the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the roastingly hot purebred border collie, here today to tell you just how hot I’ve been, and about some of my adventures. You may remember me from such posts as “A Smoky Day”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose,  on a hot and smoky afternoon.It still hasn’t rained, and none is in the forecast. The guy I live with has been watering a bit, but not enough, he says. Even the local residents are hot.I’ve mostly been lying around, roasting. I’m not sure I’ve ever been this hot for so long.

The sunsets have been pretty spectacular, though. This isn’t a really good picture. There are things going on in the garden. A few things, anyway. There’s this little oak seedling:And some cyclamen. This is Cyclamen fatrense, flowering just about on time. It got a little water last week.And the big shrubby buckwheat, Eriogonum corymbosum. So that’s the non-striped news.

As you no doubt know, I’ve been getting three walks a day, with the third walk some time after 10:30 at night. It isn’t nearly so hot then.
Well, last night, our adventure quickly became a striped one. These aren’t very good pictures but you can see what I mean. See that black spot in the center, way back by the trees?The striped kitty headed off to the right, to hide behind the trees, I guess.I wanted to get closer but the guy I live with said no. When we got to the sidewalk we could see where the striped kitty went. I know this is a super blurry picture but you can still see it, trotting down the sidewalk. Imagine walking down the sidewalk and meeting a striped kitty.So then I wanted to go back, and we did. There are things to check out on the canal road which are more interesting than sidewalk things.
We were walking along the canal road, on the way towards home; the guy I live with had his headlamp on, because we’ve seen more than one striped kitty here, and all of a sudden we saw a pair of glowing eyes coming towards us.
The guy I live with said just to stand where I was, and not do anything, so I didn’t.
The eyes kept coming closer.
Finally they stopped, looked in our direction, and headed off on the path on the south side of the canal, then turned and went on the path we walk on, behind all the houses.
It was a coyote. So of course it went along the coyote path.
But that was pretty scary until we knew what it was.

That’s been the last few days. Hot and smoky. Not much else going on.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today mostly to talk about me, so, as I need hardly tell you,  this is going to be an excellent post. You may remember me from such posts as “Mostly About Me”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see the difference between the mowed and unmowed smooth brome. There are grasshoppers everywhere. I mean there are like clouds of grasshoppers hopping all over the place, including on me, not only in the garden, but especially on my daytime walks.  As you know, I really hate being landed on. The guy I live with says I’m like a grasshopper landing zone. I’d rather not be.
But there’s stuff to look at in the sea of smooth brome. You know, just things. The way there are.
It’s been unbelievably hot here. Yesterday it was a little cooler, but today we’re back to hot weather. Right now it’s ninety degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-two Celsius), nine percent humidity, totally overcast and dark, with not a breath of air moving.
The guy I live with says all this still air gives him a case of the creeps. I tried to picture what a case of the creeps might be like, and how it would be delivered, but couldn’t.

Our part of Colorado is now under what they say is severe drought. It’s super dry here (as I guess it would be to be described as severe drought.)
Look at the area in the “way back” border that was weeded something like three months ago.Or part of the field where the grass doesn’t grow because it gets mowed so much.The grass is just totally crispy here, but it’s been mowed. You can see the green unmowed part in the sun, by the creek, which is dry.The guy I live with has been watering, a little, but it doesn’t seem to do any good at all. There are plants in the garden that can deal with this, naturally, but quite a few that the guy I live with thought would be okay that aren’t. It’s pretty nice in the mornings, though we wake up later than most people, or so I hear, but that’s because we stay up pretty late.
When the guy I live with was working, he worked the late shift, so he got used to staying up much later than most gardeners do. Then when Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, got older, it was very nice to having the fan blow cool night air into the bedroom. Sometimes we have to wait until all the strong smells from the neighbors go away, and that can be pretty late indeed.
So the guy I live with, as I mentioned on earlier posts, decided I get to go on a third walk, late at night.

Sometimes I stop and stare into the darkness for a long time. The guy I live with isn’t thrilled by this. He says it’s “unsettling”. I have better eyesight in the dark than he does, so I’m not necessarily looking at a nameless horror like he says I could be. Maybe just a bunny.

Guess what we saw late last night? The guy I live with said not to try to walk past the striped kitty, because home is on the street you can see in the background, so we kind of moved back and forth until the striped kitty sauntered off to the right. It’s hard for me not to appear super-toughly threatening, but the guy I live with is the opposite of that, so we didn’t have any smelly encounter.
It was just another nice walk at midnight.
I’ll leave you with another unfocused picture of me looking at a leaky drip irrigation system on the canal road.

Until next time, then.