Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, here to talk about how roastingly hot I am, as well as some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Hot Again”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic, if somewhat damp, pose.
The guy I live with soaked me with the hose yesterday. We purebred border collies don’t like hot weather at all. Fortunately it doesn’t get roastingly hot every single day from June to September, here.
It’s 90 degrees (32C), and about 17 percent humidity, which is kind of high for here when it’s this hot, but it did sort of rain a while ago.
You can see that the sun was out while it was raining.
The guy I live with says that there’s not much chance of thunder when it’s this hot, but I decided to play it safe.
Today, some people in a really big truck came by and stole our trash. They do this every week, and even though I try to stop them with deadly fierce barking, they still do it.
I’m going to have to have the guy I live with explain this phenomenon to me. I’m really not sure I like any kind of phenomenon, especially a weird one like this.
The guy I live with explained that the first truck who stole our trash was really stealing our recycling stuff.
Meanwhile, the guy I live with has been trying to take some movies of the garden, but hasn’t been very successful. In fact, the ones he took with the phone never even uploaded. The guy I live with said maybe the files were too big. Another phenomenon.
But we do have some pictures.
The Persian yellow rose is having a very good year, as usual. 
When he posted pictures of this on Facebook a couple of years ago, someone said something about blackspot.
The guy I live with said “Lol”. (Note the comment about 17 percent humidity, above.)
He’s never understood why people think all gardening climates are the same.
Anyway there are some other things in flower.
This is the rose ‘Veilchenblau’, almost done flowering.
Rosa kokanica:
Acanthus hirsutus, a different picture from the one the guy I live with posted on Facebook.
Salvia hypargeia, flowering in a sea of Marrubium incanum:
Amorpha nana. This was grown from seed collected in Boulder County.
And, finally, the rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’.
This unfortunately flowers all summer and will soon be covered with Japanese beetles.
I’m going to give you a break from all the flowers to talk about one of the guy I live with’s obsessions: cooking, and its corollary, eating. Of course I’m obsessed with food, but since the guy I live with has been sick (and I guess still not one hundred percent better), and couldn’t bring himself to eat much in the first week he was sick, the obsession has become worse.
This is “New York Deli Style” potato salad, marinating in brine in the refrigerator.
I’ve never had potato salad. The guy I live with makes different kinds of potato salad fairly often (he says Paul Prudhomme’s is the best, period), but he thought he would try this, because he likes trying new recipes (unless they sound icky, which this definitely didn’t).
Then the sun came out, so I was able to loll on the patio for a while.
And then, despite what the guy I live with said about thunder when it’s so hot, he got a severe thunderstorm warning on his phone. But now it’s only 80 degrees (27C).
The guy I live with said the warning was coming from a place called Aspen Park, which is about nine miles southwest of us, though a much longer drive because it’s in the mountains (foothills, really, but we would still say “in the mountains”).
The guy I live with looked at the radar and the storm was moving straight east, so, south of us. It’s dissipated now.
Thunder is definitely a phenomenon which I’m against.
In the garden on the south side of the house, Philadelphus lewisii has started to flower.
And the mesquite, which the guy I live with feared had been killed after two very rough winters, is coming back.
It will grow more with a lot of heat. It’s especially hot in this garden.
And, finally, the hesperaloe is flowering for the first time. It’s been here for several years, but has taken its own sweet time getting around to producing a flower spike.
This is a cross between Hesperaloe parviflora and H. funifera, so it’s bigger than regular H. parviflora.
And then, another truck came to steal our real trash. I did quite a lot of barking, but the trash still got stolen.
Then the truck came back and stole the neighbor’s trash, across the street.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me giving the trash thieves a piece of my mind. All in all, a very exciting day.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Thursday’s are our trash day and poor Wilson is beside himself whenever those trucks rumble by. Terrific images in the garden. This has been a wonderful year for poppies, peonies and the bearded irises. No rain in NW Denver for a couple of weeks, only wind. Lots of wind. We rank that right up there with the trash thieves. 😬
Thanks. I don’t know why the guy I live with lets people steal our trash. There must be some secret reason.
The guy I live with said we’ve received 0.87 inches of rain since May 1st. He says that’s pretty discouraging. He even set a sprinkler for half an hour because some plants were looking unhappy. You know it’s really dry when he sets a sprinkler. “So it’s come to that, then” is what I say to myself.
You guys received a lot more rain than we did. I think we’ve had about 16 drops in the past 20 days. 😬
We had a little rain, and some pea-sized hail, around noon today. It was scary so I hid in my Upstairs Fort.
HURRAH for yore the Hesperaloe is flowering for the first time. …it is a very u-neek lookin flower! All yore flowerss look so pretty! Wee wunder what that “Tato Salad” tastess like? Sorta tangy? Pickelly? Cure-euss Kittiess an Meowmy’ss wanna nose Mani!!!
