the miserable gardener

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.

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 once again to bring you up to date on our latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “The Fast Learner”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Today I heard kind of a shout outside.
The guy I live with had walked into this.
He knew it was there, and he knew it was the reason why the shed, which is normally and disgustingly filled with flies, was now much less filled with flies, but it still startled him.
It’s an orb weaver web.

Here’s another picture of Solidago ‘Wichita Mountains’ because the guy I live with really likes this plant.
And here’s another picture of Colchicum speciosum ‘Atrorubens’ because the sun wasn’t shining on it.
He got this colchicum as ‘E.A. Bowles’.
Bowles has holes, as you can see. The guy I live with said this could also be ‘Benton End’; you know how names sometimes get mixed up.

And this is the ultimately tesselated colchicum, Colchicum variegatum.
The petals are kind of messed up because it was growing through this ephedra.
It wasn’t under the ephedra last year so it’s going to have to be moved, or be swamped.
This is from Greece, and is said to be difficult in cultivation because it needs a hot, dry summer. The guy I live with said he can provide those conditions without getting out of bed in the morning.

There’s a crocus that’s said to need damp conditions all summer, like a Romanian marsh since this is where it comes from, but it presents no problems here.
This is Crocus banaticus, and it’s really something, as you can see.
There are more of them than just these, some that are two-toned, but they’re not up yet.
And this is the white form of Crocus speciosus. The guy I live with was surprised to see it already in flower.

So those are the flowers for today. I mean the ones he took pictures of.
The guy I live with was pretty happy seeing everything in flower, and he actually did some work in the garden.

And then there was this.

I had to wait for my dinner because thunder is too scary an accompaniment for dining, but eventually the chef called me to dinner and that was indeed excellent.
I did take a look outside, though, just to see if everything was okay.
It was.

Until next time, then.