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 yet another mistake that had to be made right. You may remember me from such posts as “How To Avoid Gardening”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m sure you would agree I look like I need to have a biscuit, and eat it on the couch, with the swamp cooler blowing nice cool air on me.
I got one, of course.
It’s really dry here. I mean like super dry; we’ve received about a quarter inch (6.35 mm) of rain since we had that downpour the last week of June. And it’s been over 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2 C) almost every day since like forever.
We did have two cooler days this week, and even cooler nights, which was very nice, but we have a “heat advisory” again for tomorrow and the next day.
Even so, the green belt mostly looks very green.
The guy I live with thinks that the grass in the upper right is brown because the soil is different there; not “creek-bottom loam” but something that the rain didn’t infiltrate very well, like clay.
A couple of days ago the guy I live with left me to go out to lunch with his friend. They also went to a little nursery. The guy I live with saw this sign.
I can’t say exactly what happened when he saw that sign, but maybe you can use your powers of deduction.
Yes, again.
He didn’t find any Hesperaloe parviflora there; if he had, he would have bought some because it’s the only plant in flower for the hummingbirds right now. (See my post “Pink Asparagus”.)
In fact we disturbed a male broad-tailed hummingbird visiting the hesperaloe when we came home from my evening walk.
The hummingbird got very annoyed and sat on an oak branch waiting for us to go into the house so he could go about his business.
So about the title of today’s post. It really should be “things undone and done”, but the guy I live with said that sounded clunky.
I’ll take you out into the “way back” garden to show you what happened.
On our way out, let’s look at the enclosure. More work has been done.
There was someone out in the green belt so I had to check that first. There are several places with no plants against the fence, for purebred border collies to look out into the green belt to make sure everything is okay.
Then I went and looked out, standing on my Private Lawn, which is very dry and crispy right now.
(Those posts are perches for Great Horned Owls, if you didn’t know. Owls have perched on them, and it’s scary to walk back here and see a large owl looking at me. The bamboo stakes are for plants, which of course are going to be moved later.)
Anyway, yesterday evening, the guy I live with suddenly realized he had made a “terrible mistake” that had to be corrected as soon as possible.
I didn’t get it, but he said that it felt all wrong. If you saw my post “Moving The Sacatons”, you know that he moved these eventually-huge grasses to the other side (the east side) of my Private Lawn.
He said these big grasses should be on the west side of the lawn, by the fence, where they were first planted. Since the fence is chain link, and there’s the open green belt behind that, this is where the grasses belong.
They were moved back this morning, and watered.
The guy I live with said the rocks are there because he couldn’t figure out what else to plant there, though he did sow some seeds of galleta, Hilaria jamesii. (This is the time to sow seeds of that grass.)
And on the other side now, two plants of Mirabilis multiflora, some grasses, and then some seeds of more grasses, Ratibida columnifera, and other things were sown, which is the right time to sow these, too.
The cages are to protect the new plants from bunnies. (Those green plants behind the cages are Sedum ‘Matrona’ which he’s been trying to give away.)
The guy I live with sprinkled some “compost” (mostly wood chips) on the newly-sown and watered seed; he said that all that brown is very unsightly. Hopefully we’ll get some rain next week–the guy I live with isn’t counting on it–and then the buffalo grass will revive quickly and start moving into that brown area, too. There isn’t all that much time for the grass to revive this year, though, if it doesn’t rain in the next couple of weeks.
The shriveled plant in the center is Centaurea orientalis, which he’ll see if he can transplant or give away.
And that’s it. Another mistake rectified, much to my relief, since I don’t have to listen to the cries of horror. The guy I live with said that probably no one would know, and I certainly won’t tell anyone.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Does the guy you live with grow any yellow pink asparagus? I thought it was rare until I went to Arizona, and saw that it was overly common in medians of roadways. I was careful to collect seed only from pink asparagus. I do not think that the yellow is as pretty as the pink, but I should have gotten some anyway.
The guy I live with said there was a yellow-flowered one here, but he transplanted it so many times that it died. It was growing in the raised bed you see in most pictures of the garden, at the end of the flgastone, but hesperaloes, here, don’t seem to like that soil and prefer the heavy clay of the front garden, which is less porous in winter.
He also planted one called Brakelights, super red, but rabbits ate it to the ground in a bad winter.
As you know, most plants need a trigger to flower, rainfall, like zauschnerias, say, but the hesperaloe only needs the rainfall trigger here in early April and then it flowers all summer.
So, there are more cultivars than just the yellow sort? That is interesting that they like the dense clay. We have two flats of seedlings here, but I put only one in the ground so far. It is in decomposing mudstone, which is actually rather dense and muddy when it gets wet.
The guy I live with said they would probably not like watered clay, though it’s probably not all that accurate to call the soil in the front garden “heavy clay” any more. It’s been worked, a lot, and it’s not terribly deep there; the native soil is maybe a foot down.
There are more cultivars, like ‘Brakelights’, which the guy I live with planted in the front garden but it was eaten to the ground by rabbits.
Oh, it only gets water because it is new there. It will not get water after winter.
The guy I live with says that the thing here is that hesperaloes need water some time around the first two weeks in April, in order to get the flowering stalk going. Later than that, nothing happens.
It may be very different where you live.
At that time of year, the soil is not dried out yet. Goodness, I hope I do not need to water it also. I remember that it was getting irrigation where I got it from near Phoenix, but I just figured that it was because mow, blow and go gardeners just water everything too much like they do here.
The guy I live with says most hesperaloes are irrigated here. Everything is irrigated, pretty much.
You may have to water it, because if you look at Wikipedia and the climate data for Del Rio, Texas, which is sort of where the hesperaloe is from, you’ll see the rainfall patterns.
Gads! That is totally backward from here! Their rain arrives during their hot and humid summers, which is exactly when we get no rain here. Although their rain is less, it is at the opposite time of year. It may want more than water. It may want flatter ground that does not get so dry during summer. (I put it on a steep slope to protect it from gophers.)
True, though I bet the hesperaloe is grown in California.
It is, but it gets water. I have only seen it in landscapes that are ‘maintained’ by mow blow and go gardeners.
That may be the only option, then.
We’re ready to start learning a new rain dance, the other one we’ve been doing apparently is all wrong. 90+ days with 10% humidity is some serious parching. We just hope Mother Nature takes pity on us soon.
The guy I live with said we got about fifty tiny drops today. I was busy enjoying the swamp cooler so I didn’t see the drops.
“Those posts are perches for Great Horned Owls, if you didn’t know. Owls have perched on them”
For the first time since we moved to the farm 20 years ago we had a Great Horned Owl hunting in the near field at dawn for about an hour. This was from July 5th to the 12th. On July 13, the anniversary of Nancy’s passing 43 years ago, the owl perched on a closeby fence and when I got the cell phone to snap a pic the owl stared straight into my eyes and took off, never to be seen since then. Quite eerie.
Owls are pretty spooky. We don’t see too many of them these days, because neighbors installed spotlights that light up the green belt at night, and scared away the owls.
We do see them on the north side of the green belt, sometimes.