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 what’s been going on with me and the guy I live with. You may remember me from such posts as “The Upended Breakfast”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I don’t think you can see how hot I am. I’m being stoic. It’s been really, really, really hot. I mean super hot. We haven’t been doing much of anything because it’s been so hot. Last night at eleven o’clock it was over eighty degrees in the house.

On my evening walk last night the sun was blood-red, according to the guy I live with, who didn’t get a picture of it because he said he thought his eyes were going. He had to ask some people who were walking two black Labrador puppies if the sun was really that red, and they said it was. There was a fire somewhere which was turning the sun that color.

And then later, at Tinkle Time, I went out and came upon a striped kitty in the “way back”, where it shouldn’t have been. I barked a lot and didn’t come when I was called, and the guy I live with got really angry with me. I finally did come in, and he lectured me for quite some time. He thought I might have been sprayed, but I wasn’t. The guy I live with explained striped kitties to me again but I still didn’t quite get it.

Obviously I couldn’t go out again, because of the striped kitty, so we went on another walk at quarter after one in the morning. By that time it had cooled off some.

Today he thought he found the place where the striped kitty snuck into our yard and fixed that. The fence is pretty old and some of the pickets have been broken. Some have even been chewed through by creatures trying to get into our yard.

The garden has been really dry. The photographs don’t really show it, but it has been dry. Some plants have curled up and died.

The pool was put back and filled with water. Even if I don’t lie in it, which I guess I ought to, he says it makes things look “summery”. To me that means extremely hot.Looking across what the guy I live with calls “the lawn”. It isn’t a lawn. It is pretty fun to run around the paths and look for things in the grasses. 

The Enclosure, with the medium Big Metal Chicken. The Enclosure is watered about once a week. A peek into the Employees Only section. It looks kind of autumnal because the pea shrubs, Caragana arborescens, are shedding their leaves due to the prolonged drought. The shrubs can become completely leafless in some years. That path goes on for almost another fifteen feet. The guy I live with hardly ever goes back there; he says that gardens should have places where you hardly ever go, like the disused wing of a manor house. The path leading to my Private Lawn. You can see that the grass has dried up to nothing, and the Egyptian onions have mostly gone dormant. There are apples all over the place. I don’t eat apples like the other purebred border collies who live here did. They aren’t ripe, for one thing. My Private Lawn. It’s Cody buffalo grass, which was just mowed and watered. That spot by the solar lamp has always been bare; nothing grows there because of the lilacs. Maybe some kind of native grass would do well there, but nothing else ever has. Looking back toward the house. The solar lamp hanging there had its solar panels wrecked by being left outside for years, so it doesn’t work, but it hangs there anyway. It was a really nice lamp. And another view from farther up the path on the north side of the garden. Looking across the “old rock garden”. That’s it for the garden pictures.

The guy I live with has always liked having lots of birds in the garden, and just yesterday he “rejellified” the oriole feeder and an oriole showed up just a little while later. But the biggest thing is what’s happening at the thistle feeder. The guy I live with says the thistle is being eaten at the rate of about an inch a day.You can see robins stealing grape jelly from the oriole feeder, but also goldfinches at the thistle feeder. They eat and eat and eat. The guy I live with says they probably can’t find much food outside of the garden because it’s been so dry. The thistle feeder was filled just a few days ago.

He learned a while ago that the thistle seed needs to be fresh. Thistle seed was in the feeder for several months and no one showed up. Then he went to the bird seed store, bought new fresh seed, and the goldfinches went through a whole ten-pound bag in about a month. The old seed was tossed into the garden because other creatures aren’t as picky.

Today we hardly did anything. We didn’t get to bed until two in the morning, so hardly doing anything today seemed like the logical course of action. I had breakfast, went on my morning walk, the guy I live with thought about things and moped a bit, then we took a nap. The kitchen phone rang and the guy I live with wasn’t sure what to do. He answered the phone but couldn’t understand what the person wanted. It was so hot that understanding people was pretty difficult.

Then it looked like it might rain but instead it just got dark. Dark and extremely hot. We went on my evening walk and it started to sprinkle, so I thought it best to go back home. And then it rained. It rained for about half an hour. Not a downpour or anything, just rain. There was some thunder, too, so I had to hide.

