the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about the three out of four.
You may remember me from such posts as “The Box”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been so hot here that the best time for me is in the evening, lounging on the patio rug.

We’ve had no rain (ten drops almost every day don’t count) for twenty-eight days now, and the guy I live with isn’t happy about this. He has been watering, though; much more than he usually does.
The “blazing star” (Mentzelia decapetala) isn’t as tall as some plants have been, but you can see it still has a lot of buds.
It flowers at night and this was the best picture he could get last night. Tonight’s pictures weren’t as good.
He took a picture of the Colorado four o’clock, Mirabilis multiflora, as we started on my evening walk.
We’ve been seeing a lot of hummingbirds in our garden lately. I mean a whole lot.
The guy I live with had a feeder out for most of the summer, but the last time he went to clean and refill it, it was full of dead giant ants, which made him feel bad, so he decided not to put up the feeder any more.
Because of all the watering, we have lots of plants in flower that hummingbirds like.
The most common hummingbird here is the broadtailed, Selasphorus platycercus, and if the guy I live with had had his phone camera on he would have gotten a nice close-up picture of one just today.
We also have black-chinned hummingbirds, Archilochus alexandri; they like to dive-bomb the guy I live with, and me, sometimes.
You can see a picture of a black-chinned on the post “How To Avoid Gardening”.

Also today, since he obviously didn’t learn his lesson (he is kind of old), the guy I live with was standing around looking at some agastaches that needed watering, and a broad-tailed hummingbird came to look at the flowers, and it was chased away by a rufous hummingbird, Selasphorus rufus. The rufus are kind of bossy and territorial but we don’t see them that often.

The only one we haven’t seen, and the guy I live with thinks he’s only seen one once or twice, is the calliope hummingbirds, Selasphorus calliope.
This is the smallest bird in North America and we would only see one when it was on its migration south to Mexico.
The migration is probably starting about now, which may explain why we’re seeing so many hummingbirds (we do have an open bar for them), so maybe we’ll see a calliope.

These are the only pictures we have for now.
And that’s all I have for today. We’ve seen three out of the four possible species of hummingbird that come to our garden.
That almost makes up for how hot and dry it is.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about weevils, and not much else. You may remember me from such posts as “Under The Arbor”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m sitting under the kitchen table, enjoying the air from the swamp cooler, because it’s been hot.
It’s been hot for so, so long. We had a few nice cool days when we thought it might rain, but we only got a few drops.
We’ve had a few drops of rain almost every day for the last three weeks but nothing substantial.
This is really boring, and stressful for the guy I live with.

A week or so ago the guy I live with noticed that one of the big yuccas in the front garden “looked wrong”. The leaves had turned purplish brown.
So a few days ago he decided to push against the trunk of the yucca, and sure enough, the trunk was rotted.
He said weevils did this. Specifically, snout weevils.
So he went about cutting down the yucca. The smell was incredible, sort of like artichoke and tequila, according to the guy I live with, though he hasn’t smelled tequila in ages.
It stank up the whole front yard. Not really an awful smell, but not the kind of smell usually associated with gardening.
The guy I live with said this yucca dying partly wasn’t bad, because it was planted under a desert willow (Chilopsis linearis), which he would have said was a dumb thing to do if he had known how big the yucca would get, but he didn’t.

But partly it is bad, because there’s a problem now: disposing of the leaves. The leaves have to be cut up, to make them safe for the trash collectors, and put in a paper trash bag. Even though we have a compost bin for things like this, with weevils you have to throw away the infected plant.
The base of the plant will have to be tossed, too.
Now technically, the soil is supposed to be drenched with some sort of poison, but that’s not going to happen here.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me showing my reaction when the guy I live with came up with the title for today’s post.

Until next time, then.