the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the roastingly hot purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on how hot it’s been. You may remember me from such posts as “How To Avoid Gardening”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.This shows me napping on the cool back patio, about eleven o’clock at night. Very pleasant. I think that ramp might need to be replaced some time soon, too. I’ve probably said that the guy I live with’s wife built it for Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, when he was very old and creaky.
Kind of like the guy I live with.

He tried to do some work in the front yard yesterday, and of course hurt his hip again, so I guess that’s that, for a while.

It’s been hot. Really hot; the air is filled with smoke. The guy I live with said that Denver had the worst air quality of any major city some day within the last week.
So aside from that brief painful excursion, almost no gardening has been done except to remove the oriole feeders (the orioles seem to have left, and the feeders were attracting dozens of bald-faced hornets), and water the few new plants around the garden.

Sometimes I sit at the front door and monitor flying things, like yellowjackets.As you can see, this beat-up tacky aluminum screen door has no actual screen. The guy I live with said that Flurry ripped it with his toenails one day. Like a lot of things around here, it isn’t a matter of spending money to get the screen door replaced, it’s just a low priority.

I’ve been enjoying my walks, though, especially in the evening. The walk along the creek, on either side, is nice because the air is at least ten degrees cooler.
This is me by the creepy willow. You can see how green the grass is there, too.  It doesn’t take much rain for water to run in the creek, and when it does, the grass I’m standing on gets flooded. The creek comes from the mountains, which is why there can be a lot of water in it, even if we don’t get much rain.
Kind of scary the way the willow hangs over the path. Or what used to be a path.
And then just yesterday evening, there was that thing in the grass again. We could see the grass moving, and hear noises.
I really wanted to wade into the grass and check it out, but the guy I live with said no.
That’s really all I have for today. It’s been hot, and smoky, and nothing much has been going on, but we wanted to make a post to show we’re still here.

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 talk about our change in the weather. You may remember me from such weather-related posts as “Monsooner Or Later”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Kind of contemplative, I know. It was cool enough today that contemplating things out on the patio was pretty pleasant.

It was super hot here last week, and the week before. It was exhausting, believe me. Then on Friday, I think, the temperature dropped pretty suddenly, the wind came up (that was different, since wind here has been almost nonexistent for some years), and it started to rain. We got about a third of an inch of rain. And then on Saturday it drizzled for hours. That was really different.

Some parts of Colorado got huge amounts of rain, but we only got a little. People around here like to talk about “the monsoon” (the North American Monsoon, which you can look up), but what this really is is sort of outlying rainfall from the weather patterns originating in Mexico. It’s not reliable rainfall, and Colorado does not have a monsoonal flora like southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, west Texas, and northern (if not all of) Mexico have.
But it was nice. You might be able to see the difference.

Even the “way back”, which was getting pretty crispy, looks at least acceptable.
There are a lot, maybe even too many, cowpen daisies in the back border. This used to be full of perennials, and looked very different, back in the last century, but as the weather changed, it became more and more difficult to keep plants alive here without constant irrigation, so now there are cowpen daisies (Verbesina encelioides). These are annuals.
Another thing, and this just happened today, is that the “hideous” blue spruce is gone. This is kind of a peculiar picture, light wise, but it was taken with the phone.
The guy I live with even planted out some things yesterday. That might have been a mistake, since newly-planted plants often fry at this time of year, but he said he plans to mark them, with flags and stuff, so he can keep an eye on them.

What else? Oh, the guy I live with got stung by a yellowjacket a couple of days ago. He got very angry, even though it was his fault. I guess that’s a typical response. His hand swelled up, and is still swollen.
He was trying to remove the hose from the faucet in the front yard, after watering some new plants, and there were yellowjackets around the faucet.
The guy I live with said there was probably a big yellowjacket nest in the crawlspace, so he’s not going in there until it gets cold.
There was one there years ago, and his wife said he should just take a garbage bag and the machete and remove the nest that way. The guy I live with, who tends to catastrophize, said “No”.
The nest will be empty when it’s cold.

And some bulbs arrived in the mail. It is that time of the year.
These came from Illahe Rare Bulbs. You have to pretty quick out of the gate to beat the guy I live with when it comes to ordering from them. It’s a small list that arrives by email, but there’s lots of good stuff. Only one bulb has been planted, so far, but the rest will eventually be planted. Maybe in the garden, maybe in the frames. You never know with him, and bulbs.

Oh, I almost forgot. The owls are back. I fiercely and toughly scared them away the first couple of times, but the guy I live with was able to get some pictures when I wasn’t feeling so fierce.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me doing one of my favorite things; lounging on the patio at night.

Until next time, then.