Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about our weekend. You may remember me from such posts as “Guarding The House”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m daydreaming in my Kitchen Fort, with the swamp cooler running.
It’s not as hot as it has been, though I guess this week won’t be cool, just not totally blazing hot. Or at least I hope it won’t.
The guy I live with said we’ve run out of sugar for the hummingbirds, which is mildly ironic since I understand they’re mostly leaving for the south right now. There was some complaining about having to go to the store.
I talked about the North American Monsoon in my last post, and there are a lot of hardy plants that would do well here, and serve the hummingbirds, like penstemons and agastaches, but they would need extra watering here, so that’s pretty much out of the question, unless it becomes necessary to install an irrigation system. The way things are going, it might be.
Still, Salvia darcyi is flowering now. It does need extra water now and then. You can tell just by looking at the leaves.
Very close by, is Hesperaloe campanulata. I showed a picture of this earlier, but I’m going to show one again, taken today, because we learned something.
This picture was taken at about ten in the morning.
The guy I live with read the monograph on the genus Hesperaloe, and it turns out that the flowers open at night, for pollination by bats or hawkmoths (we have both of those here), and then the next day, some time around noon, the flowers close into a tubular shape, for pollination by hummingbirds later that day.
Pretty cool, huh?
Both of these plants are native to Nuevo León in Mexico. That’s kind of cool, too.
Speaking of cool, but in a different sense, last weekend wasn’t very hot. We had a ninety percent chance of heavy rain this weekend and were under a flash flood watch; the guy I live with made sure the storm drain grate across the street was cleared a couple of days ago, and he pointed out the other, blocked grate to his neighbor, who cleaned that one out. You know, just in case.
It didn’t happen. This has been a theme this summer. Predictions of lots of rain, followed by nothing.
There was no heavy rain. He said he was “more or less disappointed”. More because he kind of liked the idea of a “tropical downpour”, but less because the idea of flooding is not very attractive.
The creek behind the house has flooded a couple of times since the guy I live with and his wife moved here, almost up to the fence in back, and one time the creek flowed over the canal and cut right through the bank on the north side. It was a real mess. They had to come in with equipment to repair that.
Other parts of the Denver metro area had heavy rain, and flooding.
But this did happen, on Saturday, and again on Sunday:
The guy I live with was content with that, even though he was hoping (and at the same time not hoping) for more.
We don’t get all day rain, or rain at night, or wake up to rain, or anything like that; the guy I live with said that used to happen here, a long time ago, but not any more.
So that was the last couple of days. There was a lot of scary thunder and I was glad that my Upstairs Fort felt so cozy and safe.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me in the newly-mowed and very green field.
Until next time, then.