Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest and greatest news from our garden. You may remember me from such great posts as “Some Real Gardening” and “A Day At The Opera”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. “By the refrigerator, as usual” says the guy I live with, which, though true, could be left unsaid. 
The weather here has been pretty interesting. Yesterday it started to rain, then it snowed, then we had graupel, then the sun came out, then it snowed again, then rained. It rained last night some, too. At this time of year our weather is kind of like what it’s like in the mountains in June.
The guy I live with says that this is excellent weather for getting plants in the mail, because they usually have to adjust to the low humidity and intense sunlight here, and cool damp weather is perfect for acclimation.
Here are some salvias from Flowers by the Sea. (By the way, the guy I live with says that dishpans and plastic jugs are indispensable for serious gardening.)
Then, also today, a shipment from Beaver Creek Greenhouses, sitting in the wooden flat.
This is how they’re packed.
So that was that. He has more plants to plant, and even has places for most of them. And a lot of extra rubber bands.
Not much has happened, gardening-wise, in the last couple of days because the garden is so damp from the snow, rain, and graupel, but there are a lot of things blooming. Here are some Central Asian onions that I’m supposed to show you, just so I get credit for showing plant pictures. The first one isn’t, like, hugely in focus, but the guy I live with says to pretend that it is.
Allium winklerianum
Allium litwinowii, not fully open
Allium pseudoserawschanicum
On my walk yesterday, we were both really yelled at by a robin, and discovered this nest in the Juniperus monosperma. There’s a nest in the back yard, too. 
I bet you’re wondering, if you made it down this far, what all the bunny business in the title of tonight’s post is, and so now I’ll tell you.
The guy I live with was out on the patio yesterday afternoon and thought he saw “a really big mouse”. It wasn’t a mouse.
The guy I live with, who can be extremely eloquent when the need arises, said the bunny was “so little, it was little”. It was indeed very little. Here it is on the pea gravel path, being extra little. 
The bunnies, which sneak into the yard, eat plants and make the guy I live with “hopping mad” (get it?), but he said this one was pretty cute. I guess I would agree.
That’s pretty much it for today. They say it’s supposed to rain for the next few days, so I suppose there will be a lot of furious planting and stuff tomorrow. I might have to rest up for that.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
That is mighty cute bunny. I’d rather have bunnies than raccoons – I can hear them fighting in the evening. We’ve had bursts of rain interspersed with with weather. Sidewalk cafes have opened.
Back when there was a grapevine here, I mean a culinary kind, over the patio cover, there used to be raccoons here all the time, stuffing themselves with grapes, and leaving purple skins all over the patio in the morning. The grapevine died mysteriously before I showed up here, but the guy I live with told me stories about it, and my Uncle Pooka looking up at the raccoon bellies sticking through the lattice of the patio cover. The baby bunny really is pretty cute. Not quite up to the level of me when I was that little, but pretty close. I like the idea of sidewalk cafes. I like the idea of anything having to do with food.
T’is the season for cute, wittle wabbits. Sorry, family tradition is to speak Elmer Fudd speak when speaking of wabbits…hahahaha. My human charges are nothing if not very silly and due to my close association, certain idiosyncrasies have rubbed off on me, some quite compromising of my dignity, but one thing I have learned in life is that you have to take the good with the bad.
And it could always be worse.
My grammy’s hoping she’s not your only reader who had to turn to her Funk and Wagnall’s to look up the definition of “graupel” Ha! Google spell-check doesn’t even recognize it! Which amuses my grammy to no end. Stupid Google.
The gardening push around here is to finish getting down a thick layer of compost mulch before the warm weather arrives in earnest and things explode, vegetatively speaking, that is. My grammy has been somewhat remiss in this chore for the past few years and the reversion to sand has begun in earnest in many parts of the garden. Her woody perennials took a real beating this past winter—even winter kill on the top two-thirds of a well-established 12-foot Japaneses maple, for cryin’ out loud! She thought those were hardy clear to Siberia, but apparently not on Cape Cod and the Islands this winter! It’s downright provoking. Since the maple took such heavy damage, I trust there is no need to go into the condition of the buddleias and the hydrangeas. On the bright side–thank goodness for the lilacs. As I write this, my grammy is suiting up for another day of pushing around overloaded, rusty wheelbarrows. I should go now and remind her to knock down a fistful of Advil—this seems to cut back on the amount of moaning and complaining that seems to be inevitable at the end of such a day as she has planned. I often hear my grammy muttering about the need for Zen. There’s a fat chance of that ever happening around here.
The guy I live with takes ibuprofen, but not as much as the doctor said he could. “Take with food”, was the instruction. Okay then. It seems like almost everyone has a horrible winter story. The place to live, I guess, is Nairobi, where apparently they don’t even have a word for “storm”. But here, Japanese maples fry in the low humidity. You can replicate what happens to the leaves by holding a match close to a piece of cellophane. At this time of year, what with it being all cool and rainy and graupel-y, the maples seem fine, and the gardener thinks “Ha!”, and then summer comes.
Happy to learn a new word: graupel. I don’t know that I have experienced that here on the east coast, but I will certainly be on the lookout for it in the future.
Sometimes called “soft hail”, though it’s not. Looks like perlite. More of a mountain-type weather thing, maybe.
Extra, extremely little and cute…for now.
For now, yes. We kind of hope they’ll discover the neighbors’ green lawn and go there for lunch.
Autumn hit us this week with vengeance. Yes, autumn, the natural season for Santa Ana winds and plant-frying temperatures. For the last five days, Chess, every dog and human in this household has emulated your resting posture, accompanied with slight panting when called for.
I love to plant in the rain! Where we are in SoCal planting in the rain ups chances for success. I also would be over the moon to have such a fine collection of salvias to plant in a downpour. When my dogs come in at night after walking through salvia and artemisia and herbs, they bring into the room a natural incense. Do you walk and sniff through salvias at night, Chess? Where is that precious little bunnie-wunnie at night, I wonder. Ah, that Allium litwinowii gives us a color beyond the dyer’s art, and to see it I know the reason I love gardens. Hope you have fun tomorrow, Chess, in your service as planting companion (as distinct from companion planting, [ladylike snort]).
Oh, the salvias are mostly Salvia greggii types, and the stems on those are “so brittle they snap if you look at them wrong”. So I would get yelled at, or “strongly cautioned” if I were to go into one of the gardens, which I rarely do. It was really gloomy and overcast all day but it didn’t rain. Sometimes the whole summer can be like that here, dark, gloomy, and mostly rainless. Fortunately not very often. So we didn’t do much of anything except nap, which we are both very good at. There was some planting in the troughs early this morning (about 10:30), and then the sprinkler was left on too long by mistake, watering the newly seeded buffalo grass, because the guy I live with was watching the neighbors dig a six-foot deep hole in their front yard. He says watching someone dig a deep hole is more fun than digging one. While he was watching the hole being dug, a baby bunny hopped onto the lawn next door and started to eat grass. Free lawn-mowing service. Santa Ana winds, huh. “It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” (Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind”)
That cute little bunny marks our return well Ches. Mummy hasn’t been in a good place for a few weeks now and I lost my best friend Chester but all is looking good now and we are catching up on your garden and your guy. Great looking at the garden over the last few weks and looking forward to more, nice to see Lamb Chops in ther too.
We understand not being in a good place. All too well. Sorry about your best friend, too. We’re kind of under the gun weather-wise here for the next few days, what with horrible storms predicted, and then weather from Mexico and heavy rain predicted after that.