the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular but totally roasting host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you all about how incredibly super ultra unbelievably roasting hot I am. You may remember me from such roasting hot posts as “Beyond Super Roasting”, “Still Roasting”, “Into The Garden, Endlessly Roasting”, “Ultra Roasting”, “Super Totally Extra Roasting Hot”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

Really, this is the only time I’ve been even remotely comfortable, except for the times when I get to get totally soaked with the hose.
It’s been so hot neither of us have been able to do much of anything, except at night. Right now, on Monday afternoon, it’s 96F (36C) and eight percent humidity. Record high temperatures for September, here, with no end in sight. The guy I live with said it was like a furnace, but I think he exaggerated a little, the way he does.
You can see some of the dead branches in the honey locust in the picture, there. The guy I live with says he might have the tree cut down, and something else, like an apple tree, planted there instead.

A lot of plants in the garden have died this year. The guy I live with walks around the garden sometimes, in the evening, and says goodbye to old, familiar plants which have been burned to a crisp. He has been watering some, too.

It’s been so hot here that we mostly do things when the sun goes down. We have a new thing in the upstairs bedroom.
The guy I live with got it when his knee was hurting and he had to lie in bed for a long time. It’s not a very big TV, and you can see, and he’s been watching something called “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” late at night. He said he watched that years ago when it first came out.
This is me looking at the TV when it was first turned on.
The TV feet are duct-taped to the top of my upstairs fort so the TV won’t fall off.
He said this was a valuable addition to our modern lifestyle, though it was not very expensive at all. I guess it’s emotionally valuable.

So yesterday, even though it was roasting, roasting hot out, the guy I live with went over to Kelly Grummons’ garden because there were plants on sale, and he could hardly resist. If you Google “cold hardy cactus” the website will come up with all sorts of things on it.

There was an agave, finished flowering and forming seeds. The stalk needed a little help.

This is an opuntia he got. Not very friendly-looking. It’s going to live in a pot, out in the front yard.The guy I live with said he hadn’t visited this garden since he and his wife came over to take pictures for “the book”, and that a lot had changed, the way lots do, and that this might quickly become one of his favorite gardens.
It isn’t very far away, either.
He did almost pass out from the heat, but that’s another story.

In other news, it’s time to start seeing katydids. And so we have been.

I of course wanted to try it, since I’ve never had katydid, but the guy I live with said not to, the way he always does, and anyway the katydid flew away right as I was about to close my terrifically fierce, vise-like jaws on it.
He said it’s hard not to think of katydids without a tear or two coming to his eyes. He and his wife would walk along the sidewalk where we saw this one, at night, trying to find katydids with a flashlight after they heard one. They aren’t always easy to see, that way.
There are books like this, downstairs.
”
But anyway we’ve been seeing katydids. Sometimes we hear them.

We’ve also been hearing a lot of cicadas. The guy I live with really likes them, though the incredible heat lately has putting a damper on a lot of things he might like. It doesn’t seem like September at all.

The hummingbirds are still stopping at the flowers and feeders. Maybe you can see one, here.

I guess that’s all I have. It’s so hot the days aren’t much fun. I know that the guy I live with is watching me to make sure I don’t get overheated.
I’ll leave you with this picture of me guarding the front door. You can see that what’s called the “marble-topped table” has almost lost its marble, because of how I run around the table to be all fierce like you see here, but the guy I live with always pushes the marble back, so it won’t get broken. It’s Italian green marble, if you wanted to know. An heirloom.

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 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.