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 to tell you about the last couple of days. You may remember me from such posts as “The Haiku”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I know I’m hard to see, but I’m there on the patio.

A few things have happened. The Agastache aurantiaca were planted, in partial shade to mimic a Madrean pine-oak woodland, and so far they haven’t withered to nothing. The orange flowers will be nice for the hummingbirds.
The soil around the magnificent rock work out in back got a top-dressing of pea gravel.
The guy I live with says he’s going to sow seeds of Oenothera caespitosa there. It will tolerate, in fact more than tolerate, the icky soil. It flowers at night with a nice lemon scent, and attracts the five-lined sphinx, Hyles lineata.
Only two of those moths flew into our kitchen this spring, which was way down from the usual number. The guy I live with catches them with a net, or with his hands, to put them back outside.

He’s extremely irked by the mess the squirrels are making, chewing on pine cones and dropping the remains on the flagstone.
I like chewing on pine cones too, so I can’t get irritated by this.
Anyway, those “pine droppings” make an excellent mulch.

It’s been hot; constantly hot. It’s supposed to be hot all next week, like over 90F (32C), with wind, again, which annoys the guy I live with to no end. He said he’s never seen so much wind since he moved here sixty-five years ago. And he’s never seen it this constantly hot.
But suddenly, last night, something was brewing. We could tell. And around ten p.m. this happened.

Two slow-moving storms in succession passed over our neighborhood. We got about two inches of rain (5cm); more than any other place in the Denver metro area, and more than anywhere along the Front Range.
There was so much water running down the street gutter that the very heavy trash tote was slowly being pushed down the street. It started to flood across the street.
I stayed in my Upstairs Fort because there was lots of scary thunder.

Some time after midnight I was able to go out, and then we went to bed.

The next day, the guy I live with looked at the wheelbarrow which he had left out in the garden because he’s doing more of this rock stuff.
It’s an old, old wheelbarrow. Not everything here is old, but a lot of things are, including the guy I live with.
He emptied the wheelbarrow onto my Private Lawn. He had a hard time keeping the water from seiching, which is a word I didn’t know. He said it was splashing back and forth, so, seiching.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me after inspecting the muddy water in the creek, and looking at the sad state of the green belt. Hopefully the rain will help improve that.

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 to talk about a few things, if we don’t pass out from the heat. You may remember me from such posts as “Roasting Again”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s hot again. Big surprise. The last decent rain we had was a month ago. It’s just nothing but hot, and the guy I live with is in a bad mood. He says this weather is very, very tiresome.

It’s also that time of year to see a lot of bats. He took this picture of the sunset a few evenings ago.
Then he stood at the back fence, watching for bats.
This is a bat. That little black speck. They fly very fast, and very erratically.
Now down to gardening business.
The guy I live with went on a rampage and dug up all the Stachys byzantina ‘Big Ears’, which is also known as ‘Helene von Stein’.
The plants were wilting and drying to a crisp.
The sedums are going to go, too. He says they’re “too ordinary”. We really try to be non-ordinary in the garden, because our modern lifestyle tends to be pretty ordinary, so it balances out.

Remember the berm? Before he got rid of it, the guy I live with planted a couple of agaves there (Agave parryi) and a hesperaloe he transplanted from elsewhere in the garden.
Rabbits started gnawing on them, so all the plants went back on the shelves.
You can see the one in the lower left pot was particularly gnawed on. The hesperaloe too.
The rest of the agaves have been sitting on the shelf ever since they were dug up from another part of the garden, earlier this year.

So far this is all regular gardening. Getting rid of plants that becoming boring, digging up plants to move them elsewhere, and so on.
But now, there are these plants. These are Monardella macrantha ‘Marian Sampson’. Mostly planted to entice hummingbirds.
The guy I live with has tried these plants on and off for several years now. They linger, and then die.
Everybody, or almost everybody, says these can be grown “dry”, which the guy I live with seriously doubted, since they’re in flower at this time of year. Those two things, “dry” and “flowering”, almost never mix. There are exceptions of course.

He looked at Calflora, the website for native plants of Calfornia. That site says the monardella flowers from June to October, in Southern California.
That of course made him wonder.
It turns out that the monardella is found in the Transverse and Peninsular Ranges, so he figured there’s more water there, and that the monardella must grow in places where it has access to water in summer.
It would be best on drip irrigation, but the guy I live with has two Haws two-gallon watering cans and has been carrying them around the garden watering new plants, of which there are about a dozen. The monardellas are in a half-whiskey barrel right next to the patio, in a little shade.

The next thing was a purchase of some Agastache aurantiaca, also for the hummingbirds.
He saw recommendations that these be watered about every two weeks. I could see him raise his eyebrows.
The leaves certainly don’t look like those of every-two-weeks plants.
True, plants like catnip have leaves like this. He was planning to plant them in pots, anyway, and so he did that.

To get more information, he looked at SEInet, the database for plants from Arizona and New Mexico, but they also have herbarium specimens from south of the border, and he found some specimens of Agastache aurantiaca from near Creel, Chihuahua, growing in Madrean pine-oak woodland.
So he looked up climate data for Creel. The record cold temperature is slightly colder than that of El Paso, where Agastache cana was first found, and that seems to be completely hardy, so hardiness probably isn’t an issue with aurantiaca.
But Creel receives an average of a foot of rain in July and August together.
He went out to look at the potted agastaches the next day and found they were completely wilted.
The guy I live with began to get Planter’s Remorse, a condition he’s afflicted with from time to time.

He thought and thought about this. Since he didn’t have a Madrean pine-oak woodland, he decided to unpot the plants and plant them in the garden in partial shade and water them, just for the hummingbirds. He didn’t expect, or really need, gigantic specimens like you can see in irrigated gardens; just some flowers.
The roots were already off to a good start, leaving the rootball, thanks to his Super Genius method.
The plants will be heavily mulched, maybe with dog hair according to the guy I live with, since there’s so much of it right now (don’t ask me where it’s coming from), and maybe, just maybe, the plants will survive, and maybe (etc.) they’ll survive the winter, too.

Okay, that’s really all I have for today. It was exhausting talking about all of this. A nice picture of the water in the canal might make up for it.

Until next time, then.