Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you our news, on a gray and rainy day. You may remember me from such posts as “A Rainy Afternoon”, among a surprisingly large number of similar posts.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I guess while the pose may be characteristic (me looking out into the back yard), the reason isn’t all that characteristic.
This is what I’m looking at.
It rained a whole bunch yesterday, and then rained for an hour this morning. I had to wait for kind of a long time to go on my morning walk. I still got wet, though.
We’re having Opera Day because there isn’t anything to do. I take naps on Opera Day; the guy I live with does too, sometimes.
The water stopped flowing in the canal, the last time it rained a lot, about a week ago, and for a couple of days there was no water in it at all.
I had to go down into the canal to make sure.
There were very different smells down there. I’m an authority on such things, so you’ll have to take my word for the fact that this was all very unusual.
I’ve been in the canal before, but only when there was water in it.
There was also an exceedingly strange thing in the canal road.
The guy I live with said it must have been a pretzel offering to the rain gods.
A couple of days later the water was flowing again. Everything was back to normal.
The canal road, by the way, veers off to the right here; the other road is an access road that goes out to the street. I’ve walked on the sidewalk on the street quite a few times. It’s not even in our neighborhood.
Since it’s been raining so much, there really isn’t much of any gardening news, except for one thing.
The guy I live with noticed that Yucca torreyi was producing a flower spike. He was really surprised by this, and posted a picture of it on Facebook a few days ago.
This is what it looks like today.
The guy I live with said he could probably stand out there and watch it grow.
I think it’s going to be very big. It leans, for some reason. Maybe the yucca got pushed over by all the snow this winter.
There really isn’t all that much to do, as I said, but when the front door is open, which it usually is, I can look out and check for rabbits, or make sure no one is walking down my street.
The guy I live with keeps saying the house needs to be painted, and he was going to do that a couple of years ago, but unexpected things intervened.
He’s kind of sentimental about the cheap, battered aluminum screen door. Even though it adds nothing to the appearance of the house, you can see that a purebred border collie can stick his head out the door. The guy I live with said all the purebred border collies who have lived here have liked to do that, after the screen itself broke, so it’s not very likely the door will be replaced.
So that’s what’s been happening. Not much, except rain, I guess.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Whatâs your facebook page? Iâve tried finding it before without success.
Love the blog, and the dog! The Yucca too, super exciting.
Thanks. The guy I live with’s Facebook page is under his name. I get to appear in a lot of the pictures that are posted, of course.
Mani an Guy wee wundered why wee did not heer from youss’….wee sorry WerdPress beein silly…….again! Wee hope you see this commint.
Yore Yucca plant iss furry furry kewl….
An look it all that rain~~~it was sunny here til 3 Pee Em an iss now 7 Pee Em an continuess to bucket down rain….so much rain…..
Weerd that THE Canal had no water an sum pretzelss. BellaSita did a dubbell take over THE foto mew mew mew…. Due Trout eat Pretzelss??? 😉
Mee hopess you due not get too much more rain….there iss ‘two much of a guud thing” rite Mani?
***nose bopss*** BellaDharma an ((hugss)) BellaSita Mum
The guy I live with said kids put the pretzels there, on the road though. Totally soggy now, of course. You can’t leave pretzels out in the rain.
The guy I live with likes the rain, but hopes this summer won’t be too dry, like they’re saying it might. I don’t like the rain much because it can thunder (it hasn’t, yet) and I can’t do any gardening.
Nothin uckier than soggy pretzelss fore sure Mani!!
An wee heerss you ’bout all THE rain all at once. Wee wunder if that iss what iss happenin heer two? An BellaSita can not garden inn THE rain eether 😉
Still drizzly an cloudy heer today……an chilley two!
Nice here today, except for the smoky skies. They’re talking thunderstorms for the rest of the week.
Yucca torreyi bloom is RAD! That was one of my first few species of Yucca, but I never saw it bloom. That is a long and sad story. It is quicker and happier to say that I intend to grow it again. By the way, what is Opera Day?
There are three of them here, but only one is big enough to flower.
We have Opera Day in the winter, usually, when it’s too chilly to go outside, but it was an actual rainy day yesterday, so Opera Day again.
There’s an opera playing on the stereo in the kitchen. They usually last a long time, it seems to me.
Do you wonder why human people only listen to recordings of opera while canine people participate by singing along?
To improve things, of course.
Oh, of course.
The bursting of growth with the rain is amazing.
It really is. It’ll be interesting to see if the flower stalk gets so big no one can get to the front door.
There is a planting on a college campus in Washington DC full of locally unusual yucca of various sizes, colors etc. One year many of them bloomed. I always wondered who had the imagination (or lack of knowledge?) to plant them there in a wet humid place like that.
ceci
They grow yuccas in England, so they must not mind being damp.They’re mentioned in The English Flower Garden by William Robinson.
That does seem weird, though.
The rain has been completely heaven sent. No matter how much you supplement water, nothing turns a garden into a beautiful place more than a few rain showers. We know it’ll turn hot soon enough and won’t complain our walking schedule is disrupted.
Your fur-iends,
Norman & Elsa 🐾
The guy I live with certainly isn’t complaining. He does fret about going out in our new car and having it hail, but so far it’s just rained, without any thunder here.
It is strange to have to wait for the rain to subside in order to go for a walk. There are plenty of old towels here so I can get dried off, too.
We’re convinced that’s why they put back doors in houses-to stash the dog towels close by. 😁
Dog towels are important. I didn’t like getting dried with a towel when I was little, but now I like it a lot.
Kind of boring for you Mani but I wish it would rain here too. Supposed to this weekend. Fingers crossed as we are currently living in smoke. Hot and smelly with horrible air quality so no gardening even though the trees and bulbs are glorious right now. The yucca is cool. Unfortunately, 2 of my 3 succumbed over the winter. Probably too wet in Spring as all the snow melted. We had a purebred border collie at one time who decided he needed to poke his own holes through the screen door. Not popular but I can see how entertaining it is for your kin.
The guy I live with said one of the purebred border collies who lived here before me broke the screen, and the sliding screen door in the kitchen, too. Must have been squirrels.
We smelled that smoke yesterday.
“Since it’s been raining so much, there really isn’t much of any gardening news”
Mushrooms, slime molds, moss, lichen?
Some mushrooms, for sure. The moss in the troughs still isn’t green. Maybe it’s dead.
Inquiring minds want to know, who or what was playing for Opera Day? Le Nozze di Figaro? Madama Butterfly? The Three Tenors? Leontyne Price?
Tristan und Isolde. It was really long, and a lot of it was kind of gloomy, if you ask me.
I hear there’s a little backlog of new operas which are waiting for later in the year. Operas he’s never heard. (Operas that most people have never even heard of.)
We had a beautiful Torrey Yucca at the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park in Albuquerque up to a few years ago, It held a Roadrunner nest for a few years as well. Three years ago, it sprouted a magnificent bloom that was the glory of the garden, which turned out to be its Last Hurrah. The plant died after that and the park staff cut the top off, leaving a four-foot high stump. We puzzled over what to do with the stump for a while, but it now holds a small bird bath. The next spring, young yuccas sprouted around the stump, which will need to be thinned and transplanted soon. If your yucca does this, I would not be alarmed, based on our experience. The Roadrunners moved on.
The guy I live with doesn’t expect the yucca to die, but it is a scary plant. He had no idea it would do so well here; same with Yucca faxoniana.
The only time the guy I live with ever saw a roadrunner was in southern Colorado. I’ve seen coyotes, though.
Wee hope yore weather stayss calm fore youss’ Mani 😉
It rained here a teeny bit today.