***nose bopss*** BellaDharma an ((hugss)) BellaSita Mum
Well, the guy I live with just threw away the potatoes. Kind of a waste, I know.
He followed the recipe by boiling the potatoes first and then peeling them, even though that’s never worked for him in the past. The potatoes in the brine were almost rock-hard, like they’d never been cooked at all.
Next time he’ll peel the potatoes first, then slice them and boil them, like he does when he makes gratin dauphinois.
EEEEKKKK Mani!!! Those ‘tatoess sound pawfull…. Wee glad Guy threw them out. They sound nasty!
They were. The guy I live with should have paid attention to his instinct instead. Peel potatoes first, then slice them, and boil them. He says you have to be careful not to get the potatoes too mushy that way. Same with dicing potatoes and then boiling them, for potato salad.
He has a mandoline (and cut-proof gloves), so next time, which’ll probably be some time within a week or so, he’ll do it that way, and report back.
Stunning rose pictures – it is so humid here and my friends from CA who loved roses there and grew dozens of them are constantly in shock as their bushes get diseased and die. You have to spray twice a month to have a prayer of keeping them going.
Neither of our dogs bark at the trash pickup, perhaps because it’s hard to see the street from the house. They reserve their efforts for the mail carrier, who sneaks up daily and leaves things.
Cheers,
Ceci
Thanks. The guy I live with said when he was a kid, he dusted roses in his grandfather’s garden, with those cardboard tubes that went “whhhsh”.
We don’t have issues like that though roses here can get blackspot sometimes if watered overhead too much.
We have a mailbox out on the sidewalk here, but sometimes people come up to the front porch and leave stuff, even after I terrify them with my barking.
The firm favourite potato recipe in this house is Potato Daphinoise.
The guy I live with used to make that fairly often, boiling sliced potatoes in milk with tons of garlic, and then pouring heavy cream on top, instead of cheese, and baking that. His wife would have leftovers for her breakfast.
He got that recipe from Jacques Pepin.
That’s about it. Delicious.
Yep. It’s too hot to bake here, and, besides, the heating element in the lower (big) oven burned out, and the guy I live with has been too lazy to call someone to replace it. (I’m sure he could do that, but it involves bending down and then getting back up, so forget it, he says.)
Wee hope THE ‘tatoess come out purrfect THE next time fore sure Mani an Guy!
I hope so, too, so I won’t have to listen to the comments.
Mew mew mew understood Mani 😉
He might just make regular potato salad, too, or buy some at the barbecue place near here (I hear they make very good potato salad).
MMMMMM ‘tato salad can bee so guud Mani!!!
It can be, for sure.
Are Hesperaloe funifera or the hybrid that the guy you live with grows somewhat available, or are they rare? I am unfamiliar with the species, so looked it up, and found that it looks just like an unfamiliar species that I encountered in Arizona. I never did identify it, but it was quite tall, with weirdly tall and scrawny floral stalks. Only a few deteriorating brownish flowers remained, so I could not see what the bloom had been like. I do not know if the flowers had been white, pink or even yellow, but I sort of doubt that they were pink like those of the hybrid that the guy you live with grows. (Hesperaloe parviflora with yellow bloom was common in other landscapes in the region.) I sort of wondered why a landscape designer would want them, but figured that they were likely intended to add a bit of height closer to the rear of their landscape, which had a few Hesperaloe parviflora, which were still blooming, closer to the front.
The guy I live with says there’s one Hesperaloe funifera at Denver Botanic Gardens, in a very protected place by the front entrance. It’s really grown for the big strappy leaves.
The hybrid in our garden was a gift, and probably doesn’t exist anywhere else.
Oh wow! So you have something that is more than merely rare! That would be a good reason why I have not encountered it. The specimens that I noticed that resembled pictures of Hesperaloe funifera were likewise likely there for their form and texture than for their bloom. There was plenty of bloom from other species, including Hesperaloe parviflora.
While in Arizona, I noticed that the supposedly rare yellow Hesperaloe parviflora was not all that rare. I get the impression that it is getting to be like the formerly rare yellow Clivia miniata, which became so popular that it is now more common than the prettier but formerly common bright orange sort.
Hesperaloe parviflora is as common as dirt around here. Planted in highway medians, etc. Irrigated, of course.
Needs water at the roots at just the right time of year, here, or it won’t flower.
Acanthus hirsutus sure is a beauty. I am tempted to plant out a mesquite and see how it does. I’ve got some extra seedlings I started and I don’t need another pot to drag in and out of the greenhouse each winter.
It is. The guy I live with once got some seeds of Acanthus syriacus (A. hirsutus ssp. syriacus), but nothing happened when he sowed the seeds.
Mesquites are taprooted so they need to get that root down into the soil, which means a lot of watering. The guy I live with often forgets to do that, and lost the other mesquite he planted at the same time, about fifteen years ago.
He also lost Prosopis pubescens ‘Clark County’, supposedly the hardiest screwbean mesquite, because of inattention to watering after planting.