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 bring you up to date on what’s been going on here. You may remember me from such posts as “Nature Is Icky”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. 
I was guarding our trash, to make sure no one stole it, but, as usual, a big truck came and stole the trash while I was watching. I don’t know why this happens every week, but it does.
I’ve been gone for much longer than I ever have been, but I couldn’t think of anything much to say except how hot it is. Imagine a post every day with me complaining about how hot it is.
That’s because it’s been hot. It’s supposed to be 90 degrees (32C) tomorrow, and while that’s not unusual for September here, it is annoying. (The guy I live with used another word.)
The guy I live with has been watering more than he has since the garden was all green and needed constant water, about twenty years ago. He said grasshoppers mostly attack drought-stressed plants. So now we have what he says is the largest cowpen daisy (Verbesina encelioides) on the planet.
It’s taller than he is.
He says the flowers are scented of “unsweetened chocolate”, whatever that is.
This is a self-sowing native annual.
A few days ago the guy I live with began to inspect the potted crocuses. You can see, on the right, that a flowering stalk is emerging (it’s Crocus mazziaricus), but when he poured everything out of the pot, the corm still didn’t have any roots, which isn’t part of the plan. 
This one was growing some roots.
This is how it should be, so the corm can form little cormlets, later. Otherwise this will be the end of the crocus.
I showed you Crocus suworowianus a while back, with the corms planted on their sides, and those did start to flower, and grow roots, so they were planted into the garden.
So the rest of the potted ones will get more water until they grow roots.
We certainly can’t count on rain here, these days.
Yesterday two people came from the botanic gardens and took three empty troughs, so there are only six left in the garden, I think. The guy I live with said this was “the end of an era”, but it didn’t make him sad.
At one time there were three dozen troughs here, filled with alpine plants, but they needed daily watering in the summer, and eventually everything died.
In return, he was given a couple plants of Atraphaxis virgata, from Central Asia. These are giant buckwheats that will grow with no watering at all. We have one atraphaxis here already; a different species.
The cage is becauise a squirrel got way too interested in the one not yet planted.
Today, the guy I live with decided to move some self-sown plants of Aster oblongifolius. (He said he wasn’t going to type the new name, “syhmp” something.)
This is a pink-flowered one similar to ‘Dream of Beauty’ introduced by Claude Barr.
These transplant very easily, even in summer.
That’s almost all I have to talk about, except for what happened on my evening walk along the canal.
I was convinced that there was something in the water. The guy I live with didn’t think so, but this is my area of expertise, and I was really sure.
I would have gone in, but the water was very muddy, because we got half an inch of rain a few days ago, and every time it rains the water in the canal is muddy.
When we went back on the other side, on our way home, I needed to check that side, too, but the guy I live with still said no going in the water. Here I am not looking at the water.
I’m not standing in grass, but in sedges. I’ve never stood in sedges before, and as you may know, sedges have edges.
I think that brings you up to date. Tomorrow is supposed to be a smoky day, which will be no fun, especially since we can’t have the bedroom window fan on.
The air conditioner is cooler, of course, but noisier.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me taken last night.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Crocus replace their corms with cormlets? I never gave it any thought. I just figured that they replace their old corms with generally single new corms, perhaps with a few cormlets attached, sort of like how Gladiolus do it. I never bothered to investigate. I still do not grow any interesting Crocus, and the common sort do not perform well here. The happiest crocus in my garden were those odd grassy things that were labeled as saffron crocus. They grew like a weed. I never figured out what they were, but they looked just like saffron.
The guy I live with said yes, they do. The corms planted in the garden in the last few days need plenty of water to grow roots, and after flowering the “mother” corm will begin to form “daughter” corms, or cormlets, and the existing mother corm will transfer starch to the cormlets, so that the cormlets can grow.
This year’s “mother” corm will have withered by autumn of next year, and hopefully the cormlets will have increased in size to become regular corms, and flower.
It’s only this year that requires such finicky stuff as making sure the purchased corms grow roots; they’ll do that on their own after that.
Some crocuses produce cormlets that are so small it can take years for them to grow to flowering size. For us, Crocus ochroleucus is an example.
