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 nudiustertian events and their resolution. You may remember me from such posts as “One Continuous Mistake”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see the swamp cooler, there, behind the chair. I know where the action is.

The guy I live with is in a bad mood about the weather. It’s 91 degrees F (33C), with 17 percent humidity. It’s “supposed to rain”, and sure enough, we got a hundred drops.
The next week we’re supposed to have a heat wave. “What is it we’ve been having almost every day since last year?” Apparently 91 degrees or hotter almost every day in the last month isn’t a heat wave.

The word “nudiustertian”, which the guy I live with just learned, means “referring to the day before yesterday”, and today, the guy I live with, bothered by what he had done with the gravel the day before yesterday, undid all that he had done, and made it almost look like he hadn’t done anything.
The gravel is gone, except for a few peas here and there. It is called “pea gravel”, after all. It was spread on bare areas on the raised beds, and on the old paths.

I was relieved that the guy I live with came to his senses. Few people seem capable of that, these days.

The next thing, after he works on the final placement of the rocks you can see in the picture above, is the enclosure. The guy I live with says it’s a mess, with way too much vinca, and a bunch of plants suffering in the heat and drought. There are some happy lavenders, though. The guy I live with has ordered a bunch of lavenders maybe five times in the last ten years and then given most of them away. He’s going to order more, but this time, actually plant them in the enclosure, resisting the impulse to give them away.
He has a large mental list of plants he would rather have there than lavenders, but the plants on his list aren’t hardy here.

One more thing.
The guy I live with got a shipment of plants, mostly cactus for the front yard, from Cistus Nursery in Oregon, the night before last. The owner of the nursery was just here in the garden and I like him a lot, though I’ve met him before.
The shipment arrived late at night. The guy I live with put the plants on this shelf, and then watered them.
All of a sudden I saw a dark thing kind of slithering across the patio. It was very alarming.
The guy I live with made me go out and look, after he took this picture when the slithering had stopped. I thought it was a snake, but it was just water.

And that’s all I have for today. There’s no path now. And no snake slithering across the patio.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me on a different path; the canal road.

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 what we do in response to hot weather. You may remember me from such posts as “Unbelievably Roasting Hot”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m sensibly in my Kitchen Fort, with the swamp cooler blowing on me.

I’ve been sensibly lying in front of the swamp cooler in the kitchen, or the swamp cooler in the living room. At night, I sensibly lie in front of the air conditioner in the bedroom.
I spend most of the day sleeping, which is sensible.

Not the guy I live with. He says this is a perfect time to move gravel, rocks, and set flagstone.
Maybe the heat is affecting him. Or he’s thinking about all the fires and wants to concentrate on something.
He also said it’s going to be 90 degrees (32C) or hotter for the foreseeable future, and that the “weather cavalry”, the monsoon, may never show up, so why not move rocks?

I can think of plenty of good reasons not to move rocks.

The other day he dug up some flagstone in the front yard that was being hidden by vegetation and set it at the end of the path going to the shed. I talked about this in the last post, but here they are. One still hasn’t been set, as you can see.
The hose turned out not to be necessary on the Fourth of July.

He finally decided to spread gravel on the back path. The path is super muddy in the winter, because melting snow runs down it.
I thought the paths looked pretty good when they were dry, which is most of the time.
So he crawled under the hedge of New Mexican privet (Forestiera pubescens), scooped a bunch of gravel into two plastic buckets, dragged the buckets under the hedge to the path where the wheelbarrow was, and ultra-carefully poured the gravel into the wheelbarrow.

Now the path looks like this. The guy I live with admits it looks pretty awful, but assures me it won’t when he’s done with it. For one thing, it still has the fine whitish dust that “new” pea gravel has, and it will darken eventually, if it rains enough.
The empty area on my right will be left empty; that’s my space for observing comings and goings in the green belt.
He ordered some seeds of galleta, Hilaria jamesii, which can be sown now, and will be, bordering the path, here and there. The seeds sometimes have low viability so he ordered a bunch of seeds.
This is galleta.
Look how happy it is, especially compared to the hens and chicks in the dish. It’s more drought tolerant than blue grama or buffalo grass.

And, apparently, since a 90-degree day wouldn’t be complete without moving some heavy rocks, some heavy rocks were moved. The bunny-chewed part of the lawn doesn’t look as bad in real life, and as I said, the buffalo grass just grows right back.

So that’s all I have for today. It’s hot. I stay inside making sure the swamp cooler works properly, and the guy I live with moves flagstone, gravel, and rocks.

Until next time, then.