the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to tell you a few totally true stories which you might not believe, but they are in fact completely true. You may remember me from such posts as “The Haunted Toaster”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.  Yawning. There’s someone else in the picture, but I’m the interesting one.This might be a better picture. (It would have been even better had someone’s shirt not been unbuttoned…)It’s been raining. Raining and raining and, yes, raining. Not continually, just on and off. The garden is soaked.

So the first thing that happened. I should say right at the start that there are no pictures accompanying these stories.  Which may be a relief, depending upon your perspective.

The guy I live with was going to see his friend day before yesterday, but when he went to open the garage door, there was a very large reptile in the way. The way he tells it, it was super large. He tried to get it to move, but it immediately went into defensive pose. It was just a bullsnake, but I hear they can fake like they’re rattlesnakes. I’ve seen a couple, and they were startlingly large. Eventually he got the snake to move, but it went up into the inside rim of the car’s left rear tire.

He didn’t want to run over it, so, naturally, he started to talk to it. “Like anyone would”, he said. It finally slithered away, under the vintage mattress that the guy I live with still hasn’t called about, to have it removed for recycling.

I didn’t get to see the snake. Maybe that was fortunate for me. The guy I live with did say it’s probably still somewhere around here, and maybe getting larger and larger.

That’s just great.

Today he went to get his hair cut, as you can see, and there was a dog there, which he said was very friendly. I got a little jealous, until I heard that the dog’s name was the same as the barber’s. Fortunately the barber cut the guy I live with’s hair instead of the dog doing it. Though that might have been funny.

And then, and this was really, really scary, after he got home and turned on the new laptop, to check mail and stuff, I was just minding my business when all of a sudden there was another large reptile that absolutely insisted it had to slither into the kitchen. That’s right, slither into the kitchen. My personal kitchen, with my fort and water bowl.

As you might imagine, I totally freaked out held my ground, fiercely guarding my personal kitchen, but outside on the patio with the sliding glass door closed, while the guy I live with tried to catch the snake with a butterfly net, which he did, but not after the snake had completely stunk up the kitchen in fright (they do that, you know). and then it was carried out into the front yard. It was a wandering garter snake (Thamnophis elegans vagrans). Harmless. But, in context, scary.

Well, whew. I think this has been enough for us, for a while.

And since I have some plant pictures, I might show the latest annual here, which the guy I live with really likes. It’s called Orlaya grandiflora. (The leaves are those carrot leaves in the upper right.)

He sowed seeds of this last winter, and since it’s been so rainy, the plants are very happy. He said we need more of this.

I suppose that’s all for today. There better not be anything else slithering around, at least for a while, but I’m going to stand guard, for sure.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Shapeless Ones”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose. You might be able to see how jungly the garden has gotten with all the rain we’ve had. I mean not rain like places where it rains a lot get, but rain like places where it doesn’t rain much (like here) get.

The guy I live with has been weeding, in preparation for the garden being on tour weekend after next. Now he says he wishes he hadn’t volunteered for that, because he has to do something. He would rather do nothing. (That includes going to his ninth tax appointment of the year, two days ago.)

I guess all that can be done is just keep weeding.

The grass right in front of me, in the picture above, is Achnatherum calamogrostis. The guy I live with really wanted this one, so he got a plant about nine years ago, and now it’s started seeding all over the place. I guess there’s a lesson to be learned. Not that that will make any difference.

The guy I live with posted another picture of himself in full weeding gear, with weeder in hand, on Facebook, so I thought I would show you a slightly different picture. He does look serious. I tried to say that looking serious won’t have any effect on the weeds, but decided not to.

When he had his eyes tested earlier this year, the eye doctor said that there were little spots in his eyes which were sun damage, so he wears sunglasses as much as possible now. He wore them before, but not as much as now. He said the sunglasses create an air of mystery. I’m a little doubtful.He said his wife was against him getting the machete, but he got it anyway, and when they chopped up dead tree branches she was surprised at how efficient it was. “See?”, he said, smugly. But then he noticed the steel was too soft to be cutting up tree branches, and there were big gouges in the blade. “See?”, she said.

Well anyway. This was a good winter for weeds, but a bad one for a lot of woody plants. I’m not going to show a picture of the almost-completely-dead Kentucky coffee tree, or the half-dead honey locust, or any of the other similarly almost dead shrubs, because there isn’t much point, and the guy I live with just says “Whatever”, the way he does.
The mesquite, though is doing really well (just like the desert willows are). That’s Philadelphus lewisii on the right, in flower. 

It has thorns.You can see the house needs painting. The guy I live with was going to do the whole house last October, but his mom died, and then the cancer stuff, so it looks like this.

And the mesquite will get the dead branches removed when the guy I live with feels like spending time with heavy gloves and maybe even safety glasses.

Penstemon brandegei is flowering. There are only a couple of plants left so he should probably collect seed and sow it in the front yard. This is a huge penstemon, by the way.There are a few plants of Salvia recognita in the front yard. They’re pinker than the phone pictures show.

The rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ has started to flower. It had a good winter. This picture isn’t very focused at all.The seed pods of Eremurus spectabilis are pretty cool-looking. So, as I said, it was a pretty nice day today. No thunder. Plenty of sun. Even late in the day, the clouds didn’t turn into anything scary.Oh, I should also say that we got a new laptop. The other one was barely working, and eventually the guy I live with had to use another computer monitor, attached to the laptop, which made for quite a clutter on the kitchen table.

I think that’s it for today. Not really much of anything, but that’s the story of our life here. Not much of anything. Just the way we like it.

Until next time, then.