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 not much of anything. You may remember me from such posts as “The Broken Cockroach”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see how busy I am in this picture.

They mowed the green belt the other day, which made the guy I live with angry. He says that since it doesn’t seem to be able to rain here for more than a few minutes every day, the mowed grass will dry out faster than it would have if they’d left it alone.
They also mowed the wildflowers growing happily along the canal road last month, but the plants came back, and decided to flower despite having been mowed almost to the ground.
Here I am walking next to them. These are Grindelia squarrosa.
The new electrical line was installed a couple of days ago, and now we’re waiting for the power company to come and splice the new wires into the transformer in our back yard, so we have this, right now.
The buffalo grass looks worse in this picture than it actually is, but it has had a rough summer. To add insult to injury, it got painted on. The paint will wash off, eventually.
How it’s going to wash off is another story, since all the rain seems to be falling east of us.
Anyway, with all this utility locating, we have a lot of extra flags. No one seems interested in getting the flags back, so the guy I live with makes use of them: marking new plants so he doesn’t forget to water.
In this picture, it’s just the green flag. The red one in the lower left marks our phone line.
That wood was laid by the guy I live with’s wife; the path was called “Pooka’s Shortcut”, because Pooka, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, didn’t want to run all the way around the raised bed in the middle of the picture, and so he made this shortcut out to the back fence.
The guy I live with read something about how planting in hot summers isn’t the best for plants, but that hasn’t stopped him.
Quite a few are in the enclosure.
That’s why there’s a hose here, just like there’s a hose by the electrical transformer, for the plants in the back garden.
I was probably walking out to the place where I can see almost anything that goes on in the green belt.
As I’ve said before, this has always been an open place in the back garden, for purebred border collies to survey stuff.
The sedums are ‘Matrona’ and ‘Autumn Joy’, and are going to my doctor’s office, because there are empty spaces in the garden there. The sedums haven’t been watered at all this summer.

There are some plants in flower here. This is Colchicum bivonae.
The guy I live with gave away a whole bunch of colchicums, but he didn’t give them all away. The summer was so dry that most of the corms didn’t reach flowering size.
He said it was stupid to have a small part of the garden just filled with colchicums and labels, instead of being fully integrated into the garden, so those were the ones that went.
Just like it was stupid to have a whole bunch of snowdrops in pots plunged into the garden in one place, so all of those snowdrops, a total of eighteen pots, went to the botanic gardens last week. There are still lots of snowdrops here.

I was going to say that I didn’t have anything else to say, but the guy I live with reminded me that we should talk about the bear, even though I didn’t want to.
He said that a neighbor said that the bear has been sleeping in a tree in another neighbor’s back yard.
Just saying this gives me the willies, and it isn’t even Halloween yet. Thinking about a bear sleeping in a tree anywhere near me doesn’t seem right at all. The guy I live with said that no way would we walk down the green belt in the direction of that tree, so at least that makes me feel better.

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 heroic efforts. You may remember me from such posts as “Crickets And Coyotes”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It was pretty hot today. The guy I live with said that “they” claimed it was the last hot day of the year, and he said they should quit predicting stuff like that.

I seem to have to reiterate my position that, as a purebred border collie, I don’t like weird things happening, but they seem to keep happening, as though my position on this means nothing to the cosmos. (The guy I live with was about to explain this to me but I didn’t want to hear what he had to say.)
Yesterday a young guy came to the front door, to locate the phone line in the back yard, because the buried electrical line that went out some months ago is going to be replaced.
When he was done, he told the guy I live with that there was a goose in our yard.
There was. I only looked at it once. We felt bad for the goose. The guy I live with checked on the internet to see what to do, but the division of wildlife was closed over the weekend, so maybe they’ll come out tomorrow, because if the goose was sick, they need to know.
It had to be moved, so the guy I live with did that. And moved to a place where nothing else might find it interesting.

Because, on our morning walk today, we saw a very large brown pile. I only looked at that, too. The guy I live with used the “b word” but I stopped listening. I could tell who did that by all the unusual scents I noticed before we got to the pile.
Later in the day, the guy I live with went out to the path and moved the pile with the shovel he’s used for gardening since he was pretty little, so no one, meaning the guy I live with, would accidentally step in it. That was a really heroic thing to do. At least he said it was.
This is the shovel: a Tool, Entrenching, Model 1945, which saw action in Korea.
The shovel was issued to his father, so it’s even older than the guy I live with. Like an antique. It’s now frozen in place; the collar or whatever that you turn no longer turns. You can see how much use it’s had.
The little metal wire is what he uses to “feather” roots with.

Some work was done in the garden today. Maybe this picture shows how hot it was. It looks hot to me.
There’s a little rabbitbrush in flower. The purple-leafed Prunus andersonii has done very well without any watering all this hot, hot summer, and the guy I live with heard that it might be introduced into cultivation. Cuttings from this little tree were taken a couple of years ago. It does much better, drought-wise, than one of its putative parents, Prunus × cistena.
Some asters are in flower. This is Symphyotrichum oblongifolium; very similar to Claude Barr’s ‘Dream of Beauty’.
The guy I live with removed a bunch of these asters because they do seed around like crazy, but there will be more next year. Most of them have purple flowers.

Oh, I mentioned work. While I lay on the patio, supervising, the guy I live with worked in the ninety degree heat, slathered with sunblock, to widen the path on the north side of the garden, because plants were moving into it and they got stepped on every time either of us walked down the path.
He dug up plants, planted other plants, scraped up gravel from behind the sand pile, strewed the gravel on the path where some was missing, raked it, and this is the “heroic” result.
It’s true, as the guy I live with conceded, that that green fence is unsightly beyond belief, but I’m a purebred border collie with a “high prey drive”, though maybe less so as I get older, and the fence is to protect the plants in case I get tempted to go in there to chase the squirrels that need to be chased.
The Havahart trap is just there, to pretend that the guy I live with has some control over the rabbits, when in fact he has none.
The red is a phone-cable locating flag.

Back to the fence for a minute, he said he would much rather have this, a single loop (or is it a double?) woven wire fence. This one is very old.
You can still get fencing like this, he said, but apparently not in the height he would want (about two feet), and it’s extremely expensive.
There may be some in an antique shop somewhere in town, but that would involve a lot of looking. There used to be a place not too far away, in Morrison, where the guy I live with and his wife would go a lot, but it’s gone now.

That’s all I have for today. It rained again, for a little while, but not enough maybe to even measure, like it has every day for at least a week.
The guy I live with started one of those “cosmos” lectures but once again I quickly lost interest. There are things to smell.

Until next time, then.