the miserable gardener

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 the garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Beyond Super Roasting”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose, hunting for flies.I like hunting for flies a lot. Bees and wasps, too, though the guy I live with says not to do that. I still do.

He also said calling myself “your popular host” sounded a bit high and mighty, but I heard an Indian cooking show on YouTube where the chef introduced himself as “your popular host”, so there you are.

The guy I live with is maybe not hugely happy with the way the Caragana microphylla are growing. They had to be staked, and now the tiny leaves are wilting. (Not because of being staked, but because it’s been so hot and dry.) The two plants were watered with a root soaker, but the guy I live with wonders if the leaves aren’t just too small. Like Japanese maples, here, the leaves are so delicate that they need to be constantly hydrated in order to survive in the sun and dry air.

True, the humidity has been around ten to fifteen percent during the day (“a bit muggy”), but that doesn’t seem enough. (The drier the air, the quicker leaves lose water from transpiration.)I guess we’ll see what happens.

The rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ is in full flower now, in “the enclosure”. The guy I live with said he’s decided to replace the fences on the north and west sides. I think the apple tree, which you can see on the left, pushed the fences every which way. All the flats of seedlings were moved out of the bulb frame, onto the trough patio, so they would get more sun. Of course they’ll have to be watered a lot more. You can barely see the large trash can, in the lower right, which is filled with water, to dip in with a watering can.And then, there are the weeds. The guy I live with suddenly remembered the grub hoe, which he bought from Smith & Hawken many years ago. This is like a super-serious hoe; the blade was made from “rail steel” in Japan. The handle is ash, or something like that.

The guy I live with went at the weeds with this hoe for a few minutes in the hot weather and then got really tired. He said that weeding with this hoe was “not for everyone”.

I bet by now you are really wondering about the title of today’s post. The guy I live with made me stop on my walk so he could take a picture of Amorpha fruticosa, the false indigo bush, growing along the banks of the canal. 

The point-and-shoot really doesn’t do justice to the flowers, but the guy I live with said he couldn’t carry the DSLR and hold the leash at the same time. Especially if he’s carrying a little bag, too. So this is what we have.

Here’s Amorpha nana, in the garden. Also with the point-and-shoot.Well, amorpha refers to the fact that these members of the pea family don’t have wings or a keel on the flowers, the way members of the pea family do, and the name means “without form”, or “formless”, though naturally the guy I live with thought “shapeless” was better.

The only other thing, I guess, is what happened yesterday evening. Everything was normal. Neither of us was doing anything. It was a long, hot day, and we were ready for some leisure time.

But then, the guy I live with made the mistake of looking at the weather forecast, and, yes, there was another severe thunderstorm headed our way. Number Four for us, this year. (The closer you live to the mountains, here, the less likely you are to get these storms, except this year, it seems. In general, as the storms move out onto the plains, they build in intensity, and usually all we get is a little rain and a lot of darkness.) The forecast said high winds, damage to trees and roofs, and so he told me to be prepared to go downstairs to hide.

The sky was all yellow.

Nothing really happened. It hardly even rained at all. Afterward there was this strange rainbow in the east.And that was that.

That’s pretty much all I have for today.

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 to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Missing Grass”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. The guy I live with took this picture of me after I came home from Day Care. He said it would have been better if you couldn’t see the awful 1970s cushion covers on the couch, but I did have to do some rearranging before I could sleep there.

This is more like a real characteristic pose, of course.Well, I’m not exactly sure what to say about the things that have happened here, except that they’ve been things, and have happened. There was yet another severe storm warning, and it hailed here, though not horribly (the guy I live with said the hailstones were “chickpea-sized”, whatever that means), and now it seems like it’s drying out (the humidity was seven percent the other day), which makes the guy I live with reasonably content.

Some people don’t like dryness, but he certainly does (because of the lack of severe weather), and dry summers remind him of his happy childhood in Los Angeles, so I guess I won’t say anything. I definitely don’t like thunderstorms.

We did see the muskrat the other day, happily paddling up the canal with a mouthful of greenery, but couldn’t get a picture in time.

And just today I had what the guy I live with calls an L.R.E., which means large reptile encounter. I found a western yellow-bellied racer in the garden. He said it was not small. If you want to look, it’s here: https://www.coloradoherping.com/yellow-bellied-racer—western-coluber-constrictor-flaviventris-colorado-snakes.html

I really wanted to get it, but the guy I live with said not to. I still wanted to, but he said racers can be really unpleasant and I might get bitten (though racers aren’t venomous), but I still wanted to, and he said like super not to, and eventually I realized that not only was he concerned about the snake, he was concerned about me, and so I came inside. He said to take a look at a post Chess made, to see about how big this one was https://paridevita.com/2014/08/01/slithering-in-the-bindweed/
but also to note that that post made mention of a much larger one, so just to stay inside while the racer slithered around.

You may be thinking that all of this is pretty scary, but compared to what happened the other night it wasn’t much of anything.

A stink bug flew into the kitchen. 

It was almost too much for me.

The guy I live with said to wait until he got out the toothpaste he bought for me (which you can see in the picture of me looking at the stink bug), and then to compare.

I guess it’s about time to talk about the garden now. The guy I live with said the neighbors used some weed-and-feed-type thing and the smell was really strong in the garden and now he’s worried that everything will die. If it does, at least we’ll have some pictures.

Here’s the bitterroot, Lewisia rediviva, which must have come from a seed pot which was tossed out.And this calochortus, which he can’t identify. (I know, right? Mister Know-it-all doesn’t know.)

Remember the corner of the garden which was cleared out, a while back? Thanks to that, the Persian Yellow rose has had it best year in quite some time.On the other side of the arbor from the rose, the honeysuckle Lonicera sempervirens ‘Flava’ is having a good year, too (but it usually does). This is growing up and over the arbor, though not in the sort of luxurious fashion that “up and over” implies. The guy I live with said he got this from We-Du Nursery in North Carolina many years ago. It’s the only honeysuckle which has survived here for any length of time.

My walks, to get back to stuff about me, finally, have been okay, though the guy I live with said it wouldn’t hurt if the county came and mowed in the open space and along the canal.

Lots of smooth brome here.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me, on my walk, showing how much the grass needs to be mowed here.

Until next time, then.