to find people willing to come out this far since we are 40 miles from the nearest small town of Burns.

This week and last week, I pulled 8 trash bags of weeds from the gardens. We've also attempted to water the existing legacy gardens. The watering system needs work, and I don't have that skill, so we bought a small watering head and just moved it around by hand in the front garden this weekend. There are roses and lillies that I hope will bloom as a result. It has only rained one day since we arrived, and that was just a storm blowing through.

I put my hummingbird feeder back out by the camper, and the birds are coming to it again. It is less buggy, so we can sit out in the evening and watch the sunsets, too.

This week, we are going to Walla Walla in nearby Washington. It was always a place we liked when we lived in Spokane and Boise. Our volunteer friend Susan leaves at the end of the month. She will go home to St Louis. She had planned to go to Dearh Valley but could not get a doctor there to treat her for her lung cancer. She takes chemo regularly. Here, she drives to Boise to get Keytruda treatments.

New volunteers will come next week or the following week to help out in the gift store.Read more