the miserable gardener

Greetings and saluations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you how totally soaked we are. You may remember me from similarly-themed posts as “Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Maybe you can see that I’m checking the garden to see how wet it is. Really, really wet.
Since about two o’clock in the afternoon yesterday, we’ve gotten an inch and a quarter of rain (that’s a little over three centimeters). There wasn’t any thunder, either.

This is really typical for June, here, and after all the dry weather in April, and the fire warnings, it comes as a huge relief. But it’s wet, and so there’s going to be no gardening.

Let me back up a couple of days, though, and tell you what happened to the guy I live with, who isn’t as strong as he used to be, but thinks he still is.
He went over to help his neighbor saw down a big broken branch off the honey locust tree in their front yard. He showed his neighbor the right way to make the first cuts before making the one by the branch collar. The branch came down just fine, but the guy I live with thought he could hold up the branch and let it fall slowly to the ground, without damaging the new fence that the neighbor had put it.
Well, naturally, he couldn’t lift the weight of the branch like he would have been able to do twenty years ago, so the branch sort of slipped, and smashed the end of his little finger. Not badly, but enough.

I also got into a little trouble when I saw a fairly large eastern yellow-bellied racer in the cactus garden. I really wanted to get it, by crashing through the cactus, and the guy I live with kind of lost it when I started to go into that garden. He yelled at me really loudly.
I guess he really does have my best interests at heart, though, because he explained afterward that it would have meant a trip to the doctor’s office, for me.
The snake is now in the front yard. It must have slithered all the way around the house.  Just thinking about that gives me the creeps.

Well, anyway, back to today and our soaking-wet garden.
The only action here is the constant racket from orioles, demanding grape jelly. You can see the feeder off to the right, there.
We can’t find the holding rod for the other feeder so I guess we’ll just have one, all summer.  The rain, of course, washed away all the jelly last night, but I think it’s been rejellified at least twice, just today.
We also have goldfinches and nuthatches, but the regular feeders are empty, because of the bird flu, I guess.

On my morning walk, I thought it would be a good idea to check the water level in the creek.  Somenody needs to do it, after all. The guy I live with said that when he and his wife moved here, there was always water running in it; now it’s mostly dry. But not today.
You can see that the field was mowed, which annoys the guy I live with no end, because he says the grass will easily out-compete any weeds, but no one ever listens to that, even though it’s super obvious. The mowed parts become full of weeds, and the unmowed parts don’t.

That’s all for today. The guy I live with said it’s so wet we might even see a slug, but somehow I don’t think so.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all the happenings around here. You may remember me from such posts as “Damp And Delighted”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I was hoping the guy I live with would come out into the garden and do some work, but he said there wasn’t much to do, since everything was so wet.
That’s right, wet.
When we woke up last Friday morning it was raining. It rained all day until it changed to snow in the late afternoon, though it kind of went back and forth all day.
Yesterday it looked like this:
It didn’t freeze or anything, but things were kind of bent over. This is Allium jesdianum ‘Per Wendelbo’, if you’re interested.
(Per Wendelbo was a Norwegian botanist who was an authority on plants from places like Iran.)

Things were a mess here, as you can see from these pictures.
Those are cottonwood branches. There are downed branches everywhere, in our garden too, and yesterday the guy I live with did a bunch of sawing. We didn’t have that much damage, though the tree branches are a real nuisance to clean up.

Most of the snow was melted by yesterday afternoon.
They said it would freeze last night, but it didn’t, here.
We got about two inches (five centimeters) of water from this storm, so the garden is completely soaked, and the guy I live with is very relieved, especially after all the fire warnings in the last six weeks.

Yesterday the water in the canal stopped flowing. That happens sometimes. But today it was flowing again, and guess what we saw? (I know, my title gives it all away.)
A really big trout. It seems early in the year to be seeing trout in the canal, but, like the guy I live with says, things are weird.

So that’s my update for today.
I’ll leave you with a highly atmospheric picture of me, up in our bedroom, thinking about things by candlelight.

Until next time, then.