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 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.

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

Here I am in a characteristic pose. It had finally cooled off at night and I was taking it pretty easy, as you can see. We stay up until midnight every night. The guy I live with said that when Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, got really old, he would stay up late so that the upstairs bedroom would be cooled off by the fan in the window, and Chess would be more comfortable. I certainly prefer going to bed in my upstairs fort when it’s cooler.

The guy I live with keeps talking about getting an air conditioner or maybe something called a “swamp cooler”, but the fans do a pretty good job. He said that people never used to have air conditioning back in the last century, but that now they do, though fresh air is always better.

Yesterday the forecast called for heavy rain. It was extremely dark here and the guy I live with got very hopeful, though really he wished the heavy rain would fall on the wildfire in southern Colorado. It rained for about two minutes.

Another thing that was pretty annoying were the firecrackers. There was a total ban on fireworks of any kind, but we heard a lot of them. The guy I live with said that people can be real jerks at times. I hate fireworks, and thunder, too. He said that all the purebred border collies who lived here felt the same way about both things, but that didn’t make me feel a whole lot better.

The thunder and fireworks made me so frightened that I went into my upstairs fort, but the guy I live with said it was too hot up there, because it wasn’t late at night when the room was cool, and he thought maybe I needed to have a fort downstairs in the basement. We’ve been taking afternoon naps in the basement because it’s so cool there.

So he thought about this for a little bit and got Chess’s old fort down from the rafters in the garage. It had been modified some to let Chess get in without much effort, but it needed to be cleaned. It sat on the patio for part of the day. Then he decided not to use it, and said he was going to throw it away.

I could tell by the way he was acting that this idea of throwing away Chess’s fort kind of disturbed him, and said the fort should go back up in the rafters.

He said that he could imagine what people would say about this, and give him all sorts of advice. People who had absolutely no idea what he was thinking, or feeling.

He then said that he was the one who got to talk about this, and make the decisions, and that if other people offered advice they needed to be quiet and just listen instead. It would be a first, for sure. (He even quoted La Rochefoucauld: “Nothing is so freely given as advice”.) The fort was purchased when Chess showed up here, in 2002, because he was trained to enjoy a fort, and he would sleep in it, and get very angry when Slipper, his older cousin, tried to go into the fort to sneak something out of it, like a toy.

And so the old fort could just sit up in the rafters, and every so often he’d just look up at it, and think of Chess in his fort, and then think of me all cozy and safe in my fort, like continuity of purebred border collies or something like that. I thought Chess sounded kind of spoiled with his specially-modified fort and soft Pottery Barn sheets to sleep on at night, though I do also sleep on the bed during the day, sometimes, and I guess some people would think that I’m even more spoiled because I have an upstairs fort as well as the kitchen fort, but I don’t sleep on the bed at night, so maybe that cancels things out. (I like my fort better, if you were wondering.)

So that was the news, as far as it related to me. I might have been able to post some pictures of the new ducklings paddling in the canal, but so far we haven’t gotten any. The grasses and stuff have really overgrown the canal banks this year and so it’s hard to see if there are ducklings there, but the guy I live with said he saw at least three a couple of days ago, with their mother, swimming down the canal.

I have some garden pictures, too. It hasn’t rained here in a very long time though every now and then a sprinkler is set, so things don’t look incredibly awful. Just very dry.The guy I live with said he would like to grow more grasses, but finding ones which will tolerate the garden conditions is not easy at all. In this picture you can see Achnatherum calamagrostis, at the back (the big one flopped after the last hail and has a “corset”), and the native A. scribneri, on the right. It’s much less showy. And in front there’s a lot of bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata), also native. I think this seed strain is from eastern Oregon or Washington, but the grass is native here, too. He really likes this grass. Here’s a view of the bluebunch from a different angle.And of the seed heads. These are okay for me. What I mean by “okay” is that the awns of some grasses can get into my coat, and work down into my skin. That sounds pretty creepy to me. The guy I live with said that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, had to go to the doctor after an awn got in his leg, so it’s important to know which grasses do that, and which don’t. In fact he even made a display of grasses, with their awns, and the scientific names of the grasses, which he took to the doctor’s office some years ago.

The only other things I have are pictures of our walk this evening. No one shot off firecrackers so it was a good walk. Most of the grass here is dry. Super crispy, even. I have this idea that firecrackers and dry grass don’t mix all that well.

This is the hill I walk around. Sometimes I walk over it. The guy I live with says it’s an artificial hill, which is think is just plain weird. It used to be a wooded area until it was “developed”, which in this case sounds like another word for ruined. There was one prickly poppy in flower. The guy I live with has tried to grow these in the garden, but they never transplant well from nursery-potted plants. Maybe just sowing seed directly into the soil would be the thing to do. I’ve mentioned red ants before, because there are several ant piles (I guess that’s what they’re called) right in the middle of where I walk. The guy I live with said not to stop right over them, because the ants might crawl on me. I really hate things crawling on me, and I suppose you might feel the same way. The ants also bite. They always seem so busy. I guess if you had someone standing over you while you had work to do you might feel like biting, too.That really is all I have. Oh, except for the bats. There were bats over the field, and our back yard, this evening. Maybe you can see them here.I know this has been a really wordy post but I think it was also interesting. I hope you agree. Here’s a picture of me walking in the dry grass in the field, past our garden. 

Until next time, then.