the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on the latest happenings in our garden. You maybe remember me from such posts as “The Missing Grass”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Pretty cute, I know. It’s not hard for me. (The guy I live with says that’s immodest.)

As usual, not much has been happening, except for a lot of weeding. “What else would a person do in Weedopolis”, he asked. I guess that was a rhetorical question.

It rained again, night before last, about half an inch. We do sometimes get rain at this time of year. You can see how green the garden looks. Not everything green is weeds, though.
Even the field is still green. It’s supposed to get hot in a couple of days, and stay hot, and if they mow the grass then it will probably turn brown and stay that way for the rest of the summer.A rose that the guy I live with thought was gone, after he dug up the roses and gave them to a friend who owns a nursery, has come back.
This is ‘Felicité Parmentier’, a very fragrant rose. The guy I live with finally sowed the seeds of holy and Thai basil that he got from J.L. Hudson earlier this year. Maybe he should have spaced out the seeds a bit more.He said he’d really like to go to the Asian market and stock up on things for, especially, Thai food, but he stills hesitates to go out. (He did drive the car around a bit the other day.)
Colorado has “reopened”, a little anyway, and the virus cases aren’t going up like in some other states, but he just doesn’t feel like going out at all. There is a rock garden meeting next week and he’s going to that.

Back to seeds, he’s been struggling with germination of seeds of Amsonia eastwoodiana and Amsonia tomentosa. (Some botanists say they’re the same species.)
Seeds germinate very quickly but then “damp off”, as they say overseas. The guy I live with doesn’t know why.
These are growing in sand.

So the latest idea is to let these keep growing in the posts, and try some direct sowing of germinated seeds. He sowed some seeds directly a month ago and nothing has happened. This new method has worked for other seeds. Seeds go into a wet coffee filter, then into a freezer bag, closed shut or not, and then on the heating mat. 

This is the result a couple of days later.These were planted into the “sand pile” just today. We’ll see what happens.

That’s pretty much it, gardening wise. No more LPs have arrived in the mail, and not much of anything else has happened.
There was a considerable amount of moping, yesterday, and I thought I would share the reason why.
The guy I live with was just doing things on the computer, looking for something, the way you do (I can never find anything interesting), and, well, remember how we talked about Radiohead a while back, and how much his wife loved them?
He’s entering the second decade of being alone here, without her, and so this song struck him. His wife claimed not to like the original. But this is a different version which you might enjoy even if you don’t like Radiohead (which we don’t want to know).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeFiIjMIlRw

The guy I live with said that Hildegard of Bingen would not have known what harmony was (in the musical sense that we do today), “But, like, whatever”.

Now that really is all for today. The pace of our life has slowed down quite a bit, which we both like. (I won’t talk about what the guy I live with said when he was trying to contact the Internal Revenue Service the other day, about his mom’s estate tax returns…)
I’ll leave you with a picture of me just hanging out in my Kitchen Fort.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Weedy Jungle”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose.Really not very much has been happening here. The guy I live with has been pulling weeds almost every day. He said that pulling weeds can get very old, very quickly, and decided to name our garden “Weedopolis”, which I think is fairly excellent.
He said if you give something a name you can meet it head-on.
You can see in the picture above that I’m helping, in my usual fashion.

We got over an inch (2.5cm) of rain Saturday before last, like I said in my last post, just in one day. It rained and rained, and there was no thunder, which I thought was hard to believe.
When the rain stopped, in the evening, we went out to look at the creek.I thought about going in, but the guy I live with said not to, because the water wasn’t necessarily clean. And I might have been swept away.

Maybe you’re like this too, I don’t know, but the guy I live with sometimes frets about plants in the garden. There have been quite a few that he thought had died, like an ancient Daphne jasminea from the cliffs about Delphi, where the oracle hung out, but just the other day he saw new growth on it. It might take a while before it grows back completely.

Even better, so I hear, is that the little Quercus hypoleucoides, which was doing okay all winter until spring arrived and it got way colder than it should have, is coming back.
The first time the guy I live with saw this oak, which has white on the underside of its leaves like the specific epithet suggests, he thought it was an oleander.Another one, one that upset him a lot, was the tecoma, Tecoma stans, that his wife grew from seeds purchased from Southwestern Native Seeds a lot of years ago.
Both tecomas (the other one is ‘Orange Jubilee’, I think) were left outside by mistake when it got way below freezing one night this past April.
The guy I live with felt pretty strange about possibly having killed the shrub which has been here for so long. It had been frozen before and come back, as well as having lost as its leaves to drought, but this was pretty extreme.
And yet….Talking about strangeness, which seems to be the defining characteristic of our daily lives now (to say the very least), today is the day that the guy I live with retired from the phone company thirteen years ago.
To say his retirement didn’t go the way he hoped is another understatement, but I’ve talked about that enough, I think.

More LPs have been arriving in the mail. The guy I live with explained that these two, in particular, were reissues, because the original pressings are a lot more expensive. Both he and his wife liked Robbie Basho; she picked up a copy of his very first album, which now costs like a thousand dollars in good condition.
The sound on these is not hugely great, but that’s not the point. 

The second one was one of the guy I live with’s particular favorites.  Just a sample. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG7nmUOGQk4

Though really he liked the albums with just guitar even better. I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t bore our readers with such things but the guy I live with said it’s a diversion from the endless weeding and complaining about weeds that goes on here.

We also have three tomato plants. The guy I live with keeps saying he’s going to plant them, but hasn’t, yet. They were going to go out in the “way back” border, but that’s over a hundred feet from the house, which means carrying a watering can all the way out there, or filling one of the trash cans with water and dunking a watering can in it. That method is okay, but still a lot of work.

I do believe that’s it for today. I might have forgotten something, but I can’t remember what.

Until next time, then.