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 a few things. You may remember me from such posts as “The Nameless Horror”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a not terribly characteristic pose at all. It is me, though. On the right.The guy I live with, on the left there, has been practicing smiling ever since he got his new set of teeth last year. It was something he put off, the teeth, I mean (well, and the smiling, too), for a long time, really, and that got to him because he usually doesn’t put off things like that. But he got his new teeth and now his lips are all chapped so smiling isn’t as easy as you might think. He can do it, though.
I think I have a bit of a smile, too.

I have a few things to talk about.
The first one is that we noticed there were comments on the last post that didn’t show any responses. We’re not sure why that happened, but it did. The thing is, all the comments come under one email, with this new program, and so sometimes they get lost. And sometimes we do respond but the responses never show up on the post. We have gotten another email program and so maybe that will help.
We’re both hugely sorry since it seems rude not to respond.

Another thing, and this is super creepy, though not as creepy as what the title of today’s post is about, is you know how the guy I live with said he was going to post a picture of himself on Facebook with nail polish on his fingers? Well, he went back and forth on that, and finally painted them, though it wasn’t easy because he doesn’t have much experience with nail polish, and then…..he learned that this was a symbol for something not very pleasant at all. So, whew. No nail polish.

The other day, speaking of color and stuff, the guy I live with bought two purple-leafed sand cherries to add some contrast to the tan grasses that are everywhere. The sand cherries will probably die of drought but he got them anyway. They haven’t been planted; just sitting in their pots, for now. Maybe you can see them, there. Most of the garden looks pretty frazzled right now. It did rain, the day before yesterday, about half an inch, and some of that soaked into the ground. Not into the parts of the garden that are clay soil, though. The gravel garden is looking better than any other part of the garden because all the water soaked in. Maybe you can’t see that.
We do have a tendency to show pictures where you can’t actually see what we’re trying to show, but, well, that blurry part straight ahead, in this picture, is the gravel garden. A pile of gravel. Behind the mullein. Maybe this is a better picture. Probably not, though it has me in it, and that makes it good, automatically.Okay, well, whatever. The gravel garden is doing just fine.

The guy I live with got some colchicums in the mail yesterday, and tried to dig holes. He was out of practice working in the garden, since he hasn’t done much for a couple of months, and thought that since it had rained, digging might be easy.
It wasn’t.

He had to use his “perennial spade”, or whatever it’s called, dig a hole, fill it with water, and then when the water drained away, or, really, got absorbed by the surrounding soil, he dug some more. Rain doesn’t percolate into clay soil the way it does into gravel or sand. It has to rain a lot for that to happen, and it doesn’t rain a lot here. The colchicum corms were huge. These are ‘Innocence’, which is one of the most beautiful. It’s white. There are pictures on the blog, somewhere, if you want to look at them. They got planted.

You might wonder at the soil here, and the lack of shade, but an authority on things like colchicums said that this climate was more like the climate the colchicums grew in than what you might call “traditional” gardening climates, so he thought this was worth a try. The colchicums that are already here, and there are a lot, are in shade; maybe too much shade.

Oh. The title of today’s post. Well….before I get going I should tell you that there will be no pictures of the thing I’m about to talk about.

I was lying out on the patio, of an evening, the way I often do, because it gets extremely cool and pleasant, most nights, and it was that, on the evening in question.
I started to get excited about something moving on the patio, and the guy I live with went out to see what I was so interested in. He said it was a mouse.

Then he looked closer. Its body was as big as a mouse, but I knew mice didn’t have eight legs. It was a very large, and I do mean very large, wolf spider.

The guy I live with got a broom and sort of herded the gigantic spider away from me, because I thought I might taste it, just a little. The guy I live with said no, a whole bunch of times, but I still wanted to, because you never know.
After about an hour, with me locked inside the kitchen, the guy I live with was able to get the spider out into the garden, where it belonged.

The reason, if you’re wondering, why the guy I live with didn’t just pass out right then and there is because his wife liked things like this, and once caught a huge spider that was on the staircase, put it in a terrarium, and fed it raw meat over the winter. She let it go the following spring.

But he was still totally creeped out by the visitor. The unwelcome guest, you might say.

Here’s a picture of a welcome guest. The guy I live with bought some agastaches to grow in pots, so they would get the water they need here. (They don’t survive in the garden without watering.)
This isn’t such a bad picture for just a phone picture. Look right above the flagstone path.
I guess that’s all I have for today. It was kind of a lot, considering how little has been happening here.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, on my walk, watching a little kid head right toward me. Fortunately there was an adult, there, too, so I was safe.

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 tell you how incredibly hot I’ve been, and not much else. You may remember me from such heat-related posts as “Into The Garden, Endlessly Roasting”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I lie here a lot, as maybe you noticed from my last post. I can take a nap, and yet be super alert in case anything happens in the back yard. Not that much does, because it’s been so hot.

This morning, though, when the guy I live with finally got out of bed, he was surprised to see me here.

He said that it was very common to see the other purebred border collies in this chair in the morning, and so while this was different, for me, it made him feel good to see me liking this chair as much as the other dogs. I also like sleeping on the couch at night, and under the living room window.
The one thing I don’t do is sleep on the bed with the guy I live with, because he takes up way too much of the bed. He says that’s fine, and that when winter comes I’ll probably be back up on the bed again.

Even my walks are hot, though the evening one is sometimes not so hot. Every now and then I get to go on a third walk, at night, and that’s pretty nice.
I discovered something odd on one of my walks. The guy I live with said these might be bulrushes.They were more in focus than that; I’m not sure what happened. But whatever; they’re growing in this tiny pond made by water coming off the parking lot right next to them. The guy I live with said I couldn’t go in the water because it was gross.
There were also these:You can see how gross the water is. The guy I live with said he didn’t think it was here, in this tiny pond, but there’s been an outbreak of blue-green algae in places and so I don’t get to go in any water. I hardly do anyway. I went in the canal, just a while ago, but not for long. We purebred border collies are not especially aquatic.

Believe it or not, that’s almost all there is to report. It’s hot every day. The house isn’t so bad, with the fans going, but outside it’s really hot. And dry.

This is pretty much just a post to let you know we’re still around. The guy I live with really hasn’t done much of any gardening because the effects of the hormone therapy wear him out quickly. He has set a sprinkler once or twice. The heat and dryness seem to wipe out any good effects the watering has, though.

I do have some pictures of the garden, taken at sunset, or close to it, if you’d like to see them.

The first few pictures have more light in them.  But you can see that the light in the laundry room is on.

This is that Artemisia ludoviciana ‘Silver Frost’ that you see in almost every picture. 

There’s a bat in this picture. 

Well, that’s really all I have, for now. Not very much at all. I’ll leave you with a picture of me on my evening walk, trying to decide whether to keep going or turn around and go a different way.

Until next time, then.