the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, and here to bring you a pretty much completely weather-related post. You may remember me from such weather-related posts as “Monsooner Or Later”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. On the morning of a day like any other day. Things started out pretty regular. They usually do around here. 

However, the guy I live with already knew, from looking at the forecast last night, that there was a fifty percent chance of storms bringing golf ball-sized hail, and he said he was really against that. Totally opposed to it, in fact.

The clouds began to move in, from the southwest, in the morning. This is looking sort of in the direction of Tucson. Some construction in the neighborhood had awakened both of us early, so after our morning walk, we both took a nap. Around noon the guy I live with woke up with a start because he thought he heard sirens, but it was something else. Just a noise. He looked at the weather site and there was no mention of golf balls any more, but it did start to rain.

I decided to go to my upstairs fort, because there was a lot of thunder at first.

Then it changed a bit. You can see the hail falling, and getting larger, too. But not very large, fortunately.

At least we discovered where the lowest point in the garden is. The soil here is creek bottom loam, mostly decomposed sandstone.When the rain and hail stopped, the sun came out, and I was able to survey my domain again. A little while later the guy I live with walked out to see if the creek was flooding. It wasn’t. That seemed kind of odd. Then after an hour or so he actually saw the flood coming, though it wasn’t a really serious huge flood like has happened here.

We went out to look. 

The guy I live with wouldn’t let me go in the water. He said I might get swept away, and that would make him very unhappy. Of course he would have tried to rescue me. The water smelled kind of weird, too.

We went back to look at the water in the culvert, where the creek goes under the canal. (You can see the culvert for the canal right at the top of the picture; the canal itself is on the far right.)

Then we went to walk down the canal road a bit.

This is where the creek goes under the canal and the canal road. 

I actually got to go on three walks today. The flood-checking walk was just a short one. On the evening walk, the canal water was red, like Red Rocks which is pretty close. The guy I live with said it looked like red miso.It could have turned out to be a much scarier day. It could still thunder more, later this evening or tonight. I’ll leave you with a picture of me, taken the other day, walking through a whole bunch of Scotch thistles. We don’t go this way very often and aren’t going to again until winter time, because the thistles are really unpleasant and stabby, but the guy I live with said it was kind of a metaphor for the day 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 “Bunnies And Flies” (which was my very first post in my very first May), among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I think the guy I live with was doing something scary like pressing buttons on the stove, which is why I had to be way out where I was. Behind my Personal Hill. Sometimes things can be scary.

We haven’t had much of any thunder–talk about scary–despite the way the afternoon and evening skies look, which I understand is increasingly typical for this time of year and the next few months.But someone has been setting off huge, loud firecrackers and so I have to stay pretty close to my fort. I prefer my kitchen fort for total safety, though my upstairs bedroom fort will do in a pinch.

There have been ants swarming, or whatever it is that ants do when they all gather together, on our walks, lately.These are really little ants, but they still bite, so I avoid them. I also hop gingerly over the red ant piles because the guy I live with, who knows my likes and dislikes pretty well, says that having red ants crawl on me would be very high on my list of dislikes. Having something land on my is even higher on my list, but red ants don’t fly.

Speaking of things that fly, the guy I live with said “The yellow pigs are back”, and at first I was confused, because I know pigs don’t fly, but he meant goldfinches. These pictures were taken using the point-and-shoot zoom feature so they’re not super sharp, but you get the idea.You can see that the thistle feeder was only filled a little, which is kind of an odd thing to say, since if it was filled it would be full, but I guess we say “fill” even if we don’t makes things completely full.

The reason why it was only partially filled was that all through the winter the thistle feeder had thistle seed in it, and the guy I live with discovered that the seed had gone rancid, or old anyway, so he bought some new seed and put only that much in the feeder to see if anyone was interested, and now the goldfinches are visiting, and they will eat a lot of seed. He says goldfinches are pretty delightful so the “pig” business is what they call a term of endearment, not a criticism. The feeder will be completely filled in the next couple of days, because there can be twenty goldfinches on the feeder at once.

We have another visitor, too. 

That’s a male Bullock’s oriole. We’ve seen females too. They all really like the grape jelly in the feeder. There should be half an orange skewered on the rod that the feeder hangs from, but someone forgot to buy oranges.

I know I talk about orioles every time they show up here, but maybe I also didn’t say that even though this feeder is an excellent one, when it was filled with sugar-water one year a bunch of bees got trapped in it, so it doesn’t get filled with sugar-water any more.

What else? Oh, the lilacs are flowering; this is a very good year for them. But ‘President Lincoln’ has bacterial blight or something really bad and so may have to be removed, or at least severely pruned. You’re supposed to clean the pruner blades with alcohol and the guy I live with wondered if cognac would be okay. There’s a bottle of Hennessy which is used for cooking, though not very often. I think there isn’t any rubbing alcohol in the house. Anyway this problem began year before last, and seems not to be getting worse, but also not to be going away.

And now we have tomatoes. I know this is hard to believe. There are four different kinds.I guess these will be grown in large plastic pots. You can see that one has already been potted and is sitting in the glazed ceramic pot.

Today I was left alone at home, all by myself, so that the guy I live with could go to the big plant sale at Denver Botanic Gardens. He bought three plants. (An Arctostaphylos ‘Cascade’ and two Phlomis crinita.)Why even go? The guy I live with’s friend had to work, and parking in inner-city Denver is not what you would call a delight, so, why go?

I know I already said that May is not the guy I live with’s favorite month. It’s Number Twelve on his list of favorite months, in fact. He said it was the smell of May in Denver, partly, that evoked all these traumatic memories, as well as the onset of severe storm warnings, but also, the last day of the month will mark eleven years since he retired.

Retirement was something he always fantasized about and when he retired it was so massively traumatic that he thought about going back to work again, started worrying about all kinds of things, and then two years less one week after he retired, his wife died very suddenly, and all of that comes back with the scent of May.

On the other hand, he’s gone to the plant sale possibly every year for the last thirty years, and Denver is extremely beautiful at this time of year, so going seemed like the right thing to do, even though I didn’t get to go.

I think the main reason why bunches of plants weren’t purchased is that the guy I live with had a hard time finding a parking place, and would have had to drag plants about ten blocks, to the car. Of course the real reason why he didn’t buy a lot of plants is that he didn’t buy a little red wagon like he said he was going to. He had a wagon, about sixty years ago, and couldn’t say what happened to it, and just never got around to buying another one.

So anyway that’s what’s been going on. Mostly really nothing. I’ll leave you with a picture of me relaxing on the patio. The concrete is extremely cool, if you didn’t know. 

Until next time, then.