the miserable gardener

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 how annoyed the guy I live with was today. You may remember me from such posts as “In Trouble Again”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The day started out pretty nicely. We did all the things we always do, but after the guy I live with had his breakfast we decided to walk around the garden.
As you can see, I began the walk with a rather noble pose.

We went our separate ways for a while, like we sometimes do.
The guy I live with saw some more snowdrops.
And he noticed the sternbergias were flowering more than yesterday. He was very happy about that. There are even more flowers to come. The guy I live with said he read articles about cactus growing on limestone where it was surmised that rainfall altered the pH at the roots and that triggered flowering, and maybe that’s what happened here. Though our soil isn’t alkaline, our tap water is, slightly, and maybe the bulbs wanted rain rather than watering.
You can see that there are three groups of bulbs here, and if you remember my last post about these there was a clump of grass growing between two of them.
The guy I live with sort of gently wrenched it out with his widger; it was a lot of work, probably because widgers aren’t made to do that.

The grass is Melica ciliata, which is a very attractive grass, but it has a tendency to reseed everywhere, as the guy I live with noticed when he stepped back onto the path and looked at the raised bed the sternbergias are growing in.
I could tell how annoyed he was. He said you can’t just pull it up; it resists.
So he got his old hori hori, and worked at a clump for a while, and then all of a sudden I could swear that an illuminated lightbulb appeared over his head, and he went into the shed and came back with this:
Despite its name this is an excellent little Japanese tool. You just stick it into the ground and just rip out the weeds.

It took him almost no time at all to clear this raised bed of all the grass.
This part of the raised bed is supposed to be mostly empty like this, at this time of year.
He says it’s “avant-garde minimalism”.
There are other areas that are deliberately left empty like this.

But then, after he put the ripped-up grass in the compost pile, he walked around and saw this:
And this:
And this, among all the fallen-over cowpen daisies:
He went inside to his laptop, to the Hida Tool website and discovered there was another model, with more teeth than the Mont Blanc, which he ordered. A Kusitori Ichiban. The guy I live with told me “ichiban” means “Number One” in Japanese.
It was twenty-three dollars with shipping.

He then went back to the grass and said “In the words of Homer J. Simpson, “the world is a blender full of sharks, set on extra teeth”, and I just ordered extra teeth.”
The grass didn’t look scared or anything, but I knew the guy I live with meant business.

It started to rain and he didn’t want to get wet, so he went inside, and that was that.
And that’s what happened today.

Until next time, then.

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 to spend time with you on the last hot day of the year. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Light, Some Dark”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Obviously, I was helping the guy I live with do his work in the garden.
The grass I’m next to is Sporobolus airoides.

The other day his neighbor asked if he could borrow a couple of cups of sugar and since the hummingbirds have left the guy I live with said yes and his neighbor came over and noticed how tall the desert willow had grown this year. Almost six feet.It stopped flowering around the first of July because we didn’t get enough rain and he doesn’t water in this part of the garden, but the desert willow certainly enjoyed the heat. At least something did.

The guy I live with said people have come to the garden and then later said they didn’t think Chilopsis linearis (which is what this is) would be hardy here, and so he asked them what they thought they had walked under when they went to the front door.
What do people notice when they visit a garden? Some people who’ve come here have only noticed one plant.

He could write a book (but won’t) about the off-the-wall things people have said when visiting our garden, though people said nice things too, of course.

The weather people say today may be the last hot day of the year, and let me tell you, I totally and completely approve of that idea. The guy I live with said tomorrow could be a bit hot, and windy, as colder weather moves in, but still, I’m prepared.
We purebred border collies were bred to herd sheep around the border of England and Scotland, listening to the distant skirl o’ the pipes, in mist and drizzle, not roasting every single day. Which is why I like winters here.

The grass in the field has turned green again thanks to the rain.
You can see the tracks made by the mowing machine earlier this year.

He went to lunch with his friend yesterday, and lunch was very close to a nursery (he claimed that wasn’t planned) and so he bought some snowdrops.
These are Galanthus woronowii.
No, really, there are snowdrops there. The guy I live with potted them up and watered them so they’ll start to grow roots before they’re planted.
These are kind of ordinary snowdrops so they won’t be planted in pond baskets like the non-ordinary ones are.
He says the specific epithet is pronounced “vor-o-NOFF-ee-eye”, even though the name “Voronov” has the accent on the first syllable in real life, if anyone cares. I can’t say that I do.

He started switching to pond baskets when he discovered that some of the rarer snowdrops had rotted when grown in gallon nursery pots; there was a perched water table at the bottoms of the pots and that was that for the bulbs.
Now he uses smaller baskets:
These really helped during the Great Vole Invasion of last winter.
Also, with the baskets he can see where the bulbs are, which helps when he goes jabbing mindlessly into the soil with his sharp Swedish rock gardening trowel.

Since the guy I live with has been taking a break from social media, you’ll have to put up with all his obsessions here, on this blog, instead.

He went out to plant stuff and accidentally dug up a tiny cyclamen seedling. They’re all over the place and he expected this. He replanted it.

There are more crocuses in flower.
This is Crocus puringii:
This is Crocus xantholaimos:
Both of these used to be Crocus speciosus but they’ve been renamed as species.

This is Crocus hadriaticus, one of the saffron crocuses, though this one isn’t used for saffron.

And he noticed today what he thought was Crocus goulimyi ‘Mani White’. This is named after the Mani Peninsula in Greece, not for me, which I think is weird.
The guy I live with said that black thing is the edge of a pond basket.

The autumn-flowering crocuses do very well here, though the guy I live with has to put hardware cloth cages around the ones that have overwintering leaves, otherwise rabbits will just mow them down, which is a bad thing. I’m less interested in chasing rabbits now that I’m older. Maybe if I got paid I’d be more enthusiastic.

Speaking of off-the-wall comments, the guy I live with just raises his eyebrows when people around here say this is a “challenging climate”.
He said he had crocus in flower here on New Year’s Eve day, before my time. (They were Crocus ochroleucus if you wanted to know.)
Every climate has its challenges.
We can grow rhododendrons, heaths, witch hazels, bamboo, and so on. With a lot of watering of course. The guy I live with and his friend drove by a house where the front yard was nothing but bamboo.
There used to be a lot of rhododendrons growing here.
And we can grow cactus.

Some cactus came in the mail, from Ethical Desert. “Nicely-grown plants”, the guy I live with said, and potted them up.
These are cold-hardy cactus, so they’re going to be planted in troughs on the trough patio.
The guy I live with said the trough patio hadn’t had troughs on it for a long time and now it was about time to return to his late wife’s idea of a trough patio actually having troughs on it.
But they can’t be planted outside now. These were probably grown in a greenhouse, and even if they arrived in spring they would need time to harden off, otherwise the epidermis would sunburn badly, which could be fatal. And at this time of year a cold-hardy cactus needs to harden off before it starts losing water so the interstices of the cells don’t freeze and blow up the cactus.
The guy I live with has seen the aftermath of cactus blowing up in the garden. They don’t really blow up, I mean like explode, but the cell walls do, and it’s not a pretty sight, unless you like to look at green slime.
So these are going to spend the winter safely in the upstairs spare bedroom.

That’s all I have for today. There would have been more pictures of flowers, especially zauschnerias, but the pictures didn’t turn out. The guy I live with said the phone camera didn’t want to focus on red, or something.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me doing some intensive gardening.
I certainly know that it’s important to notice things when I make my rounds in the garden.

Until next time, then.