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 sundry things, but mostly about one thing. You may remember me from such posts as “Heavy Sighs”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s annoyingly hot, and it’s going to be annoyingly hot for some time now, which we both find annoying since they were talking about an “unusually wet monsoon season” even though Colorado doesn’t have a monsoonal flora like southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, west Texas, and states in northern Mexico do. We’ll still going along with the monsoon business but would rather have rain, like the word “monsoon” suggests, than a bunch of heat.
Even the resident bunny in the front garden would agree.
That’s one reason why the guy I live with got rid of the “stupid berm”. Bunnies like to lie there when it’s hot.
This cactus flower, on an echinocereus hybrid, is a metaphor for what’s about to happen.
Here’s another, less red one:
So you may be wondering about the title of today’s post.
The guy I live with decided to move some large, heavy, flat stones. He said if you can’t get anything to grow in an area, just put a flat stone over it.
You won’t see such sophisticated gardening advice elsewhere, I bet.
I was a little concerned, because the guy I live with is pretty old, and he does, if you’ve been reading this blog closely, which is the only way to read it I think, have a tendency to injure himself.
It began with a previously-placed stone being moved “to a better place”
The guy I live with tried to impress me by telling me that the blade of this grub hoe is made from “Hitachi rail steel”, but I wasn’t really sure. You can see it’s easily holding up this very heavy stone.
I hung out in the shade by the back fence, not thinking about rail steel at all. I don’t even know what it is, and when the guy I live with started talking about things called “railroad tracks” my mind really wandered.
It wandered so much that I went back into the kitchen, where it’s cooler.
The guy I live with had looked all over the place for his pry bar, a large thing that’s really heavy and was in the garage when the guy I live with and his wife moved into this house forty years ago, but he finally found it, and did some prying. I hasten to add that in this case “prying” is a transitive verb.
Eventually another very heavy, flat stone was pried out of the ground (it was in a place where you couldn’t see it anyway, so moving it would be no loss to the grand design here), carefully placed on the dolly, and carefully moved to the back garden.
I came to look, too late to help.
My timing was of course perfect.
The soil here, according to the guy I live with, is “weird dust”, left over from the compost pile that’s been gone for over thirty years.
Since it’s dust, water doesn’t infiltrate it very readily at all, but it’s easy to dig in. Plants that need watering don’t grow well in this soil.
I spent a moment admiring the finished work, though I understood that the work wasn’t completely finished; there are more heavy flat stones to move.
That’s all I have for today. You can see that I have an expert knack for not being in the right place at the right time, where moving heavy objects is involved.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Hoo boy, that is a lot of heavy work. I recently learned from a rock gardening book about a “rock bar,” not a place where drinking and music occur, but an object that I guess is like TGYLW’s pry bar. You must keep us posted on the rock moving, since we do read this blog closely.
It looked like a lot of work, for sure. The pry bar is about six feet long, thick at one end and beveled on both sides. It’s a very serious tool.
The guy I live with said you call it “stone” because it was purchased, which makes it sound fancier. Years ago the guy I live with and his wife bought a bunch of stone, had it delivered, and it turned out there were about a dozen large flat pieces, which they didn’t see when they picked out the stone. But the guy I live with found a use for it.
Good luck to the man you live with on getting all the stones moved without him suffering an injury. We’re with you, Mani…the heat is too much for us too. And sadly it comes just when the rescue is hosting it’s annual picnic/fundraiser. Mum hopes there will be plenty of shade since neither of us do well in the heat. P.S. the blooming cacti sure are pretty.
Thanks. The cactus are nice but if we’d had more rain there would be more flowers. He still hasn’t hooked up the hoses yet.
But if it does get to 98 next week, the hoses will be hooked up and the faucet turned on, when it’s our watering day.
The guy I live with said that when he was working in telephone repair June and July were months when he worked lots of overtime, because it rained all the time.
I found that bunny’s wallow absolutely adorable until I remembered that it probably dines exclusively on rare crocus and other greens from precious bulbs & plants, and then I decided that maybe a berm covered in cactus might have been an excellent idea after all!
This is the front garden bunny. The crocuses and stuff are in the back garden.
The back garden bunnies eat the buffalo grass, which is fine because the grass grows back very quickly in response to being grazed.
I have suspected that the rabbits in my garden are grazing on grass weeds (foxtails) but quickly banish the thought as wishful thinking. I have also thought about trying to get some kind of tracking collar on the resident bunnies so that I can figure out their movements, before coming to my senses.
Are you buying any bulbs to plant in late summer/autumn this year? Who do you like to purchase from now that Odyssey Bulbs is “dormant”?
The guy I live with says Messina Wildlife Animal Stopper works fairly well. Safe for dogs like me. Kind of a cinnamon scent, when sprayed.
I have a feeling not very many more bulbs are going to be ordered here, because there’s less and less room, but Scheepers and its wholesale division Van Engelen are good.
Something about not having opposable thumbs kind of gets in the way of you helping move heavy things too. However, I bet you were a great overseer to the whole endeavour. Sorry to hear about your hot and dry. I can send you some cold and wet in exchange. Something about rocks: you are either cursing them as they’re in the wrong place or collecting them to add. An interesting conundrum. Tell the guy you live with to be very careful. Not matter what kind rocks are heavy.
Thanks; it is very hot and dry here, though it rained a little yesterday evening.
Another large stone was moved today. I don’t know what a “chameleon” is but the guy I live with said he moved like one, digging up and transporting the stone to its new place.