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 talk about the endless loop. You may remember me from such posts as “Going With The Flow”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I was looking at the mail carrier, who brings us mail. I’m feeling fine, by the way.

This has been one of the few springs in which the lilacs didn’t freeze before they could flower. This is ‘Miss Ellen Willmott’.
It’s true that the flowers look fairly hideous when they turn brown. He removes them. There are a lot to remove, this year, but he bought a hedge trimmer which will make it easier.
The guy I live with planted the hedge of lilacs a long time ago and he’s kind of regretted it ever since, because he says these are mostly just “big green things” all year, especially if they don’t flower, and there was a time when he thought he might cut them all down, but he said that sounded like way too much work.
Lilacs will take pretty much total drought in summer, though the drooping leaves are kind of depressing to look at.

These are the male catkins of the cottonwood, Populus deltoides, growing along the canal.
The female catkins are green. So cottonwoods are dioecious; male and female flowers on separate plants. (The guy I live with said the words “male” and “female” don’t share the same etymology, even though it looks like they do.)
When the guy I live with and his wife moved into this house there was a cottonwood in the small front yard, which was completely ridiculous. He cut it down a year or two later.

It’s still very dry here even though we got snow last Friday. We’re 1.46 inches (37mm) below average for the water year which started last October.

The guy I live with said it feels like we’re stuck in an endless loop, weather-wise. We’ve been having the same weather every week for months on end now.
Granted, we’ve had a lot of beautiful days, when everyone else in the country was enduring rain or snow or whatever, but for gardeners, this hasn’t been so great.
Far too hot for this time of year, low humidity, wind with “fire weather” warnings (we have one this coming Wednesday, and I mentioned something like that in my last post), promises of rain or snow which only sometimes materialize, and then we’re back to the same thing, week after week after week.
He said it reminds him of the early work of Philip Glass, or the movie “Groundhog Day”, and not in a good way.

It’s true that he watches the same movie every night, and has the same thing for breakfast every day, just like I do, and I have the same thing for dinner every afternoon (with some extras), so we both like our routines, but this is weather we’re talking about, and you’d think there would be at least some change, aside from the five or so snowfalls we’ve had.

Anyway, what with all of this heat, sameness, dryness, windiness, and so on, there’s talk in our area about how to deal with drought and the watering restrictions that have been imposed.
The guy I live with says he’s not going to do anything differently. Most of the plants in our garden are prepared for this.
This is the clove currant, Ribes aureum. The flowers are scented of cloves, and the shrub doesn’t need any irrigation. (There are some lilac leaves in this picture.)
This is Fendlera rupicola, in bud.
Someone made up a common name for this: “cliff fendlerbush”.
The guy I live with says that name sounds like an Elvis impersonator in a 1970s nightclub.

And this is Berberis (Mahonia) fremontii. The guy I live with had a difficult time getting a good picture of this, as you can see.
There are two shrubs here, about thirty-five years old, and they’ve never been watered. The flowers are scented, sort of like chocolate. The leaves are horribly prickly, though rabbits eat the ones on the lower branches in a snowy winter, when the leaves have turned violet.

We have a lot of plants like that here, thanks to the guy I live with visiting (long-gone) local nurseries that offered such things, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was really into western native woody plants back then. There would be more but he killed a lot of them, trying to transplant them, when he should have left them alone.

So that’s my post for today. I suppose there aren’t many blogs where you get to read complaints about day after day of beautiful weather. This could be a first.
The guy I live with said he would rather be complaining about weeks of mist, drizzle, and rain, which he says we used to have at this time of year, back in the last century.
We purebred border collies certainly do like the idea of mist, drizzle, and rain.

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 a couple of things. You may remember me from such posts as “Winter In Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.This was taken a few days ago, while the guy I live with was gardening. I forget what I was looking at.
He was keeping an eye on me, because my tummy wasn’t feeling very well.

The guy I live with was hoping my tummy troubles would turn around, but events of late last Sunday night caused him to take me to the emergency vet; he said the anxiety he suffers from wouldn’t let him wait any longer. I was stuck with needles and stuff like that.
We got home at a quarter after two in the morning.
I had clostridium, as usual, but this was a pretty bad case of it.
So the next day the guy I live with went to my doctor and got some medicine. I’m lucky that he knows what to do. I’ve had this before, and I know from him talking about it that Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, got clostridium all the time.
As of today the guy I live with says it looks like I’m very much on the mend.
This was his view in the parking lot of my doctor’s office. He thought it was funny.
I was kind of put out that I have to have my antibiotic hidden in a piece of Brie, rather than my preferred Fromager d’Affinois or Délice de Bourgogne, but the guy I live with apologized and said the store he went to only had Brie. It’s still good though.

I behaved like my regular self through all of this; I got to chase the raccoon up a tree late one night. That was very enjoyable.

Well, the other thing is that we finally got a little relief from the fairly horrific drought we’re experiencing.
This is me, yesterday.
On my evening walk I was sure there was something in the creek, and tried to get the guy I live with to climb down into the creekbed, but it said it was too deep and he might fall. He’s a lot less limber than I am.
By the time I went on my morning walk the next day there was a lot of melting. We got about a quarter of an inch of water from this snow, which isn’t a lot, but the guy I live with said it’s better than nothing.
He said they’re talking about more rain and snow maybe this next weekend. He hopes there won’t be any “fire weather” warnings before that, but the way this fairly nightmarish past seven months have been, he wouldn’t be surprised. He said it’s a bit like knowing someone for a very long time who suddenly goes “off the deep end”. I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I do agree that nothing seems right with the weather, these days.
I guess we’ll see what happens.

Until next time, then.