the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you the one thousandth post on this blog.
You may remember me from such non-thousandth posts as “Mice In The Rice”, among so many, many others. (Obviously.)

Here I am in a characteristically horticulture pose. I’m supervising, of course.
I think the trash can adds a certain something, don’t you?

Uncharacteristically, some work is being done here. I know that’s hard to believe.

A few plants have been planted, but not many. A lot of them had rootballs so packed with roots that the guy I live with used the Super-Genius™ method of getting them to root. Namely, you repot in a larger pot, surround the root ball with sand, and then water for a couple of weeks, and, usually (but not always), roots will leaves the root ball to get water.
Tightly-packed roots can only get so much water, so this helps the plants establish in a dry garden much more quickly.
The other work that’s being done is on the lilacs. The guy I live with is no longer happy with the big green hedge of lilacs that rarely flower here, and just sit there being green all summer, so the first thing that’s being done is removal of the older, larger stems, of which there are a lot, because the lilacs have been neglected for such a long time.

The guy I live with’s wife used to do this. I wasn’t here at the time, so it’s a little hard for me to understand how much he misses her, and her help in the garden. Tomorrow would have been her sixty-fourth birthday.
I guess she would work on the lilacs for about a week. She was much more of a perfectionist than someone I know is.
Maybe you can’t see the gap in the lilacs here, but it’s definitely there.
That’s Solidago ‘Wichita Mountains’ in flower. The guy I live with thinks this is just a form of the variable Solidago speciosa, but since he doesn’t know one goldenrod from another, this name is fine. It comes from the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma. Bees love it.

You can see here that the Acer grandidentatum is turning color. Not as spectacularly as in some years.
And you can see the wall of green lilacs, which the guy I live with says looks weird. Partly because of the abrupt transition from the dry border to all-of-a-sudden green lilac leaves.And you can also see the gap, right over the sagebrush.

There are some crocuses in flower. The guy I live with has been watering, a little. These are Crocus kotschyanus.
And this one, which is called Crocus goulimyi ‘Mani White’. I was very disappointed to learn that it was named for the Mani Peninsula in Greece, and not for me.
This is growing in a pot because someone forgot to plant it in the garden earlier this year. It will go back into the bulb frame pretty soon, to spend the winter there, and then get planted in the garden next year.

Speaking of spending the winter here, the guy I live with turned off the faucet last night and heard some rustling among the dry grapevine leaves clustered by concrete downsplash block.
This afternoon he went to turn on the faucet again and noticed he was being watched.
It is almost that time of year, after all, when spooky things happen, and you have the feeling that something is watching you.
It kind of gives me the creeps, though.

I guess the bullsnake–the very large bullsnake–will be spending the winter with us. There must be a huge burrow under the downsplash block. There’s a hole there, and the guy I live with said he’s often thought about filling it, but reconsidered because he also thought someone might be using it. And someone is.

We’re used to seeing burrows in the garden, since we sort of live out in the country.

That’s all I have for today. I know it’s hard to believe that there are actually a thousand posts on this blog, but there are.

The guy I live with posted a picture of me walking among fallen apples, on Facebook, but I’ll leave you with another, much more atmospheric one taken this evening.

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 tell you about a very unusual thing. You may remember me from such posts as “A Walk At Sunset”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This was taken at sunset, as maybe you can tell.

Here I am again. (This is going to be an excellent post, because it has lots of pictures featuring me.)
This one doesn’t have me in it, but it shows the difference in the way the phone camera gathers light if you point it in another direction.
There are some bulbs in flower now, though I guess this is what you would call a pretty lean year, because it’s been so dry.
I don’t know the name of this colchicum.
A bee on ‘Innocence’. I think it was asleep. These colchicums are mostly done now.
And Colchicum bivonae ‘Apollo’. The guy I live with posted a different picture of this on Facebook.
The cowpen daisies have been wilting almost every day, but they perk up after watering. They have very shallow root systems, but then, they’re annuals.
They kind of flopped, too.
The guy I live with said he wasn’t going to mow the buffalo grass again this year. You can see it’s gotten pretty unruly, but it’ll be going dormant soon. It’s my Private Lawn. (You can’t see it from the house because of the hedge of lilacs.) It used to belong to Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me. His first cousin Chess never used the Private Lawn.

Seeds came in the mail the other day.
These are from Western Native Seed. A bunch from Plants of the Southwest came a day or so later.

I think these will mostly be sown directly into the ground, maybe at the end of next month. That isn’t always successful, but sometimes it results in seedlings.

Maybe you can see how dry things are in this picture of me walking along the canal. On the left are irrigated plantings, and on the right are native plums and other plants growing on the canal bank.
This is farther east than we usually go, but we do go this way sometimes.I debated going into the water, but at this time of year it’s pretty chilly. It comes from the mountains.
We haven’t seen a muskrat, or any trout in the canal at all this year. We usually see trout when the water is clear, which it mostly is.

We saw an owl.
And I almost caught a duck. The guy I live with said not to do that, but I tried anyway. The thing about ducks, though, is that they can fly.

Then there’s this. What you might call a sign of the times. (The guy I live with says I’ve used up my quota of cliches in this post now.)
That’s the native currant, Ribes aureum. The flowers are strongly scented of cloves.

And the cotoneaster, Cotoneaster acutifolius.
Things are changing.

I suppose I should mention the unusual thing, since my post has the word “unusual” in it.
This was it.

You may wonder why I haven’t shown more movies lately. It’s because the guy I live with, who, for an old person, has a lot of experience with computers, couldn’t figure out how to process movies with Windows 10. He said it was much easier with Windows 7.

Well that’s it. It rained. Not a whole lot, but at least it rained. “They” say we have an eighty percent chance of rain showers tonight. That would be nice.

Other than that, things are pretty much the same, which is the way we both like it.

Until next time, then.