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 flagstone paths.
You may remember me from such posts as “Clearing The Path”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s become obvious by now that the ramp is falling apart, and needs to be replaced. The guy I live with says plywood is expensive but maybe he’ll find what he needs at not too exhorbitant a price.

They say that southern Colorado is supposed to get a massive amount of rain tomorrow, and that we might get some, but the guy I live with is dubious. In any case, he said it’s time to unhook the hoses, which were used to water new plants in the “way back” garden and the enclosure.

So today, without any talk about any creatures beginning with the letter B, the guy I live with suddenly decided to uncover all the flagstone in the path on the north side of the garden. He said that it was important for people to have something to do, and so he did something.
The layout of the flagstone was done by his wife, and they laid the flagstone together. I hear it was a lot of work.
The piece in the foreground needs to be repositioned; pine roots have caused it to heave.
That one piece in the lower right came from in back, somewhere, and needs to be set into the ground.
He still isn’t sure what to do with that area where the flagstone is; maybe just plant some native grasses.
The dwarf conifer in the blue pot dried out too much and was badly damaged, which made the guy I live with unhappy. He can be pretty self-critical.
There’s an issue here: that little pine in the green pot, Pinus flexilis ‘Blackfoot’, has rooted into the ground, and it needs to be planted in the garden. That will be quite a bit of work.So that’s it for today. The path is now twice as wide. I know I’ll appreciate it; I do a lot of running on this path.

Until next time, then.

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.