the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here on this roasting hot day to bring you up to date on everything that’s been happening. You may remember me from such heat-related posts as “Super Extra Totally Roasting Hot”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It got up to 96 degrees Fahrenheit (35.5 C) today. I was roasting.

The last time I posted, it rained that night. Kind of a lot. Remember the backhoe dredging out the creek, north of the canal? The people who did that did a pretty good job, so now the creek doesn’t back up right where it leaves the culvert.
This is what the field looked like that day. That’s my yard in the upper left. You can see the poles for the owls; the phone camera makes them look slanted.
We even saw a mushroom on my morning walk along the canal road a couple of days later.
So it was all rainy for a few weeks, and now it’s roasting hot and windy. That’s quite a change.
I think there are some creatures that don’t get hot. Maybe you can see the mother mallard and her ducklings in the canal. They were paddling as fast as they could, because they could tell how fierce and deadly I was. I have that look about me, you know. Protecting the guy I live with from ducklings.
The guy I live with counted seven ducklings, the first time we saw them. He told the neighbors about the ducklings, and said that he would always say there were seven. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, and he didn’t tell me.

The grasses in the garden, along with the weeds, of which there are a lot, have been growing like crazy because of all the rain.
I’m in this picture, to add a special excellence to it.
Like most people who have gardens, the guy I live with sort of wanted to order some plants, but when he went online to look at things, almost every plant he wanted was out of stock. He was pretty disappointed, but said that for people in the nursery business, this was probably a good thing. He did manage to order some plants from Digging Dog.

When plants arrive here, either from local nurseries or by mail, they’re almost always repotted into larger pots, then watered, and stay on the patio for a while so that the plants will grow more roots, and be planted out in the garden later.
The guy I live with also ordered some roses, from High Country Roses. Most of these aren’t for him, but for his friend and her daughter.
The guy I live with also went to a local nursery and got a few plants. The nursery was oddly empty, but the owner told him they were downsizing after one of the other owners passed away. That made him pretty sad; he used to go there with his wife, a lot. But I guess things change.

That’s about all that’s been happening here, I mean besides the guy I live with fighting with his email program on the laptop, finding so many plants out of stock online, and also wondering what to have for dinner.
We lead very exciting lives, don’t we?

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 bring you up to date on what’s been going on here. You may remember me from such posts as “The Pine Cone Chronicles”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You can probably see how green it is here. It’s been raining a lot. Well, okay, not a lot, but more than usual.
Even what used to be a rock garden looks pretty good.Maybe you remember that we said that Ornithogalum nutans wasn’t very happy here; it turns out that it is. No one noticed the clumps in the little garden between the birch tree and the patio. They’re super happy here, as you can see.

Clematis hirsutissima is happier this year than it ever has been. (I think it might have looked even happier if the picture was more in focus.)The sea kale, Crambe maritima, is also very happy here, even though it’s growing in “icky” soil. What’s mostly been going here is a lot of weeding. So much weeding that the guy I live with hasn’t had time for much of anything else, though he does have to stop and lie down from time to time.
I like to go out and sit with him while he’s weeding.

There was some excitement here. A couple of days ago there was thing huge kind of scary thing, which the guy I live with reminded me was called a backhoe (it was much bigger than the one that tore up our front yard last year). It was blocking the entrance to the field, so we both wondered what was going on.
And then the next day, the backhoe was gone, but the guy I live with said we could follow its tracks, which we did. It went into the field, along the canal road, and then suddenly went off the road, and down to the creek on the north side of the canal.
The guy I live with said they were going to dig a new channel for the creek, because there were all these branches blocking the creek, which could have formed a dam, and caused a flood.

In other news, I’ve been collecting pine cones. The guy I live with says not to chew on them while I’m on the bed, but I tend to ignore him. I like chewing on them pretty much anywhere.
Oh, there is something else. We’ve been getting a lot of orioles here, lately. The guy I live with has been filling the feeders with grape jelly like twice a day, and cutting an orange in half every day.
You can see a male oriole in this picture.
The guy I live with said there were even western tanagers coming to the feeder. I guess that’s pretty exciting.

So that’s it for today. There might have been something else, but I’ve forgotten what it was.

Until next time, then.