the miserable gardener

ultra roasting

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

Here I am in a characteristic pose. You may notice an addition to the garden decor.It’s been super ultra roasting hot here. Like ninety-five degrees (thirty-five Celsius), and not much cooler than that when we go to bed. (We stay up late.) We haven’t seen the sun much in days, and the clouds are keeping the oppressive heat from radiating out into space, or wherever it goes. Quite a few things have happened here lately. I know that things happen all the time, but I mean things of note.

The guy I live with washed his cell phone in the washing machine and it came out “pretty dead”. He removed the battery and tried to dry it in a bunch of rice (uncooked rice), but that didn’t work, so he took it in to the phone place. He said that because he’s a super-genius (minus the phone-washing business of course) he brought his old cell phone along and they were able to reprogram that one.

You should have seen him trying to fix the “land line” here. There’s a wall phone hanging in the kitchen, like in almost every kitchen thirty years ago, but he said it wasn’t a Western Electric phone and so couldn’t troubleshoot it or fix it. And he had no tools. He said if we had an emergency he would just stick his head out the window and yell. Like this, maybe, but with yelling. He says we’ll get a new screen door eventually. Maybe when he paints the house.

Here, though, I was watching him take pictures in the front yard. Almost none of them came out.Since there weren’t any other pictures that were good, I thought we might post the desert willow (Chilopsis linearis) pictures he took the other day. They were posted on Facebook but they might show up better here.

Pretty cool, huh? The guy I live with says to look here https://paridevita.com/2012/06/19/the-red-one/ to check out the Peattie quote, though I should say this post was before purebred border collies began to narrate the blog.

I encountered a little striped kitty in the back yard, which alarmed the guy I live with, but I went inside when he told me to, and a few minutes later the striped kitty had disappeared. It probably wriggled between the opening in the fence and went next door.

There might have been some other things but it’s been so hot neither of us have been able to think much. Today it’s cooled off a lot, but still cloudy. I like it better when it’s cooler.

Oh. There is one thing. One evening we had a lot of thunder, so I couldn’t go on my walk, but then later the guy I live with said we should walk, so we went out at 11:45 at night. It was the best walk ever. I made the guy I live with walk as fast as he could.

Some people think that dogs like lawns. Years ago there was a watered green lawn here, and it does make the guy I live with sad to think of that, but things changed, and I must say I really like my lawn now. There’s grass I can lie on, but also a lot of plants to run through and explore in.

(These are really big files which you can embiggen, if you want, and “view to their advantage”. Or something like that.)

The path to the shed. The guy I live with is really happy he got gaillardias to live here. They come back from seed. Winterfat (Krascheninnikovia lanata), with Ipomopsis rubra behind.

And the “trough patio”. Yes, there are tomatoes there. The trash can is filled with water for them. They’re growing in big plastic pots. The wire fence is because I got carried away and knocked over some seed pots. The guy I live with didn’t get angry because he’s giving up on growing a lot of things from seed. The seed-sowing this year has been really unsuccessful. The “nanodome” right by the tomato plant had seed pots in it but everything died. I guess that’s it. I hope you enjoyed this update. Hopefully there won’t be any more phone-washing; we get a secret code sent to the phone in order to sign on to the blog, and it’s a little difficult if the phone is wet.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me exploring behind Sporobolus airoides.

Until next time, then.

another solstice

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, your popular host, here to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden and environs, and to wish you a happy solstice. You may remember me from such posts as “The Missing Grass”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically alert pose.The guy I live with said to make some humorous and highly sophisticated comment about me shadowed by a jalousie but really I am outside and not a character in some film noir. He’s been watching a lot of these lately. He says Saturday night is the best time to watch a good “noir” but he doesn’t always know when it’s Saturday. (Really.)

It was kind of hot today, as you can see by my lack of activity; the humidity was a bit much. Almost twenty-five percent in the early afternoon. He was perspiring, let me tell you.

Things here have been pretty exciting, to say the least. The other day, the weather forecast called for severe thunderstorms–again–and so he went to the store before the storms were predicted to hit, and came back just in time for huge raindrops to fall. He got out of the car, raced inside to let me out of my kitchen fort, so I could run upstairs to my bedroom fort (it’s safer), put the car in the garage (which involves actually opening the garage door, since the garage-door opener broke a few weeks after it was installed, which was also a few weeks after the guy I live with and his wife moved into the house), and then this happened.If you think this looks scary, it was. He was talking on the phone with a friend, when the hail began to fall. But it just fell. It wasn’t driven by high winds; it just fell. So nothing really happened other than the guy I live with’s calm was severely damaged.

In order for this to do a lot of damage, which I think you can guess it could do very easily, the hail has to be driven by wind. Imagine something just being dropped versus being thrown at high speed. So, whew. But his friend, who lives on the other side of town, was hit by the same storm and by then the storm had built up in intensity and there was a lot of damage to her garden.

The guy I live with says this is easily the worst feature of the climate here, and that this sort of thing never, or rarely, happened until the last decade of the last century. It is certainly a source of anxiety. He doesn’t like being separated from me when storms approach, and I feel the same way.

But anyway that was that.

He tried to get a moon picture the same evening, using the special night-time feature on the point-and-shoot, but the feature isn’t all that special.And maybe you remember the quandary surrounding the Caragana microphylla plants. The guy I live with said that the phylla (leaves) seemed excessively micro, and so he moved these plants into a place where they might get a little more water to hydrate those tiny leaves, and planted a couple of C. microphylla ‘Mongolian Silver Spires’, if that’s the right name. The leaves on this one are certainly micro, but not nearly as much so as the ones on ‘Tidy’ which he planted earlier.The guy I live with and his friend (not the same person that I mentioned above) went to Harlequin’s Gardens in Boulder and there was a large specimen of that plant, with seed pods, too.It will probably take forever for the plants he bought there to get big. There is another one here in the garden which is fairly large but branches on it die every year so maybe it will never get large.

The only other thing I have, and it’s kind of a big deal, though not as big a deal to me as the baby raccoons sleeping in the New Mexican locust just now, which the guy I live with couldn’t get a picture of, even though I was barking like crazy, is the happy, happy muskrat we saw a few days ago. You can see it here, leaving its happy home, to paddle happily down the canal.