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 a few things that have happened. You may remember me from such posts as “Jam Session”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If the garden suddenly looks all green, that’s partly because the guy I live with has been watering, but also because, at about 10:30 last night, it started to thunder a lot, and then it poured rain for two hours.
It rained so much that the guy I live with’s neighbor ran out at night out to clear the storm drains so his front yard wouldn’t flood. The guy I live with didn’t see him do that, or he would have helped.
This bird bath was empty yesterday morning.
I could tell the guy I live with was very relieved by all the rain.
I thought it was scary, and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to go out before bedtime, but it turned out I was able to, and then the guy I live with dried me off with a towel.
Day before yesterday, the guy I live with spotted a huge crawdad right by the canal. Why it was strolling around on the path I don’t know.
He put it back into the water.
But then yesterday evening, before the storm, I encountered another big one that threatened me.
It held up its big claws as if to say “You shall not pass!” but I just bravely hopped over it.
The guy I live with put that one back in the water, too.
He also looked up whether crawdads should be walking along paths and I guess they do that, but it’s not a safe place for them to do that, because there aren’t any ponds around here, and the creek is almost always dry these days. (It wasn’t, this morning.)
The guy I live with said this hawk might like to snack on a crawdad.
By the way, that’s how our sky has looked for days and days now; this picture was taken today but it’s not going to rain.
The other thing, and this didn’t really work out the way the guy I live with hoped, is the new growth on the ‘Folsom Blue’ oak. It didn’t work out because the phone camera didn’t capture the right color today, with all the new growth.
This is the right color:
You can see why it has “blue” in its name.
This oak was grown from acorns by the late Allan Taylor from a tree growing near Folsom, New Mexico.
Aside from that original tree, this may be the only one.
The guy I live with said he thought it was important to acquire plant selections made by gardeners from an older generation, which is why there are so many of these in our garden.
After the guy I live with’s wife died, he would prowl nurseries and sometimes there would only be one or two of something, and if the plants looked special, he would buy them.
Of course he did kill a few of those plants, which still annoys him.
He acquired two oaks with this label but the other one was mislabeled, and it deeply resented being transplanted after the guy I live with realized he’d planted them in the wrong place, which he does a lot.
This is the other one, which isn’t as big.
Probably because he didn’t get all the roots, it died back quite a bit one winter, but as you can see it looks healthy now. Healthy but little.
That’s all I have for today. Rain, crawdads, and oaks.
I’m more or less assured there won’t be any thunder tonight, but since we’re getting “the tail end of the monsoon”, anything is possible.
And here’s my tail end.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
You got rain!!
The CoCoRaHS maps are pretty educational. Until I started monitoring I had no idea how very localized rainfall can be.
Nearly speechless at the ‘Folsom Blue’ oak situation. What a treasure. I had to look up Allan Taylor.
We did get rain. Naturally, the guy I live with would like more rain. Since we do get rain at this time of the year, I guess that’s a normal desire.
The guy I live with said he thought about joining CoCoRaHS but the business about sending information at 7 a.m. ruled that out. He’s a night owl.
Allan was a retired professor of linguistic anthropology, but also a recognized authority on oaks. Mostly talking about “scrub oaks” here, but he was also interested in much larger oaks.
The guy I live with said his garden in Boulder was one of the coolest he’d ever seen, all sorts of western native woody plants, and other plants as well.
When I looked up Allan Taylor, I found his obituary and my goodness, a lifetime of achievement. How cool to have toured his garden!
The guy I live with said he was a remarkable person. The guy I live with and his wife went to the garden, but she mostly took pictures of the large collection of ancient Japanese bells hanging from a pergola.
There are a lot of plants in our garden that ultimately came from him; there’s an Acer monspessulanum which was grown from seed Allan collected in northern Greece, some dwarf ponderosas, a Quercus grisea, and all sorts of other things.
The guy I live with has an interest in language so he talked with Allan about it on email.
He learned that writing is not language but rather a representation of language; language is the actual spoken thing.
That the African American Vernacular use of “aks” instead of “ask” is perfectly legitimate, since it was originally pronounced “aks” and several dialects in the British Isles still say it that way.
That the reason why English orthography is so weird is because the spelling was not reformed in the way German and French was after the Great Vowel Shift (the “k” and the “gh” in “knight” were originally voiced, like in German “Knecht”, and when the English stopped pronouncing it that way they didn’t change the spelling).
That if a word enters the spoken language, it’s a word. “Irregardless” is a word.
How people talk is the language, not how they write.
