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 yet another strange burst of energy. You may remember me from such posts as “Unhappy Landings”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is what I did for most of the day. It was too hot for me.

It wasn’t too hot for the guy I live with, and he told me he was tired of looking at all the “stupid vinca” and Brunnera macrophylla in the shade garden under the Wasatch or canyon maples, Acer grandidentatum.
So out he went. I could hear all the spading and hacking from my vantage point.

The guy I live with said some people claim Brunnera macrophylla is a good plant for “dry shade”. This is what it looks like in dry shade.
The late Henry Mitchell said something like “If you have to water it, why call it dry shade?”, and this is what the guy I live with thinks, too.
If someone printed a list of plants for “dry shade”, the guy I live with with say no to almost all of them. It’s true, as Olivier Filippi said in one of his excellent books, “everyone’s drought is different”, but the guy I live with said he only knows about the conditions in our garden, and would say no. Yes to Mahonia repens, yes to ivy (which he doesn’t want).
I think the brunnera is all gone now. The guy I live with said it’s hard to tell if it’s really all gone, because some will appear next spring and look fine, then collapse like this when it gets dry.

There should have been pictures of this garden before all the work started, but this is what it looks like now. Pretty empty.
Aside from the maples, there’s Rubus ‘Benenden’, which is a cross between our native Rubus deliciosus and the Mexican species R. trilobus. As Trees and Shrubs Online says, after it flowers “one has a large, dull shrub for the rest of the year”, but that doesn’t bother the guy I live with. The lilacs here are duller.
And there are the three geraniums, which are holding their own in this extremely dry soil, made drier by the maples, no doubt.
There’s Geranium × magnificum, or something similar, which is sort of barely alive, but still alive instead of dead.
And Geranium renardii.
And, finally, Geranium macrorrhizum, which is doing the best of the three. The guy I live with likes the smell of the leaves, a lot.
And that’s my short post about the three geraniums. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but I know the guy I live with has been as happy working out in the back garden as I’ve been lying in front of the swamp cooler.
We make a good, complementary team.

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 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.