The main thing, though, was that it finally cooled off to the point where I didn’t think I wasn’t going to roast away to nothing. Like if you left a turkey in the oven for ten hours. Instead it was delightfully cool.

The guy I live with said that eventually it will cool off, to the point where he wishes it would be warm again, but I can hardly wait.

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 up to date on the news from our mostly roasted and crispy garden. You may remember me from such hot-weather posts as “Into The Garden, Endlessly Roasting”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically pensive pose.There are a couple of good places in the house to do a lot of daydreaming. The studio downstairs is the best but lying on the soft Pottery Barn sheets is pretty good too.

The reason why I haven’t posted in a few days it’s because it’s been so hot that about the only thing I and the guy I live with have been able to do is take naps downstairs with the fan running. It’s been upwards of eighty degrees at eleven at night, which is very unusual for here, and I’ve really been roasting.

Here I am lying in some shade on the path. It was like a zillion degrees outside that day. Almost nothing is in flower here. The guy I live with said that was perfectly okay and that it would be weird to expect flowers when it’s been so hot and dry; the humidity has been about ten percent or lower for days now.

All, or almost all, of the seedlings in the seed pots on the trough patio fried to a crisp and are gone. Someone (not I) forgot to water one day. He said “Oh well.”

One thing that is in flower are the “Supertunias” out in front. There are two plants doing just fine, in one of the hottest places in the yard. Actually on the driveway.

They get watered maybe once every ten days with a gallon jug of water.

The guy I live with and his friend went to the botanic gardens last week. He said it was too hot to take many pictures, but he did get this picture of Campanula incurva. It’s been grown here but doesn’t do anything remotely like this. Not enough water.

We got our land line fixed and now we have phones in the kitchen and upstairs bedroom. Like if I needed to make a call late at night, there would be a phone I could use. It made the guy I live with really happy, in some strange way, to have the old phone working again. He bought a couple of new phones to celebrate.

He said it was nice to have the home phone working again because it was something from “the old days”, way back when things were a lot happier around here. I did find it hard to believe that “happy” could include not having me in his life, and he said he didn’t mean that, but that he could dial the phone when he was at work and she would answer. I guess I understood that.

He was curious as to why the internet worked and the phone didn’t, and went online to try to find an answer. By “answer” he meant an actual explanation, not just that it works that way. He worked for the phone company for years, before they had internet of course, and always liked actual explanations instead of just “because”. I hear that “because” kind of a lot when I want to do something and he says not to, so I think there’s a double standard at work.

So we have our home phone working. In fact, it even rang the day after it was fixed. It wasn’t anybody. The guy I live with said that was typical.

In any case, the cord on the kitchen phone is too short for him to just stand there talking, so the whole thing is more of a gesture than anything else. The guy I live with said that gestures can sometimes be important.

That was the philosophical side. The practical side had a lot more to do with accidentally washing the cell phone.

I have some pictures of part of the back yard now. The guy I live with said he would be content growing almost nothing but grasses, because summer is so icky around here. He’s not much into watering (he says because I interfere, a statement with which I strongly disagree). That clump of grass is Sporobolus airoides. Then there are the two pictures taken with the “big camera” looking down the path to the shed. I’m not sure which one I like best. The bluebunch wheatgrass is in the background. We can’t grow any of the ornamental grasses sold in the trade because they all need way too much water. 

Back on the tenth, it rained here for a while. Everything was all cool and damp and nice, but the next few days totally canceled out all of that.

It was almost a hundred degrees last Friday, and let me tell you, that is definitely not purebred border collie weather. I had to be hosed down. The guy I live with thought I was going to bake. It certainly felt like it.

As some of you may know, yesterday was the guy I live with’s birthday. He’s sixty-seven now, which I think is a lot. I’m not sure what that is in dog years. He said it was his tenth birthday without Cindy, and thinking of that made him very sad for her.

It was very cool yesterday and I liked that weather a lot. The guy I live with and his friend went out to lunch. When he came back it rained a little, stopped, and the rained again. It rained so hard that the gutter above the patio overflowed, and he got out the ladder, cleaned out the gutter, and was totally and completely soaked, which is why we didn’t get a movie of this.

The street started to flood, because the storm drain across the street is about a third too small for all the water it drains, so he went out and played in the gutter to see if there were branches and leaves blocking the drain.

It turned out to be a very nice birthday after all.

Until next time, then.