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 describe more work done in our garden.  You may remember me from such posts as “The Project”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
So today I’m going to talk about yet more work done in the garden. The guy I live with has been working like crazy, just like he did when he painted the inside of the house earlier this year.
When he gets this sort of bee in his bonnet it’s almost all he can think of, but I know he enjoys doing this work, some of which he’s planned to do for a few years.

The rock wall in the sandpile is almost finished. As I said earlier, it’s hard to see. But it’s there. (That one grayish rock isn’t part of the wall.)
Rabbits got in here and messed around with the sand and gravel near the cactus at lower left, which is why they look disheveled.
This bed was originally for special bulbs, but the top of the bed got too dry, and everything died. He planted some young agaves here.

I’m surprised that the bed hasn’t been ripped apart, because the guy I live with now has very strong opinions about garden design, and especially about the way our garden should look.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago the guy I live with purchased a single Salvia greggii and jammed it into the garden just to make the hummingbirds happy.
Then it rained, and as I showed in my last post, all the salvias burst into flower, so this one salvia in the middle of the garden looked kind of dumb.
Yesterday, the guy I live with noticed the plant had wilted, and one more day of that would have been the end of it. The rain didn’t help it at all.
He dug it up; this is what the root ball looked like.
Bone dry. The guy I live with has repeatedly shown what he does what gross peat-mossy root balls like this, how quickly peat moss dries out in our garden, and he said it served him right for just planting this salvia.
He soaked the root ball in water, “feathered” the roots by pulling them apart with a little steel tool, and within an hour it looked like this:
It was planted in the enclosure.

If he had purchased this two months earlier, it would have been given the “super genius” treatment, to allow the roots to leave the root ball, but at this time of year it’s more practical to “feather” the roots and get the plant into the ground, with these salvias.

He also got seven Salvia greggii ‘Wild Thing’ at a local nursery.
He soaked the roots,”feathered” them as much as possible, walked the thirty-nine steps from the patio to the enclosure, and planted them there.
Maybe you can’t see them.
They’re in these cages. The salvias have “irritatingly” brittle branches so these changes are to prevent the guy I live with from tripping over them and breaking the branches.
I know this doesn’t look like much.

Speaking of branches, the person at the nursery said there was one they wouldn’t get if they bought these plants, but the guy I live with pointed to the base of the plant.
Those leaves at the base of the plant are very important for plants adapted to monsoonal rainfall which might not be hardy here; the basal leaves overwinter and generally insure that plants like this will make it through the winter.

The salvias will need to be watered a lot, before it gets cold (if it does). Then they can be left on their own. They flower in spring, but then don’t flower again unless it rains, which is okay with the guy I live with, though of course an extravagant display at this time of year is excellent, and the hummingbirds would agree.
It did rain here today, a little. The guy I live with wanted more.
And that’s it for today.

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 something I don’t really understand, as well as some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Another Weird Day”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.We’ve only gotten a teeny bit of rain every day, which is disappointing, but the guy I live with said “Whatever”.

There have been a number of crises here lately. The guy I live with decided not to focus so much on bulbs any more, and gave away a whole bunch of colchicums to the botanic gardens. He also decided not to use the DSLR cameras and the software that ties up our internet for hours, and plans to sell the cameras or trade them in for something.
The biggest crisis, though, had something to do with things like this:
All I know is that this is a “Western Electric 2500 desk set”. The “handset cord” wore out so it was replaced with one of a different color.

I know the guy I live with would check this thing hanging on the wall, which he said was “a cheap, non-Western-Electric phone” for messages, even though there was rarely a message, and it was often for someone who doesn’t live here.
No one ever called him on that phone after his wife died.
He was notified that “plain old telephone service”, or “POTS” as they called it when he worked for the phone company, was going away. There was a choice between paying extra for a box, and keeping the phone number he’s had for forty years, or having the phone disconnected, which he decided to have done.

That was a big change, and a big deal for him, but he said that, like a lot of other things, it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. He met his wife working for the phone company. He would call her from work on that phone number. And now there’s no dial tone on that phone.

Even with all that, the guy I live with has been working in the garden.
He took this picture of the enclosure a couple of mornings ago.
And my Private Lawn is looking pretty good, unlike most lawns around here.
Another good rain would make the grass really green and lush. He said he might buy more buffalo grass seed next spring, even though it’s expensive, to fill in that triangular area at the end of the lawn, where the red bucket is, and maybe some of the path, too, though that will be difficult with both of us walking there all the time.

The guy I live with also said that they’re talking about banning lawn watering after October this year, but buffalo grass doesn’t need to be watered then, because it goes dormant.

The only other thing to talk about is that the rain we had a couple of weeks ago triggered Salvia greggii into flowering.
So the hummingbirds, after being more or less deprived of flowers all summer, now have something to check out.

That’s pretty much all for today.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, enjoying my morning walk.

Until next time, then.