the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about sundry things, but mostly about one thing. You may remember me from such posts as “Heavy Sighs”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s annoyingly hot, and it’s going to be annoyingly hot for some time now, which we both find annoying since they were talking about an “unusually wet monsoon season” even though Colorado doesn’t have a monsoonal flora like southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, west Texas, and states in northern Mexico do. We’ll still going along with the monsoon business but would rather have rain, like the word “monsoon” suggests, than a bunch of heat.

Even the resident bunny in the front garden would agree.
That’s one reason why the guy I live with got rid of the “stupid berm”. Bunnies like to lie there when it’s hot.

This cactus flower, on an echinocereus hybrid, is a metaphor for what’s about to happen.
Here’s another, less red one:
So you may be wondering about the title of today’s post.
The guy I live with decided to move some large, heavy, flat stones.  He said if you can’t get anything to grow in an area, just put a flat stone over it.
You won’t see such sophisticated gardening advice elsewhere, I bet.

I was a little concerned, because the guy I live with is pretty old, and he does, if you’ve been reading this blog closely, which is the only way to read it I think, have a tendency to injure himself.
It began with a previously-placed stone being moved “to a better place”
The guy I live with tried to impress me by telling me that the blade of this grub hoe is made from “Hitachi rail steel”, but I wasn’t really sure. You can see it’s easily holding up this very heavy stone.
I hung out in the shade by the back fence, not thinking about rail steel at all. I don’t even know what it is, and when the guy I live with started talking about things called “railroad tracks” my mind really wandered.
It wandered so much that I went back into the kitchen, where it’s cooler.

The guy I live with had looked all over the place for his pry bar, a large thing that’s really heavy and was in the garage when the guy I live with and his wife moved into this house forty years ago, but he finally found it, and did some prying. I hasten to add that in this case “prying” is a transitive verb.
Eventually another very heavy, flat stone was pried out of the ground (it was in a place where you couldn’t see it anyway, so moving it would be no loss to the grand design here), carefully placed on the dolly, and carefully moved to the back garden.
I came to look, too late to help.
My timing was of course perfect.

The soil here, according to the guy I live with, is “weird dust”, left over from the compost pile that’s been gone for over thirty years.
Since it’s dust, water doesn’t infiltrate it very readily at all, but it’s easy to dig in. Plants that need watering don’t grow well in this soil.

I spent a moment admiring the finished work, though I understood that the work wasn’t completely finished; there are more heavy flat stones to move.
That’s all I have for today. You can see that I have an expert knack for not being in the right place at the right time, where moving heavy objects is involved.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about this and that. You may remember me from such posts as “The Giant Ants”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s still green here, even though the sun kind of bleached out the photograph, or something. I’m still not fully versed on cameras so I don’t know exactly why it doesn’t look super green here, but it is definitely green.

We’re in a drought, but sort of not really, which is why I said it was still green. We’ve received about half an inch less than average precipitation for May, which the guy I live with said was acceptable, but we’re way down from average for the water year, so far, which is why they say we’re in a drought.
So most of the bulbs that would ordinarily flower in April didn’t. The guy I live with wasn’t as disappointed as you might think.

We’re also under watering restrictions, so the guy I live with waters with his fancy two-gallon Haws watering can.
You might be surprised at how heavy this can is when filled with two gallons of water. The guy I live with told me to post this picture so that when he goes for his annual physical he can show this to his doctor as proof that he gets exercise.

There are lots of plants in the garden that don’t need to be watered even if we’re in a drought, though the guy I live with said he read some articles that suggested that rainfall had the effect of changing the pH at the roots of certain plants, like cactus, and triggering the plants to flower.
He said the cactus might be flowering more profusely if we had had more rain recently.
Still, some are doing okay.
These are in the front garden.

Which leads me to the real subject of today’s post.
The guy I live with had some extra cactus, and if you remember that I said that empty space beyond the hesperaloe, in my post “Pink Asparagus” (the hesperaloe, by the way, has sent up a third flowering stalk), well, the guy I live with said he had a “brilliant plan” for that empty area.
I knew there was going to be trouble when I heard the words “brilliant plan”, but since I don’t go out into the front garden, except to go on my walks and stuff, I would just watch through the screen door.

But first there was work in the back yard: the north side of the sand pile had a lot of gravel just sitting there, so it was scraped up, shoveled into the wheelbarrow and then the guy I live with had to pull the wheelbarrow from behind the sand pile and over some rocks, out onto the north path.
At some point there was a moment when the guy I live with realized that if he didn’t have a good grip on the wheelbarrow handles when he was pulling it out from behind the sand pile he might fall backward and crack his skull, which sounded extremely counterproductive to me.
Eventually three wheelbarrow loads of gravel were moved to the front yard, through the garage, without scratching the car, and then there was this.
Pretty much just a pile of gravel. Or a berm, as he said it was. And bindweed, as you can see.
What was difficult for me to believe was the amount of thought that went into this. He told me it was going to look really good, and planted the cactus and some other things in the mound of gravel.
(That log is what’s left of an Arizona cypress that died some years ago. I guess no one is coming to get the yellow flag marking the gas line, but maybe someone will.)

A couple of days went by. We mostly worked in the back garden; I supervised, of course.
Then last night the guy I live with looked at me and said “That berm is the stupidest-looking thing I’ve ever seen.”
I didn’t say anything.

Today the guy I live with took the old square shovel, some tongs for the cactus, and another shovel, worked out in front for not very long, and this is the result. Best seen in person, maybe.
He looked at me watching him through the screen door and said, “First thought, worst thought.”
You can maybe sort of see where the flat area ends; the guy I live with said he was going to try to find some non-expensive “Hachita” blue grama seed and sow the seed in the flat area, after properly raking it. The little lawn here, which you can’t see, is blue grama.
Unfortunately both blue grama and buffalo grass seed are very expensive these days.

And that’s all I have for today. We’re still hoping for some decent rain.

Until next time, then.