the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, Mani the uneasy border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about why I’m so uneasy. You may remember me from such posts as “Nature Is Icky”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I was staring at an owl in the honey locust. I barked at it, later. The guy I live with said not to bark at owls, but I like to. It eventually flew off. I could tell it was terrified of me.

It rained a little, yesterday. There was a downpour for a while, but I think we only got about 0.15 inches of rain. The guy I live with said that was better than nothing.
There were some bulbs in flower before that. The guy I live with said it was surprising that these were flowering despite only half an inch of rain in the last month.
This is Colchicum autumnale ‘Nancy Lindsay’. You can also see some cyclamen leaves.
This is Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Tilebarn Helena’.
And this is Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Corfu Red’. It’s actually redder than the picture suggests.
For some reason, there was a small pot of crocus corms in the “bulb frame”. These are Crocus tommasinianus. When a crocus flowers, that’s from the “mother corm”, and it produces “daughter corms”, or cormlets, which can take a long time to grow to flowering size, particularly in a very dry summer like we had. So you might think that the crocuses have died, when in fact the corms are taking their own sweet time to get larger.
These, at least, will come up and flower in the next couple of years, unlike some of the rare and expensive ones he got some years ago that either never came up to begin with, or flowered and then never came up again, because the “mother” corms died without producing cormlets.
He said that spending money on plants that die wasn’t his idea of fun.

A lot of gardening was done today. As has been happening, the guy I live with realized he’d made a couple of mistakes in choosing places for plants, so he spent a few hours moving five plants.
Then he planted two grasses, which took a few more hours because he had to fiddle with the roots.
Then he dug all the seakale, Crambe maritima, out of the garden, because he said the big blue-green leaves “looked stupid” in a bed of mostly smaller plants.
(In this case, he only bought one plant, but it spread, which he didn’t expect.)
You can see the crambe in this picture. All those big leaves on the left. This picture was taken yesterday, before it rained, and now the buffalo grass in the paths is a little greener.
The guy I live with admitted that the seakale was a very attractive plant, and very nice in flower and seed, but it didn’t belong there. He also said it would come back, from the huge roots it forms. But it’s gone for now.

So you may be wondering why I’ve put off talking about what’s made me so uneasy. That’s because it’s worth putting off.
Today, I overheard the guy I live with, on the street talking to some neighbors who were walking by.
They talked about the thing I don’t want to hear about. Or see. They said there was more than one.
Great. Just great. More than one. Two is more than one. So is three. So is a hundred.
I didn’t linger on my evening walk, that’s for sure.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, and here today to show you the three rocks. You may remember me from such posts as “The Flags”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You can see that more work was done here, yesterday; those three rocks. The guy I live with said the largest one weighed over 300 pounds. It took him quite a while to wrestle it onto the dolly with the pry bar and grub hoe. He moved so slowly, to avoid hurting himself, that transporting these three rocks, which were hidden under a bunch of Mahonia repens, took him all day.
He said the rocks “echo” the ones along the fence. I guess that makes sense. He said that one area (along the fence) with rocks and the other without any looked unbalanced.
He also said he’s going to sow buffalo grass and blue grama seeds in most of the bare soil you see here; you do that in spring or early summer. Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, showed the method of holding the seeds in place using burlap and landscape pins. I hear that it works pretty well.
The guy I live with says it’s also possible to do “dormant seeding”, later this year, but he’s never tried that, and since the seed is super expensive these days, he’s going to do it the regular way.
I’m kind of excited about all of this because it will mean my Private Lawn, which you can see there, will be almost doubled in size. I like my Private Lawn.

Today, the guy I live with stood and watched butterflies sipping nectar at the big rabbitbrush. This is a monarch. We hardly ever see these.

And, of course, it rained.
The guy I live with made his usual “joke” about failing to go to REI to buy a rubber raft for both of us. It was funny the first time.

Also, I got to try out the new path. You can see one of the three rocks in the distance. Trying out new paths means a lot to a purebred border collie.
I looked at the new grass that was planted where the firepit used to be, and the flagstone that needs to be leveled.
That one pole, a 4×4, with the elephant planter at its base, needs to be straightened, too. The guy I live with said the apple tree pushed it to the east, which is one reason why the fence eventually started to fall apart.And that brings me to the end of today’s post. It rained a little more while this post was being worked on, but nowhere near the amount of rain we’ve been hoping for.

Until next time, then.