Yes, that is what I mean (in your last comment). I think of cormlets as tiny corms that take at least another year to be mature enough to bloom, not as bloomable corms. I suppose that Crocus do not need to be big to bloom like bulbs with bigger flowers, like Gladiolus.
The guy I live with says the cormlets usually do grow to flowering size by the next year.
It did not occur to me that their season is different; they foliate first and then bloom later, so have more time to grow prior to bloom.
With crocuses, it depends. About half the species in the pots on the patio produce leaves right after or during flowering, which overwinter, and the other half wait until spring to grow leaves.
But, obviously, they know what they are doing, and can somehow sustain the growth of their cormlets in order to survive. The resourcefulness of some perennials is amazing!
Yep.
Tired of the heat here too, Mani.
That cowpen daisy—wow!
It’s no fun at all.
Cowpen daisies are super easy to grow from seeds scattered on the ground in later autumn. There used to be a bunch growing at the edge of the pasture (hence the name) next to my doctor’s office.
But this one and a couple of others are enormous because of all the watering here. Grasshoppers don’t bother the daisies at all.
We keep thinking this heat has to go away at some point and then there’s [yet again] another 90º degree day. Sigh. I saw that there was a dusting of snow in the high country Thursday morning while it rained in the city and prayed that will head to the Front Range, although that shower was sure nice. The weeds especially enjoyed it and sprang forward overnight. 😉
The guy I live with keeps saying that a foot of snow would be nice about now. He says the day after the snow it would be 90 degrees again so there would be a lot of melting.
The man you live with would be right!
Four inches of snow fell here on September 3, 1961. Always a possibility.
🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼
Thankfully, we are spared your heat here in southeast Ireland but the seasons are moving on with earlier sunsets and colder weather forecast, down to 2C at night this coming week, we are told, while daytime temperatures at present are 17 – 20C.
Those temperatures sound pretty nice to me. We purebred border collies loathe being roasting, and especially loathe being roasting every single day.
We just finished with three days in the 100s and with smoke. An awful beginning to September. I’m ready to say goodbye to the summer. I planted my bulbs for the year, Dichelostemma volubile, Bloomeria crocea, and Allium sp. ex Leach Botanical Garden from Illahe Rare Plants. Fun times. Hope nothing eats them. I planted them in a layer of basalt gravel to hopefully deter the rodents. Hoping more of your crocus get roots soon. I think you should have been allowed in the muddy water. Really, it’s quite soothing. Fewer grasshoppers too.
The guy I live with wasn’t exactly sure what was in the water, though it does come from the mountains. But there is giardia and stuff like that.
We’re, um, uh, rooting for the crocuses.
The guy I live with also says that if there were things from Illahe that you wanted and were sold out, he’s semi-sorry for that, but he’s been ordering from them since before it was Illahe and has vacuumed up stuff like a dog confronted by popcorn on the floor.
Well, I wouldn’t want giardia. So, I guess it’s a good decision to stay out of the canal.
So, TGYLW consumes rare bulbs like popcorn? Plain? Buttered? Other toppings? Sounds like an expensive habit. I’m not really grumpy about it though. Hard to get upset about sold out plants as it is almost like they never existed in the first place. Now, if he came in and grabbed the last something special from in front of me, like the little old ladies at the Hortlandia Spring Plant Sale… Well, that would be a whole different story. Probably as frustrating as having someone steal my trash from right in front of me every single week. Grrr.
Can TGYLW grow Dichelostemma? Would he even be interested? I don’t recall ever seeing it mentioned in the blog. He does seem to really love his crocus, galanthus, and cyclamen.
The guy I live with said he used to push little old ladies out of the way at plant sales. I’m not sure if that’s really true.
It would be buttered or white cheddar popcorn. We don’t have that here very often. But he usually just sits here and the email arrives, and he orders bulbs, just like that.
The guy I live with says “people in the know” call them “themids”, since they’ve been put in a separate family, Themidaceae, though I guess also in a subfamiy Brodiaeoidae. None of them is really garden-worthy here; they might come up the folowwing year, flower, and then that’s that. The only exception might be Brodiaea (or Triteleia) laxa, but even that’s not dependable.
“The guy I live with said he used to push little old ladies out of the way at plant sales.”
I remember going to many a NARGS CT chapter plant sale where the little old ladies had sharp elbows and knew how to use them.
Lol.