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 the snow, and other stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “Colchicum Time”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m helping in the garden, as you can see. The guy I live with actually did some work in the garden today. It was a beautiful day, and he said why not, and so we did.
He’s been working on emptying out some of the troughs that are around the base of the honey locust. The tree needs to be cut down, but the troughs have to be moved first.
Most of the plants that were growing in the troughs died this summer. They needed almost daily watering and didn’t get anything like that.
Seeing all the dead plants made him kind of sad but they were holdovers from the time when there were two people working in the garden, and so he said “Whatever”, and scooped out the soil from a few of the troughs, so they could be moved. They’re really heavy. Heavier with the soil in them, too.

The owls have moved; we’re not sure where they went.  They must not have liked the snow. They were sitting on top of fences  near the end of the path. We got some pictures before they moved.
You can see both of them in the next picture. The other one is sitting on the next fence over. 

And, like I think it was on the news everywhere, it snowed here, last Tuesday. Here’s a picture of it, also at the end of the path (just to the right of where the fences are in the pictures above).It snowed, and then it melted. It didn’t even freeze.
There was still snow in the foothills a day later.It was mostly rain, believe it or not, in the form of drizzle, all Monday night and into Tuesday, and then it changed to snow.
The guy I live with left the tomato plants outside, because they’d only produced two tomatoes, which a squirrel ate, so it didn’t matter, but the plants weren’t harmed.

The first colchicums are up now, after the rain and snow. This is ‘Innocence’, which was just planted a week or so ago. There are other ‘Innocence’ which have been here for much longer, but the guy I live with wanted more, even though it’s kind of a dumb name.
Autumn-flowering bulbs especially seem to flower a bit earlier the first year they’re planted, by the way.  The older bulbs (really corms) aren’t quite this far advanced.They came from Daffodils and More, if you wanted to know.

Oh, and then there are the hummingbirds. They’re starting to leave now, so we see a lot more of them. The guy I live with makes new sugar syrup for them every day, because we don’t have very many flowers they like. (That’s sort of a sad story in itself, but it has a lot to do with needing to water much, much more for hummingbird plants that would flower now.  Back in the old days there were a lot more red-flowered plants at this time of year, but there was also more watering done.)
There’s a hummingbird in this picture, at the feeder.

So that’s really all I have. It snowed, it melted. And now we have autumn-flowering bulbs to look forward to. The guy I live with said it was nice to have something to look forward to this year.

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 stuff that’s been happening here, which, really, is not a whole lot at all. You may remember me from such posts as “Still More Summer”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Pretty sophisticated, huh? I mean if you ignore the condition that the ramp is in. The guy I live with’s late wife built that for Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, when he got to be really ancient.
The guy I live with occasionally says stuff about replacing the ramp, but I think he’s too sentimental to do that. Since there are two sliding glass doors, the what I guess you would call “stoop” is shorter than usual and so a ramp was necessary. It is nice to have a ramp of one’s own, no matter how derelict it’s getting.

Anyway. I know this might be hard to believe, but it rained here.
Not what you would call a soaking rain; a little over three millimeters. But at least it was rain.

It’s cooled off a little, though still hot, and still dry, despite the rain (if you know about rain, you know that three millimeters is hardly anything, though the guy I live with was still grateful for it).
Some plants have been doing perfectly well despite everything.

Sedum ‘Matrona’.

Sedum ‘Xenox’.

Sedum ‘Desert Red’.

I guess you really call these Hylotelephium or something like that, but we still call them sedums. The ‘Desert Red’ is a lot redder than the picture suggests, by the way.

The other gardening thing–and there haven’t been very many gardening things to think about here at all, what with the heat and drought and the fact that the guy I live with hasn’t been very motivated at all, is the desert willow seedlings. 

I know they look pretty hopeless, but in fact most of them are doing okay.
So many plants in the garden are not doing anything like okay that having some desert willow seedlings is something to feel good about.

There have been some other things. The guy I live with didn’t go to the plant sale. He got a very late start, and then after he drove off, realized he’d forgotten his hat, and was so discouraged that he turned around and drove home.
This is something that’s been bothering him ever since the first stay-at-home order here: he hasn’t gone out very much, and every time he does, he forgets something, like his wallet, or his mask, or something that, say, last year, he would never have forgotten. And so he feels weird about this.

The other thing, which the guy I live with would agree was much more important, was my what you might call digestive issues. I started having some problems, and I could tell that the guy I live with was pretty concerned, and he even called my doctor.
He told me that he was very experienced with this sort of thing, like when Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, was sick, or Slipper before him, but at the same time had to keep reminding himself that he could get in the car and drive to the doctor’s. It’s not very far at all, but this hesitation was because he hasn’t gone out very much at all; going out has become a little strange to him.
He found a can of sweet potato in the pantry and gave me some of that, and after a couple of days everything was back to normal.
As normal as things could be, these days.

Since, as maybe you can tell, we kind of value continuity, it was pleasant to see that the owls have returned. 

And we’re still seeing striped kitties on our midnight walks. I realize this is an awful picture. (I didn’t take it.)

So that’s what’s been going on. This and that, I guess you would say.
It’s not supposed to be so ridiculously roasting hot next week, and that alone is good enough for me.

Until next time, then.