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 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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about this and that. You may remember me from such posts as “Of Orioles And Rain”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m in my fort because it’s been raining. All day long. No, seriously. The guy I live with said the rain will make it easier to pull the smooth brome. Maybe you can see what he’s up against, here.It does give him something to do, if he gets motivated.
He said, early on in the lockdown that he would try to get some things done, like learn how to use the little Fujifilm camera, and also the camera on the phone.
He took these two pictures with the phone, the other day.
This is Clematis hirsutissima:Finally having a good year after being here for about twenty years. It likes more water than it gets.
And Acanthus syriacus, forming a flower bud.

I know it’s Sunday, but the post office delivered this box today. The guy I live with was pretty happy. And, no, it’s not decaf. That was just the box they sent the coffee (French Roast) in.
And more LPs have been arriving.

The guy I live with mostly listens to classical music, and has since he was eight (they had music back then, if you can believe that), but there was a time, right about the time he met his wife, that he was really into “new age” music.
He went to this record store where there were–and I kind of shudder to think of this–cats all over the place. He says when he was leafing through the records, there might be a cat sitting on the records and you would have to gently move the cat aside to be able to keep browsing.
Before they met, his wife went to the store, too, and it’s remotely possible that they were in the store at the same time, without ever noticing each other. He says he would have noticed her.
He bought a whole bunch of these Windham Hill records at the record store back then and is pretty glad to have them back.  Well, two of them. The music is kind of repetitious, he says, but so what.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eClQNCK2jTQ

These came in the mail last week. They spent some time in “quarantine” out in the garage, and now they’re downstairs. These are the headphones. Eventually he’ll get the rest of the equipment so he can listen to the LPs. 

So, anyway, if you’ve been following the blog for any length of time, you know what today is.
The guy I live with went down into his wife’s studio and sat there for a while. 
She’s been gone for eleven years, today.

That’s pretty much it. It’s still raining. Orioles are visiting the feeder but I tend to chase them away–not on purpose of course–but maybe we can post a picture eventually.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me patrolling the garden yesterday, when it wasn’t raining.

Until next time, then.