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 all the news. You may remember me from such posts as “In The Doghouse”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I know I look pretty serious, and I did get into trouble, which I’ll tell you about in a bit, but that was a few days ago. The guy I live with said that a serious pose might be good once in a while. Well, it snowed last Thursday. We got maybe four inches of snow. I thought it was pretty great. The guy I live with said it didn’t matter to him one way or the other, though the autumn color here is now completely spoiled, as it often is, because it gets so cold “too early” in the year. Lots of trees have brown, crispy leaves hanging on them.

The garden didn’t suffer much and after the snow melted, which it had by Saturday, the crocuses and colchicums started flowering again.

The guy I live with and his friend went out the day before to do some stuff. I had to stay home.
They went to a Mexican restaurant, downtown, that was really tiny. La Pasadita, it was called. The food was pretty good. It was an old house that was built in a triangle where three streets intersected, so the south end was kind of pointy. Then they went to City Floral, a greenhouse that was built in 1911. The guy I live with said he just wanted to make a kind of pilgrimage there because his wife used to like shopping in the gift area, especially before Halloween.
They have a very good selection of garden pots, which you can see there. He completely forgot that he wanted to look at the pots. I guess another trip will be in order.  He did buy a couple of Jellycat stuffed animals, for Christmas presents.

This would have been my entire post, except for the thing that happened.

For almost a year he had been talking about getting a nice blanket for the upstairs bedroom. The blanket that was on the bed was getting pretty ratty, and it was white, “not a very friendly color”, he said. He had been looking at this Pendleton blanket, and finally decided to get one, even though it was really not cheap at all. More of a throw than a blanket, I guess.

So the blanket arrived in the mail last Friday, at about five in the afternoon. He put it on the bed, and we both lay on the bed for a while, until he discovered that I had chewed a hole in the brand-new expensive blanket.

I really don’t know why I did that. I ran to hide in my kitchen fort.
He was at least this angry:
He was upstairs fuming for a while, then all of a sudden he came downstairs, got me out of my fort, and we went upstairs to snuggle on the bed and watch TV. Everything was okay. He doesn’t stay angry for very long. The hole isn’t very big. He knows it’s there, though. And so do I.
We’re both pretty sure there’s a moral to this story, too, but neither of us can figure out quite what it could be. Maybe just one of those things where you know there’s a moral, and don’t know what it is, so you just keep going with on with life.

So I guess that’s all for today. 

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 provide just another post. The guy I live with said why not, and I agreed. You may remember me from such posts as “The Ghost In The Grapevine”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. It’s been so dry here, it’s dry. The guy I live with has been watering, some, but it doesn’t seem to help all that much. Maybe it does and he’s just being negative. You might be surprised to know that he can be negative. Sometimes he is.
You can see here how dry it is; this is me (if you didn’t know) on my walk. I’m looking at something. The other day it was kind of drizzly, which is like totally weird for here. He said there used to be drizzle, and mist, sometimes, but not any more.
I think we got about .000001 inches of water from the drizzle that day.
But the sunsets here have been very nice. This is one of them. I’m actually in this picture but you have to look hard. There are a lot of unhappy plants here right now. This is an agastache. The guy I live with planted them for the hummingbirds but the agastaches wilt every day. And one of his favorite plants, Stachys byzantina ‘Helene von Stein’, or ‘Big Ears’, looks like this:
Well, it did before it got watered. Afterwards it perked up. I guess I would too.
This is a Salvia greggii that the guy I live with dug up from the garden because it wilted every time it got dry (so, a lot), and it turned out that the roots hadn’t left the nursery root ball, so he gave it the “super genius” method for a month or so and the roots grew into the coarse sand you see there, so today it got planted again.Here are a couple of plants of Holodiscus dumosus he got at the plant sale a couple of Fridays ago, and they need to be repotted for a while before the go into the ground. There was a big plant of the holodiscus here, for years, but it died. The guy I live with looked on the Forest Service website and it said there that the shrubs only live for about thirty years, and that seemed about right, so for once he didn’t think he had done something wrong. And then something a bit more interesting, maybe: Hyacinthoides (or Scilla) lingulata emerging. It’s an autumn-flowering bulb from like Algeria which probably isn’t hardy but we grow it anyway. The guy I live with said it’s kind of cool to think of autumn-flowering bulbs from North Africa. There are a few species of cyclamen from places like Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, that flower in the autumn, but they’re not hardy here. (There’s also a cyclamen from Somalia.) There were more bulbs but he dug them all up so he could share some.

Several days ago the guy I live with went out to the “trough patio” to go through the seed pots there. Not too many had survived the hail of last year combined with the total neglect they got this summer, but there were some seedlings left. All penstemons. He said he might not grow anything from seed again, except maybe for grasses and wildflowers, but when he says stuff like that I always think he’s just saying things.

Speaking of cyclamen, they’re starting to flower too. Mostly Cyclamen cilicium. Maybe you can’t see them in the picture here but there are some. Colchicums too. Oh, that conifer, the little limber pine with two trunks, is growing in one of the troughs. That came from Jerry Morris, with no name. The very blue, even though the camera makes it look super blue, dwarf blue spruce, also came from Jerry, and had a tag that said ‘Blue Beaut’. Just to the right of this is the locust tree, which is going to have to be cut down this winter. It’s being killed by “borers” or something like that. About half the branches are dead. Aside from the expense, the guy I live with is kind of indifferent about this. The tree was here when he and his wife moved in, but he always thought the pods were a nuisance. I like the tree because squirrels like it, and they’re fun to bark at. Oh well.
If you go back to the picture of the cyclamen you can’t see, maybe you can see the condition of the fence on the left. Squirrels have chewed it to shreds. Maybe you don’t think of squirrels as fence-destroying chewing things, but they are.

I have a couple of pictures of the garden here. The “lawn”, really. At least this one is.This is the “rain garden”.  You can see the spindle tree, Euonymus europaea, is totally wilted. It’s actually behind the rain garden.  Bluish Quercus grisea on the left. The iron owl came from his mom’s yard. I guess that’s it. There was probably something major that I was supposed to say, but I can’t think what it was, and the guy I live with has no clue at all. As usual. 

Until next time, then.