the miserable gardener

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 news from the garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Day Of The Scorpiris”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically sun-drenched pose.
They say we may get some rain this weekend, which will be nice because April has been so dry.
It snowed again a few days ago, which is why I didn’t post then. It didn’t freeze the night it snowed, and the snow was all gone by the end of the next day.

There are plants in flower, which may not come as much of a surprise.
This is a groundcover-type manzanita. It’s been in the front yard for many years and has never been watered.
The guy I live with says it may be heavy-handed of me to show a picture of the apple tree next, since “manzanita” is Spanish for “little apple” (referring to the fruit), but this is a regular apple tree and no relation to species in the genus Arctostaphylos, which are related to rhododendrons, blueberries, heathers, and plants like that.
Anyway, the apple tree.
The apple tree was the first thing planted here. There was a row of them in the back yard; they all died but this one. The guy I live with said he should have taken that as a sign.

The juno irises are flowering, though not as spectacularly as in some years, because it’s been so dry. Junos are in the Subgenus Scorpiris, and some botanists place them in their own genus, Juno.
There are a lot of species and the guy I live with said he wants them all, except for one which isn’t hardy because it grows on, like, Sicily or some place like that.
They’re mostly not at all easy to acquire.

We worked in the garden today, even though there was an annoying, nasty chemical smell from next door. The guy I live with got a sore throat.
But the most annoying thing, and I could tell that this was super annoying by the language used, was the amount of effort digging out roots of this plant he bought at a plant sale some years ago.
The roots are thick as a pencil and they go down deep into the ground. The plant spread everywhere and the guy I live with gets mad just looking at the new shoots.
The guy I live with said this has happened before, and more than once; planting something that immediately displayed a tendency to take over the whole garden.
He dug and dug and dug, and got at least a few of the roots. He said this thing is even worse than smooth brome, which is saying something, believe me.
You can see some junos in the background there.
The cages are for crocuses, so that bunnies won’t mow down the leaves.
This will all have to be redone, with a new gravel mulch.

So that’s our news for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me lying on the couch, listening to a lecture about me “beflortling” the couch. He says the word “beflortle” means to totally rearrange something that was all arranged before, but I think it’s a made-up word.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today, after a longish absence, to bring you up to date on all the happenings here. You may remember me from such similar-themed posts as “Frightful Times”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically sun-drenched pose.
If it looks like things here are becoming greener, well, they are.
Even the buffalo grass is turning green.
You may have to look closely to see the green.
Some people around here don’t like native dryland grasses because it takes so long for them to turn green in the spring, and this year the grass (this is my Private Lawn) took longer than usual to turn green, but the buffalo grass needs hardly any water during the summer, which makes it excellent for a dry climate like ours.
The guy I live with said he might plant some bulbs in the grass this fall, because for some mysterious reason bulbs really like growing in buffalo grass. By the time the bulb foliage has died down, the lawn is ready to be mowed.
You only mow buffalo grass once or twice a summer, and after it’s mowed, it does need to be watered, a little, especially in hot weather.

Since I mentioned the weather, I should tell you about our scary weekend. In fact it was absolutely terrifying.
It started to get windy Friday before last. I mean super windy.

Then on Saturday it got extra super windy. The wind was gusting to about 70 mph (112 kph). The guy I live with attached a leash on me so I could go out and tinkle and know that he was close by me.
The wind blew and blew all night long, and then on Sunday, too.
This was all accompanied by “fire danger” warnings, though the guy I live with explained to me that the “forecast area” included most of eastern Colorado, which is a very big place; the Kansas border is about 180 miles (289 km) east of us, and most of that part of Colorado has had very little precipitation in the last couple of months.
Still, he made sure our bags were packed, which of course added to the stress.

I got to go see a huge blue spruce (Picea pungens) that was blown over by the wind, a block from my house. It looked scary; it had fallen on a garage.

This month has been pretty dry, which the guy I live with said was disappointing, but the forecast for next week calls for rain, which hopefully we’ll get. There might be some scary thunder but I can deal with that, since I have three forts in my house now. The guy I live with said that most dogs only have one fort. And some have none at all.

So that’s the scariness.

Meanwhile, Viburnum farreri is flowering.
The guy I live with and his wife would make pilgrimages to Denver Botanic Gardens to see this in flower in December, January, or February, but this has been a very long, strange winter, and times have changed since they made those pilgrimages, so he’s happy to see it in flower, even this late in the year.
The flowers are strongly scented of heliotrope.
He said that when he went to Toronto, one year, the viburnum was in flower in April, which he thought was strange, since he considers this a winter-flowering shrub, but it’s doing this here, this year, because of how our winters have been, lately.

I’m also going to show pictures of some color forms of Corydalis solida, which are seedlings from the tubers he planted which he ordered from nurseries in the Baltic states some years ago. He posted these on Facebook but I might as well post them here, too.
The plants are crossing and seeding like crazy.

Oh, one other thing. See this?
I think you know what this looks like, and you would be right.
It’s a fake hornet’s nest. The guy I live with bought some of these after seeing some hanging around his neighbors’ house.
Apparently hornets and yellowjackets see these, and go elsewhere to build nests. The guy I live with talked to his neighbor and his neighbor said he was pretty certain that they worked.
Two have been hung under the eaves on the front of our house. One blew away during all the wind but he was able to find it and reattach it.

That’s all I have for today. Kind of a lot, I guess.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, sitting next to the decrepit dog ramp, with a hope for some rain next week.

Until next time, then.