the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to show you the dishes, and not the ones you eat off of. You may remember me from such posts as “Horticultural Invective”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
As you can see, it didn’t rain like they said it would.
You can also see the ancient wheelbarrow, which the guy I live with said was a sign of work being done.

Last weekend the guy I live with left me for a while to go get some clay dishes, made in Mexico. There’s a place here that sells lots of them, and you’ve seen them in pictures of our garden. There’s one in the lower left of the picture above.
(You can also see the new ones if you look closely.)

The other day, when our neighbor came over, he was especially taken with the hens and chicks in the clay dishes.
I’ve shown pictures of these several times, but there’s no reason not to show one again.
You can see that this dish is crumbling. That happens.

A whole bunch of work is being done in the area close to the kangaroo bag in the first picture.
The north-south, or maybe it’s south-north, path is being redone. The guy I live with hated to remove so much buffalo grass, because seed is now super-expensive, but there were so many other grasses that had seeded themselves into the path he’s decided to redo the whole thing.
There’s one of the new dishes on the left. It’s not really slanted like that. The guy I live with said that was called “barrel distortion”; you can see that our house seems weirdly slanted too.
In fact, all three dishes are perfectly level. (He used a level to make them level.)
There’s a little square of cut window screen at the bottom, to keep the soil-less mix from sifting out.
I’ve already talked about “drainage” (the guy I live with gets irked when people talk about that, like it’s something that actually happens), but in this case it’s important for water to drain out of the dishes, of course, and the perched water table discussed in the post I mentioned in my introduction won’t be an issue because the soil-less mix here is highly pervious to water.
This came from a trough that had the plants removed; the guy I live with gave the plants to a friend.

The hens and chicks have already been ordered. They do very well in our climate and need almost no care at all. The roots can be frozen solid all winter with no problems. (The guy I live with suggested that that means the hens and chicks stop photosynthesizing, and just sit there, in a kind of stasis. He does that, too.)

The next step will be to order some gravel to spread on the paths and that part of the garden where most of the plants have been dug out (except for that “aster thing” which still needs to be dug out more).
The gravel will make the paths less muddy in the winter time.

The guy I live with said he wanted to title this post “The Hens And The Chicks”, which he said sounded like some 1950s epic novel made into a Hollywood technicolor spectacular, but there was already a post called “Hens And Chicks”, so “The Dishes” is what we decided on. I mean if you wanted to know.

And that’s what’s been going on here. We’re still waiting for rain.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on the new from around here. You may remember me from such posts as “The Terrors Of Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’ll talk about the wheelbarrow in a bit.

A couple of interesting things happened while we were away. There’s another sinkhole, though not as big as the one last summer (the guy I live with called the appropriate people), and the water in the canal was shut off after all the rain we got.
And then, I got to see the water start flowing again. That was very interesting indeed.
As I said in an earlier post, the guy I live with decided not to remove all the lilacs because it would be way too much work and there would nothing to replace them with, and, anyway, the lilacs are having a good year.
This is ‘Pocahontas’.
This is ‘Miss Ellen Willmott’.
This is ‘Assessipi’.
And, finally, ‘Victor Lemoine’, a heavily-scented double.
So those are the lilacs, not counting ‘Annabel’ which I already showed pictures of, and not counting the common purple one, of which we have several. The guy I live with bought those for $6.25 each about thirty years ago.
One of our neighbors came over and the guy I live with cut a bunch of lilac flowers for his wife.

The main thing going on her is the wind. I am, too. Super windy, chilly, with no rain. The guy I live with said that in some parts of Europe there are winds that can drive people nuts, and now we understand that.
We were awakened at 3:16 (precisely) two mornings ago by the wind. Very annoying.
One of the fake hornet’s nests blew away but the guy I live with retrieved it. They make a very strange sound rocking back and forth in the wind.

Speaking of annoying things, remember how I said the guy I live with was digging out this aster-thing which was infuriating him? It’s back.
He said the roots must go down to the center of the earth.
I blush to think of the language I’ve been hearing, when it comes to digging out this plant. It’s coming up everywhere.
There are already issues with smooth brome (the grass that’s in the field behind our house) and bindweed, so this aster thing is just too much.

Since I’m on the subject of things being dug out, the reason that the wheelbarrow is out in the garden is because the guy I live with is digging out the path where the wheelbarrow is.
He moved it out of the way so I wouldn’t run into it at night.
All kinds of things have seeded into that path, where the bag and kneeling pad are, and he got tired of looking at it. The path will be gravel, like most of the other paths here.
The yellow leaves on the yucca need to be removed, too, because he said they’re unsightly.
(The white in the background is an arabis, if you wanted to know.)

Except for the wind, though, all of this is good, as far as I’m concerned, because I can sit out in the garden and watch him work, which is one of my favorite things to do.
He can’t work as much as he used to be able to, but it’s surprising how much he can get accomplished. He does miss his helper, his wife, at this time of year, especially. She loved to weed, but may not have enjoyed pulling out that aster thing.

So that’s our news.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me checking out the smooth brome growing on the side of the canal road. The grass really is everywhere around here. You can see that the other side of the road was sprayed, and I’m supposed to stay away from that side. I mostly do.

Until next time, then.