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 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 th 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.

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 sundry things, but mostly about one thing. You may remember me from such posts as “Heavy Sighs”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s annoyingly hot, and it’s going to be annoyingly hot for some time now, which we both find annoying since they were talking about an “unusually wet monsoon season” even though Colorado doesn’t have a monsoonal flora like southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, west Texas, and states in northern Mexico do. We’ll still going along with the monsoon business but would rather have rain, like the word “monsoon” suggests, than a bunch of heat.

Even the resident bunny in the front garden would agree.
That’s one reason why the guy I live with got rid of the “stupid berm”. Bunnies like to lie there when it’s hot.

This cactus flower, on an echinocereus hybrid, is a metaphor for what’s about to happen.
Here’s another, less red one:
So you may be wondering about the title of today’s post.
The guy I live with decided to move some large, heavy, flat stones.  He said if you can’t get anything to grow in an area, just put a flat stone over it.
You won’t see such sophisticated gardening advice elsewhere, I bet.

I was a little concerned, because the guy I live with is pretty old, and he does, if you’ve been reading this blog closely, which is the only way to read it I think, have a tendency to injure himself.
It began with a previously-placed stone being moved “to a better place”
The guy I live with tried to impress me by telling me that the blade of this grub hoe is made from “Hitachi rail steel”, but I wasn’t really sure. You can see it’s easily holding up this very heavy stone.
I hung out in the shade by the back fence, not thinking about rail steel at all. I don’t even know what it is, and when the guy I live with started talking about things called “railroad tracks” my mind really wandered.
It wandered so much that I went back into the kitchen, where it’s cooler.

The guy I live with had looked all over the place for his pry bar, a large thing that’s really heavy and was in the garage when the guy I live with and his wife moved into this house forty years ago, but he finally found it, and did some prying. I hasten to add that in this case “prying” is a transitive verb.
Eventually another very heavy, flat stone was pried out of the ground (it was in a place where you couldn’t see it anyway, so moving it would be no loss to the grand design here), carefully placed on the dolly, and carefully moved to the back garden.
I came to look, too late to help.
My timing was of course perfect.

The soil here, according to the guy I live with, is “weird dust”, left over from the compost pile that’s been gone for over thirty years.
Since it’s dust, water doesn’t infiltrate it very readily at all, but it’s easy to dig in. Plants that need watering don’t grow well in this soil.

I spent a moment admiring the finished work, though I understood that the work wasn’t completely finished; there are more heavy flat stones to move.
That’s all I have for today. You can see that I have an expert knack for not being in the right place at the right time, where moving heavy objects is involved.

Until next time, then.