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 bring you up to date on recent things. You may remember me from such posts as “Thank You, Calm Again”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I do go outside sometimes, if you were starting to worry, but not all that much since it’s hot, except to chase squirrels off the hummingbird feeder, and to bark at squirrels, too. And of course to go on walks.
It’s still roasting hot, though the guy I live with said he saw some raindrops today.

Here’s proof that I go outside. There was some action in the green belt, and I have a special main place to stand and challenge whatever is walking out there.
Nothing has ever been planted here, because we purebred border collies like to see stuff.
You can see that they mowed right up to our back fence. The guy I live with has an opinion about mowing healthy grass when it’s been so dry. The healthy green grass is now brown and dry, thanks to being mowed.

Speaking of grass, the guy I live with has been extra-solicitous of the buffalo grass that’s my Private Lawn. He waters it by hand, at night.
The grass is also being mowed, which kind of counteracts the watering, but buffalo grass does respond positively to the combination of watering and mowing.
You can see the lawnmower in this picture, pretty close to the metal chairs that no one sits on, these days.
It’s a little lawnmower, and works for free.
But that’s why there are cages around all the newly-planted grasses.

You can also see a change to the mulch in the upper right-hand corner. The guy I live with said that brown “compost” mulch (it’s mostly wood chips) was hideous, and he wanted to cover it.
He said something about the late Jerry Morris recommending “squirrel cash” as a mulch, and I couldn’t figure out why squirrels had money and I don’t (though I also don’t need money, since all of my needs are met), but the guy I live with said no, squirrel cache.
Like the squirrels here sit up in the pine tree, chewing pine cones (I like to chew pine cones too), and dropping lots of pieces on the ground, well, the guy I live with said that way up in the mountains, squirrels store, or cache, pine cones and stuff in big piles called middens, so it would really be more correct to say “squirrel middens”, but he said Jerry called it squirrel cache, and that’s fine.

The guy I live with and his wife once walked through a forest and saw an enormous squirrel midden; big piles of chewed pine cones at the base of pine trees. He said it was quite something to see. The actual cache would be the pine cones stored inside the midden.
It would probably be best to get pine cone pieces from an old midden, and with permission, and it would involve lots of driving and scooping, so the guy I live with used pine needles instead.
The reason these pine needles are darker than regular pine needles is that they were stored in a plastic trash can that had water at the bottom. The guy I live with had poured water into the trash can.
What happens, in a year or so, is that the wet pine needles decompose, at least to a degree, and they make a pretty nice mulch. Not so dry and spiky, if you know what I mean.
A stinky mulch, though. The guy I live with poured the water out, and it stank really badly, but the guy I live with said it smelled just like horse manure. I’ve seen horses but don’t know anything about horse manure. It sounds interesting.

On the right in this picture, the sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula) seed the guy I live with sprinkled there a little while ago is already germinating. A big cage will have to be put there.
This bed is going to be mostly grasses, because the guy I live with likes grasses, and I’m certainly not against them.

Okay, whew, that was a lot of talking about mulch and grass.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, once again enjoying the benefits of our modern lifestyle: the swamp cooler.

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 yet another mistake that had to be made right. You may remember me from such posts as “How To Avoid Gardening”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I’m sure you would agree I look like I need to have a biscuit, and eat it on the couch, with the swamp cooler blowing nice cool air on me.
I got one, of course.

It’s really dry here. I mean like super dry; we’ve received about a quarter inch (6.35 mm) of rain since we had that downpour the last week of June. And it’s been over 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2 C) almost every day since like forever.
We did have two cooler days this week, and even cooler nights, which was very nice, but we have a “heat advisory” again for tomorrow and the next day.

Even so, the green belt mostly looks very green.
The guy I live with thinks that the grass in the upper right is brown because the soil is different there; not “creek-bottom loam” but something that the rain didn’t infiltrate very well, like clay.

A couple of days ago the guy I live with left me to go out to lunch with his friend. They also went to a little nursery. The guy I live with saw this sign.
I can’t say exactly what happened when he saw that sign, but maybe you can use your powers of deduction.
Yes, again.

He didn’t find any Hesperaloe parviflora there; if he had, he would have bought some because it’s the only plant in flower for the hummingbirds right now. (See my post “Pink Asparagus”.)
In fact we disturbed a male broad-tailed hummingbird visiting the hesperaloe when we came home from my evening walk.
The hummingbird got very annoyed and sat on an oak branch waiting for us to go into the house so he could go about his business.So about the title of today’s post. It really should be “things undone and done”, but the guy I live with said that sounded clunky.

I’ll take you out into the “way back” garden to show you what happened.
On our way out, let’s look at the enclosure. More work has been done.
There was someone out in the green belt so I had to check that first. There are several places with no plants against the fence, for purebred border collies to look out into the green belt to make sure everything is okay.
Then I went and looked out, standing on my Private Lawn, which is very dry and crispy right now.
(Those posts are perches for Great Horned Owls, if you didn’t know. Owls have perched on them, and it’s scary to walk back here and see a large owl looking at me. The bamboo stakes are for plants, which of course are going to be moved later.)
Anyway, yesterday evening, the guy I live with suddenly realized he had made a “terrible mistake” that had to be corrected as soon as possible.
I didn’t get it, but he said that it felt all wrong. If you saw my post “Moving The Sacatons”, you know that he moved these eventually-huge grasses to the other side (the east side) of my Private Lawn.
He said these big grasses should be on the west side of the lawn, by the fence, where they were first planted. Since the fence is chain link, and there’s the open green belt behind that, this is where the grasses belong.
They were moved back this morning, and watered.
The guy I live with said the rocks are there because he couldn’t figure out what else to plant there, though he did sow some seeds of galleta, Hilaria jamesii. (This is the time to sow seeds of that grass.)

And on the other side now, two plants of Mirabilis multiflora, some grasses, and then some seeds of more grasses, Ratibida columnifera, and other things were sown, which is the right time to sow these, too.
The cages are to protect the new plants from bunnies. (Those green plants behind the cages are Sedum ‘Matrona’ which he’s been trying to give away.)
The guy I live with sprinkled some “compost” (mostly wood chips) on the newly-sown and watered seed; he said that all that brown is very unsightly. Hopefully we’ll get some rain next week–the guy I live with isn’t counting on it–and then the buffalo grass will revive quickly and start moving into that brown area, too.  There isn’t all that much time for the grass to revive this year, though, if it doesn’t rain in the next couple of weeks.
The shriveled plant in the center is Centaurea orientalis, which he’ll see if he can transplant or give away.

And that’s it. Another mistake rectified, much to my relief, since I don’t have to listen to the cries of horror. The guy I live with said that probably no one would know, and I certainly won’t tell anyone.

Until next time, then.