the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you about my day guarding the house. You may remember me from such posts as “Unhappy Landings”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.The guy I live with and his friend went to the botanic gardens yesterday, and left me to guard the house. You can see how I do this.
He said that if someone came to the house, I would jump up, hit my head on the ancient Italian green marble tabletop (that’s one of the equally-ancient steel or iron table legs there), and that would be that. I kind of think that that’s the guy I live with thinking about how he would do it. I’m much more coordinated.

Well, so, maybe you noticed that there was a post with a different title yesterday. The pictures in that post were so large it was very difficult to edit them, or whatever it is that gets done to the pictures. So we’re trying this again. The guy I live with resized all the pictures, which was more work than he thought it would be. 

This next one is the cardoon, Cynara cardunculus. It’s not really hardy here, I think, but the plants grow very fast. It’s sort of like an artichoke but a different species.

The guy I live with said he was really taken with this little section of the garden. He’s tried to grown Rudbeckia triloba, but nothing ever happened. Maybe he should try again. This is the buffalo gourd, Cucurbita foetidissima.There were more pictures but some of them weren’t in focus. It was pretty sunny for a while yesterday, and the guy I live with didn’t have his reading glasses. (He never carries them anywhere.) But that made it hard for him to see if the pictures were in focus.
And I wasn’t left at home for very long.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me walking down a newly-mowed section of the field. The mowed grass is kind of prickly.
That gray mound in the upper left is the big rabbitbrush by the fence in the “way back” in our garden. 

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 a little bit about what’s been going on in the garden, and a bit about my midnight adventures, too. You may remember me from such posts as “The Nameless Horror”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.It hasn’t been so incredibly hot, lately, and the guy I live with has actually done some work in the garden. Yes, I know. I was surprised, too.
It mostly happened in the front yard and I didn’t get to see the work, but I know it happened, because he showed me what he’d done afterward.
There’s still a bunch of dead branches to be removed, and that purple-leafed chokecherry needs to go, but it really does look nicer. Kind of a native oak woodland, you might say.Of course he scratched his arm and came back into the house bleeding profusely, but that’s to be expected now. His doctor said his skin has gotten thinner, because he’s, you know, getting on in years.
The guy I live with sometimes talks about having someone help him out in the garden. Someone maybe less relatively ancient than he is. Of course that could lead to problems, because the person working in the garden might not feel about the garden the way the guy I live with and I do.
And people tend not to listen. I mean I rarely listen to the guy I live with, because of all the babbling, but sometimes he says something that needs to be listened to, and in the garden that would be especially true.
So anyway that’s where we are now. Hours of lying around doing nothing, and then the occasional burst of energy, interrupted by a whole bunch of first aid.

Because of the not a lot of rain at all (but still some), there are plants flowering in the garden.
The Rocky Mountain beeplant (Cleome or Peritome serrulata) is one; the guy I live with said to make a note to buy extra seed to sow early this coming winter. It’s an annual.  Hummingbirds like it,too.The nodding onion, Allium cernuum, a native, is flowering all over the garden. White, and some pink flowers too.And the sphaeralcea, I guess Sphaeralcea fendleri, which flowers all summer regardless. The Japanese beetles love them, unfortunately. When the garden was redone, about ten years ago, it was supposed to be a garden full of grasses, mostly native ones, but a lot of these didn’t take.
The only one planted from nursery pots that was successful was the alkali sacaton, Sporobolus airoides. The failure of so many grasses has been a big disappointment; the easiest way is to grow them from seed, but not all of the grasses he’s wanted have been available as seed.
The guy I live with said that watching grasses sway gently in the breeze is a very good stress reliever. Then of course he complains about the lack of breezes here, in what used to be a pretty windy climate.
You can see here the bluebunch wheatgrass, Pseudoroegneria spicata, with its straw-colored stems, after it’s flowered, and Melica ciliata (the white tufts), which isn’t a native grass.

The sempervivums never disappoint, which why there are a lot of them here. This is one called ‘Salt Peanuts’. (No, really.) The picture was taken at dusk, like the ones of the grasses, above. That’s pretty much it, except of course, for my midnight adventures.
They’ve improved considerably now that the guy I live with has a head lamp. It definitely illuminates stuff.
Well, the other night, believe it or not, he noticed this before I did, because my eyesight in the dark is way better than his, or at least he claims to have seen it first, and we both sort of wanted to go check it out, not too closely of course.
All we have is this phone picture. A pretty terrible picture which he had to resize in order that you could even see it. You can see the shadow of the phone, but also, if you look very closely, at the bottom of that white pillar, on the left, is someone striped.

That’s as close as we got, and the guy I live with said that was close enough for both of us.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me in the daytime. One of us is on the wrong side of the creek.

Until next time, then.