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 bring you a short interlude featuring clouds. You may remember me from such posts as “The Filter (An Interlude)”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Checking things that need to be checked.
You can see how kind of disgraceful it looks when cool-season grasses start growing in the warm-season buffalo grass which is the main grass here. The guy I live with says “Whatever”. If it gets super dry this summer, which we hope it doesn’t, the green cool-season grasses will disappear.
It’s much cooler today but of course the overnight rain they promised didn’t happen and everything is still very dry.

On my evening walk a couple of days ago the guy I live with took a bunch of pictures of clouds, and I thought it would be nice to post these pictures.
The first two were taken looking to the west.
The rest were taken looking to the east.

This one was taken late at night. That’s the moon, if you didn’t know.

And that’s all I have for today. Clouds.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, and let you guess what movie is on the TV. A movie the guy I live with says he’s watched about forty-five times now, and is one of the best movies he’s ever seen, though he’s not what you would call a movie buff.

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 the heat. You may remember me from such posts as “The Heat Is On’, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m hot. This picture was taken yesterday and now I’m even hotter.

It’s 88 degrees F (31.1C), which the guy I live with says is totally insane for the first full day of spring. The humidity is six percent. There’s a cold front moving in, with wind, so we’re under yet another “fire danger” warning today.
Earlier this week the forecast was that this “cold front” (not very cold, really) would bring rain, but “they” took that away a couple of days ago.

This is no fun at all. It’s true that we’ve received 1.93 inches (49 mm) since the first of the year; the average is 2.16 inches (54.8mm) up to the end of March. But the guy I live with says that since October, November, and December were so dry that that’s factored ins, since the beginning of the water year starts on the first of October.

There’s no precipitation in the forecast and the guy I live with said he’d like three weeks of rain. He says that used to happen here in March, sometimes.

A couple of days ago the guy I live with noticed what looked like drops of water on the patio. He even saw a drop fall. He looked around and couldn’t find anything that would cause this.
He even looked under the sink to see if something was leaking. That was an unlikely place for water to get into the patio without getting the outside wall wet, but he looked anyway.
He decided to ignore it, and then yesterday he saw this.
He looked and looked again, and felt another drop.
It was from this:
A cut end of the grapevine next to the kitchen window.
The grapevine is dripping grape juice. This probably isn’t good for the grapevine.

The guy I live with posted this picture of a very-late flowering Galanthus woronowii.
There have been snowdrops in flower in our garden for 202 straight days now.
That says something about snowdrops, but more about what passed for a winter here.

Some years ago the guy I live with got various color forms of Corydalis solida, and they’ve seeded around, producing other colors.
Here are a couple of them.
And that’s our first full day of spring. Roastingly hot. No talk of gigantic blizzards, thunderstorms, gentle rain, anything resembling spring.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me showing what I do on a day like today.

Until next time, then.