You might want to try the RainDrop app on your phone. https://www.raindrop.farm/
That may work, thanks.
The guy I live with said that yesterday two tiny rain-filled clouds, maybe less than a mile wide, passed right over our neighborhood and we got sprinkles of rain twice. The clouds moved east and then vanished.
So we got a trace of rain and places like Denver got 0.00 inches.
Crawdads did that on the road where my home in college was. They lived in the ditch between the road and the railroad tracks that the road was parallel to. After heavy rain, they came out to walk on the road. It looked like a science fiction movie. We had to drive around them. “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s was popular on the radio at the time, so we named the crawdads “Road Lobsters”.
It’s very weird that they walk around on the ground, threatening purebred border collies who have no interest in them, except as weird creatures waving pincers.
There are lots of them in the canal.
Well, the B-52s were weird also.
I guess.
Are the crawdads edible?
The guy I live with says they definitely are edible. In Cajun cuisine they have “crawfish boils” (they call them crawfish in New Orleans), crawfish etoufee, crawfish pie, and all sorts of other things.
If you look at the post “Of Crawdads and Coyotes” you’ll see pictures of big ones in the water just like the one in the post.
The canal (we know it’s really a ditch) goes under the apartments to the north of us, and just past the culvert there’s a whole bunch of riprap, and there are often lots of crawdads there. Or crayfish or crawfish.
Well, one time when I was on my evening walk, we saw a man sitting on the canal bank with a big bucket, and there were a few kids wading in the water.
The bucket was full of crawdads.
The water is usually pretty clear and originates at Summit Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_Lake_Park#Summit_Lake
I think I would be with them with my own buckets. A culinary delight on your doorstep!
There are also trout in the canal, and they’re not small. The guy I live with sometimes talks on the phone to the people who own the water rights to the canal, because he notices things, like if large stuff is dumped in that would impede the flow of water, and the people didn’t even know there were fish in the canal.
After the water stops in autumn there are often poor trout that get stranded.
One time, on our walk, we saw some kids collecting trout in plastic pans.The guy I live with asked them what they were going to do with the fish.
“Bring them to our mom to cook.”
The guy I live with said they shouldn’t do that, because the fish had been dead for ten days.
The crawdads are beautiful, with their blue-green pincers and shimmery patina. In fact, between the crawdads, the blue gray skies, and the color of that (new-to-me) Folsom Blue oak, you practically had a color theme going. Glad you had some rain. Glad it wasn’t too much. Hope it’s cooling off there.
Thanks; it’s not really cooling off much.
The oak is probably the only one of its kind; the guy I live with said he was just in the right place at the right time.
The crawdads really are beautiful to look at, though I don’t want my nose pinched.
When I used to live in Delta, we had crawdads in our irrigation ditch but I haven’t seen one of those in forever. That was an impressive fella on the pathway. We’re so jealous you got 2 hours of rain. The most we’ve had has only lasted about 5-8 minutes. But I’ll take that over nothing.
There are lots of crawdads in the canal at this time of year. When the water level drops, which it sometimes does, like after a big rain, the crawdads go into holes in the mud along the canal bank, and then come out again when the water level rises.
Sorry you didn’t get any rain. The rain seems to be so localized at this time of year.
A nice upslope storm would probably give everyone a bunch of rain.
Glad you got some rain. Those crawdads are cool. Didn’t realize they existed so far from an ocean or swamps. I am sure you could take one on if you wanted to. The blue oak is superb. What a cool plant. Mid season rain does help. We have had close to 6 inches this week between regular rain and some wicked thunderstorms that I know you wouldn’t have liked. Getting ready to build an ark if it doesn’t stop soon as there is more to come.
Thanks; it rained a little yesterday, too, but we had nothing today, which was supposed to be a “rain day”.
The storms here are so localized that the guy I live with said that a few months after his wife died there was a storm at about 11 p.m., with horizontal winds, so he took Slipper and Chess, the two purebred border collies who lived here before me, down into the downstairs bedroom, and there was a terrific hailstorm.
But the hail stopped one block to the east, and nothing happened to our house and garden.
We wouldn’t mind a downpour or two here.
There are hundreds of species of crayfish distributed all over the world. The guy I live with read up on them, and they don’t tolerate polluted water. They’re raised commercially in Louisiana.
They live in the water and then go into mud holes along the canal for the winter. Basically freshwater lobsters, but smaller.
The guy I live with said that years ago there would always be a Great Blue heron fishing, or crayfishing, along the canal.