Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, here to talk about our day today. You may remember me from such posts as “Mice In The Rice”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Here I am in another characteristic pose.
I thought you might enjoy two pictures of me.
The guy I live with found this the other day.
He said this was a “snail shell”, but that the snail was gone. He said this could be an old shell back from the time when snails came into the garden from nursery pots.
He showed me this old Taylor & Ng mug and I still didn’t get it, but maybe there was nothing to get.
The guy I live with found this miniature katydid. They sometimes fly or hop into the house, but this was on the patio.
I’ve said before that the guy I live with and his wife would walk around the apartment complex at night, on the sidewalk where there are shrubs, and they would listen for katydids and then try to spot them, which wasn’t easy.
He said when we start seeing katydids it’s really beginning to feel like autumn.
Naturally, he had to take pictures of the white colchicum again, Colchicum speciosum ‘Album’.
He said the reason why there are only three flowers, one per corm, is that the colchicums probably didn’t like the very dry summer we had. These corms were planted about 1995.
Speaking of old things, aside from the guy I live with, he saw this today:
This is Sternbergia lutea. The guy I live with said the last time this clump flowered was in October of 2000. Twenty-five years ago.
It must have liked the rain we got, but the guy I live with did give this clump and the one behind the grass that shouldn’t be there some Blossom Booster. The other clump is going to flower too. He’ll remove the grass some time.
There are some other bulbs of this elsewhere in the garden and they flower regularly.
The crocus look even better today.
There’s other stuff in flower, but the guy I live with said that some work needed to be done, which surprised me. Usually he just sits around and talks about working in the garden.
In fairness, though, it has been super hot almost every day since June.
The guy I live with got this hedge trimmer a little while ago.
He already had batteries so this was an easy decision. It was that or spending hours and hours trimming stuff by hand.
There were lots and lots of old dead branches on the Russian hawthorn that were hanging way too low “for comfort”. The tree had kind of a skirt of dead branches and twigs.
He also used this French lopper which his wife bought a very long time ago after researching loppers.
There’s still a lot of work to do on the hawthorn, and other shrubs which have been neglected.
After all of that, it was time for my dinner. This is my “time for dinner in case you forgot” look.
He never forgets.
I got my dinner. It was good, as usual.
Then I waited for my “toothbrush deal” which helps clean my teeth. I like those a lot.
A couple of hours later, we went on my evening walk.
The clouds were all buttermilky.
He told the story of the time he washed buttermilk onto a trough, having read that buttermilk would make the trough all mossy, and then a couple of hours later he heard this rasping sound, and Pooka, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, had licked all the buttermilk off the trough.
And that was our day. The guy I live with said it’s supposed to be hot for the next two days, then get cooler, and hopefully, stay cooler for quite some time.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me glowing in the dark.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
I am surprised that snail shells are uncommon, or worthy of comment. We were out for a while yesterday evening and when we drove in at home there were several crawling up the garage door. These damp days suit them perfectly. They are numerous here but do little damage.
The guy I live with says finding a snail shell here is slightly more likely than finding an intact skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex while digging in the garden.
We don’t have snails here, except in ponds. The snails probably came from plants grown in California.
He grew up there and remembers snails. He said he remembers escargots en brioche at a French restaurant here but that’s about as snaily as we get here. He does have a shell of a Roman snail which a friend of his wife sent her from England.
He also said that he reads about gardeners complaining about things called “slugs”. I’ve never seen one, though they sound icky.
The guy I live with assured me that we don’t have slugs here, so I can sleep safely at night.
It must be nice to lack slugs and snails. They can be so destructive to certain plant material. However, the biggest and scariest, which is the banana slug, eats primarily decaying redwood debris, so is harmless to desirable vegetation. Kids have a tradition of kissing them on a dare.
The guy I live with has a picture of a banana slug on his hand, when he went to Multnomah Falls.
He and his wife thought they were cool.
They are cool, and they taste like chicken.
No.
We have plenty of slugs also, many species, – a snail without a shell in essence.
There were a lot of them in Los Angeles, where he grew up, and I think heavily-watered gardens here have them, but our garden is just too dry for them.
That Sternbergia blooming again after so many years is really something! How fun.
It was kind of amazing. It must have been the rain, and not watering, that caused them to start flowering. The guy I live with thinks it might have something to do with the pH of rain versus watering.
A couple of years ago he dug down and pulled a few bulbs away from the big clumps, planted those elsewhere, and they flowered that autumn, but he has no idea why the big clumps haven’t flowered in such a long time.
You used to be able to get them every year from bulb companies, but not so much any more.
Thank goodness we don’t have snails or slugs. When I was in my early 20’s I lived in San Diego and I’d never encountered them or their slimy trails. I still remember how they were climbing up the side of the house. Yikes. It may be warm for the next couple of days but the mornings are crisp-a clear sign of autumn. The leaves in my NW Denver neighborhood are still fairly green, any changing leaves are gold and the stressed maples seem to have shed a lot of brown leaves. Very little orange or red on the majority which is making this a dull-ish autumn. But at least the pizza oven hot days seem safely in the rear view mirror.
The guy I live with remembers the very gross sensation of accidentally stepping on a snail when he was a kid.
He said there used to be slugs in this garden when it was watered a lot, back in the last century, but as he started watering less and less the slugs vanished.
He drove to Littleton the other day and the leaves were turning faster than they are over here. Maybe because there were more ash trees and honey locusts. Silver maples, of which there are too many around here, don’t turn at all. Since there are like bands of highly alkaline soil in parts of this neighborhood there are hideous chlorotic silver maples which are yellow in summer, too.
All in all, it looks like it was a pretty good day.
Drat, I accidentally hit comment before I was done. I was going to say, in regards to your last post, that I planted tomatoes for the first time in years. Normally, our nights are too cold and we don’t get any ripe tomatoes, but this year we had a good 2-3 dozen that we had to compete with the chipmunks for. I guess it is never too late to try something new.
The guy I live with once grew Siberian-type tomatoes and they seemed to tolerate the cooler nights here.
We can feel a temperature drop walking toward the canal road because cool air comes down from the foothills.
Squirrels have been stealing tomatoes from next door, climbing into the Austrian pine, eating parts of the tomatoes, and dropping the rest on the flagstone here.
It looks weird; tomatoes all over the place. The guy I live with said it was like someone was putting on a very bad play in that area of the garden and the audience was expressing its disapproval.
It was.