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 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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, here to talk about our day today. You may remember me from such posts as “Mice In The Rice”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Here I am in another characteristic pose.
I thought you might enjoy two pictures of me.

The guy I live with found this the other day.
He said this was a “snail shell”, but that the snail was gone. He said this could be an old shell back from the time when snails came into the garden from nursery pots.
He showed me this old Taylor & Ng mug and I still didn’t get it, but maybe there was nothing to get.

The guy I live with found this miniature katydid. They sometimes fly or hop into the house, but this was on the patio.
I’ve said before that the guy I live with and his wife would walk around the apartment complex at night, on the sidewalk where there are shrubs, and they would listen for katydids and then try to spot them, which wasn’t easy.
He said when we start seeing katydids it’s really beginning to feel like autumn.

Naturally, he had to take pictures of the white colchicum again, Colchicum speciosum ‘Album’.
He said the reason why there are only three flowers, one per corm, is that the colchicums probably didn’t like the very dry summer we had. These corms were planted about 1995.

Speaking of old things, aside from the guy I live with, he saw this today:
This is Sternbergia lutea. The guy I live with said the last time this clump flowered was in October of 2000. Twenty-five years ago.
It must have liked the rain we got, but the guy I live with did give this clump and the one behind the grass that shouldn’t be there some Blossom Booster. The other clump is going to flower too. He’ll remove the grass some time.
There are some other bulbs of this elsewhere in the garden and they flower regularly.

The crocus look even better today.
There’s other stuff in flower, but the guy I live with said that some work needed to be done, which surprised me. Usually he just sits around and talks about working in the garden.
In fairness, though, it has been super hot almost every day since June.

The guy I live with got this hedge trimmer a little while ago.
He already had batteries so this was an easy decision. It was that or spending hours and hours trimming stuff by hand.
There were lots and lots of old dead branches on the Russian hawthorn that were hanging way too low “for comfort”. The tree had kind of a skirt of dead branches and twigs.

He also used this French lopper which his wife bought a very long time ago after researching loppers.
There’s still a lot of work to do on the hawthorn, and other shrubs which have been neglected.

After all of that, it was time for my dinner. This is my “time for dinner in case you forgot” look.
He never forgets.
I got my dinner. It was good, as usual.
Then I waited for my “toothbrush deal” which helps clean my teeth. I like those a lot.

A couple of hours later, we went on my evening walk.
The clouds were all buttermilky.
He told the story of the time he washed buttermilk onto a trough, having read that buttermilk would make the trough all mossy, and then a couple of hours later he heard this rasping sound, and Pooka, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, had licked all the buttermilk off the trough.

And that was our day. The guy I live with said it’s supposed to be hot for the next two days, then get cooler, and hopefully, stay cooler for quite some time.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me glowing in the dark.

Until next time, then.