the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about the subject of my pretty hysterical title. You may remember me from such similarly-hysterical posts as “The Sun Was Out”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m checking on the progress of the buffalo grass, as you can see. It needs more rain. The grasses behind me are Sporobolus airoides. Yes, right in the middle of the lawn. That’s what we call “advanced horticulture” around here.
The solar lamp doesn’t work, if you wanted to know. The panels on top deteriorated years ago.

It rained today. Here’s proof.
Practically a downpour, as you can see.

The guy I live with said that our windy and dry weather is caused by something called “La Niña” and that our summer will probably be pretty dry, which isn’t all that unusual. The wind is, but we haven’t had much lately.

The native shrubs in the garden are doing just as well as they always do, because they’re adapted to the vagaries of our climate, and all the bulbs certainly are, but there are always some plants which do well no matter what.their native habitat is. You always hear about plants that only grow in a certain habitat and so obviously they need those conditions in the garden in order to survive, but that’s almost never true, with obvious exceptions. If it were true, nobody could grow anything except plants native within a few miles of their garden.

The guy I live with posted a picture of Mahonia fremontii on Facebook; this is a slightly different picture; you can see how happy it is. This is a plant native to deserty places and pinyon-juniper woodland in the American southwest, and yet Reginald Farrer mentioned growing in it his book My Rock Garden (I think), in Gloucestershire, as alien a climate for this plant as growing bananas at the South Pole. (I’m quoting the guy I live with, here.)

I know, from the constant talking that goes on around here (it’s like background noise, or Muzak), that the guy I live with really isn’t interested in growing a lot of plants that other gardeners grow (except for super-rare bulbs, which are an entirely different story), but for some reason he bought a plant of the sea kale, Crambe maritima, and planted it right in the middle of what used to be called “the great lawn” here, and it’s doing very well.
This is a plant native to what the English weirdly call “shingle”, which we would call something like pea gravel or a bit larger, on beaches in Europe, and you can see it in pictures of the late Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/angusf/sets/656542/

The sea kale is a long way from home, growing here.
The guy I live with says that people say the leaves are edible, just like they say regular kale is edible. He has a different opinion.

Well, anyway, this is one of my mostly plant-related posts. I don’t have much else to report. Oh, except that the weather forecast says that this coming Friday night will feature temperatures at or below freezing. On the twenty-first day of May. The guy I live with said that was pretty funny. We’re used to this sort of thing.

The orioles are back, but there are no pictures of them, because they’re so skittish. They make a lot of racket, demanding grape jelly all day long. They get it, too.
And I haven’t seen the muskrat since the first time we saw it. I’ll leave you with a picture of me on the way to search for the muskrat.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to tell you about our quiet day today. You may remember me from such posts as “The New Thing”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that the native grasses are turning green. They don’t need much water to start growing.
Most of the other green stuff is bulb foliage.

Water has become quite a concern here. We did have a little bit of rain a week or so ago, but mostly it’s been really, really windy, with high fire danger warnings almost every day. There’s no rain at all in the forecast. The guy I live with says he’s never seen a spring this dry or windy. He said experts are predicting a hotter than normal summer, and so I guess we’re going to have more fire warnings, unless the wind stops.

The wind has had an effect on the snowpack in the mountains, which in some ways doesn’t affect us since the garden isn’t watered much (except for the shade garden), but in other ways it does, of course, and overall, it’s not good.
The dust blown by the winds, which blew sixty to eighty miles an hour just yesterday in southern Colorado, have covered the snowpack with dust, and that’s lowered what scientists call its albedo, or ability to reflect sunlight, meaning the snow will melt faster than usual.
The snowpack for the Rio Grande watershed, in southern Colorado, is almost completely gone. That water goes to places like New Mexico. I’ve never been there.
(You can see that I’m learning stuff, but I’d rather learn happier stuff, like the stuff near the end of my post.)

But today was a nice, quiet day, without constant wind. I guess tomorrow will feature more wind, though, and critical fire danger.
There were bumblebees on Amsonia jonesii today. This will flower regardless of whether or not it rains.
The flowers are bluer than the pictures suggest.

There are a few other dryland amsonias which are being raised from seeds here. The guy I live with said it’s fairly annoying that while Amsonia jonesii seeds need a cold treatment to germinate, some of the others don’t, and yet they’re much harder to get established in the garden. (He tried sowing some seeds directly into the ground, but that didn’t work.)

In other news, less filled with agitation and worry, we saw a muskrat.
This is the muskrat’s happy home. We know because we saw it swim into the grassy bank there.
It’s not the same muskrat as before, but you can be sure I’ll be looking for it on my walks.

Until next time, then.