the miserable gardener

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, and all kinds of other stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “Mice In The Rice”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.That’s the “bulb frame” behind me, though there aren’t any bulbs in there, yet. The guy I live with wasn’t sure what sort of soil to put in there, and finally decided on filling the frame with pea gravel, and planting bulbs in “pond baskets” with sandy loam or something like that. Eventually this will get done.

I like this part of the yard, even though it’s pretty bare. Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, liked to lie here too. There wasn’t a bulb frame there, then. It’s one of the warmest places in the yard, especially in the winter.

The last couple of days here have been extremely gorgeous.Today it was seventy-six degrees (that’s about twenty-four Celsius) with twelve percent humidity. Yesterday, the wind came up and lots of leaves blew off the trees, but unfortunately most of the leaves are still there. You can kind of see the “mountain wave” cloud that appeared yesterday. (You can also see the spot on the camera lens. The guy I live with can’t find where the spot is. He looked online to see how to replace the lens and you have to have that done professionally, so he said the lens would have the spot.)It’s supposed to snow on Monday.

They say we might get eight inches (twenty centimeters) of snow, with a low on Monday night of twenty-two (minus five and a half Celsius). The guy I live with is not hugely happy about this, but it does happen here, sometimes, and “No one ever said this was a great climate for gardening”. Then it will warm up again. The snow will probably break a lot of tree branches and make a huge mess in the garden. But we’re used to that.

Back to more pleasant news.

I got to go up into the mountains on Thursday. The guy I live with and his friend took me up there. He brought his camera but didn’t take any pictures of me in the mountains, so I guess a photographic record will have to wait for another time.

The mountains are really cool. Literally and figuratively. There were all sorts of new smells. Smells are one of the best parts of walks, if you didn’t know. I got to see things like deer poop, and elk poop. The guy I live with’s friend used to live up there and so she was an expert on such things. I even saw deer bones. They were pretty scary, and I jumped high in the air, until I totally checked them out. I didn’t see any deer or elk, though. The guy I live with told his friend how Chess was just walking out into the “way back” and a big bull elk stuck his head out from behind the pea shrubs, and Chess went completely berserk, which I would do too, because elks are huge.

Anyway, there are things happening in the garden, even with snow looming in the future. The guy I live with was talking to a friend in the nursery business about Salvia greggii, because some people have a hard time growing it, but it’s been reseeding here. This is a not-very-focused picture of four salvias, only one of which was planted. Maybe you can see that the one in the back is slightly darker; that was the one that was planted.The trap is just there for looks, like we’re being threatening or something. The wire cages are for crocuses.

Speaking of salvias, the guy I live with bought some ‘Shangri-La’ salvias the other day, because “the leaves looked cool”.He’s afraid this will need a lot of watering here, but there’s no way to tell until we try it. Still, the leaves are cool. He said he grew one of the parent plants, Salvia moorcroftiana, decades ago. It needed watering here.

We have mushrooms coming up. Someone did say they might be edible. The guy I live with said he’s not going to try them. He ate a Destroying Angel mushroom when he was two, and still remembers the doctor making a house call. That was a long, long time ago.There are crocuses all over the place. This is Crocus speciosus, one of the most attractive, and readily available. It’s been seeding itself in the garden for years. This was just what you might call a “casual picture”. And there are lots of cyclamen. This is Cyclamen hederifolium in the shade garden. And I guess some self-sown Crocus speciosus. Not much is in focus here. The stake is to mark the boundary where the cyclamens are, so no one walks on them.

Colorado really doesn’t have a lot of red where autumn color is concerned, but the Wasatch maples, Acer grandidentatum, native to the western slope, do turn red.

Maybe this has been said before, but some botanists consider this species to be the “western expression” of the eastern sugar maple, Acer saccharum. Early settlers in Utah tapped the little trees for syrup. The sap runs in March, here.

So that’s been what’s happened in the last few days.

Today, we were just doing stuff, the way we do, when all of a sudden there was something in the grapevine by the kitchen window. I barked a lot. I was pretty sure it was a ghost, because it’s that time of year. The guy I live with tells me fairly often that we do live with ghosts, but nice ghosts, but I was sure this was the other kind. He got kind of weirded out, because I kept looking, and barking, and he looked too, but couldn’t see anything, even though I was sure there was something there. He said there wasn’t, but I had to check. You can see how super careful I was being. Neither of us could find anything in the grapevine. I had a case of the creeps for a couple of hours after that.

Oh, and speaking of weird things, the guy I live with said to say, as a public service message, that he doesn’t know why all the older posts have the “word wrap” that they do. He isn’t going to go back and redo everything, but for some reason the text wraps strangely around the pictures. Just to let you know.

So that’s it for today. For the last few days, actually. I’ll let you know if the snow wrecks the whole garden, of course, and maybe even report if there’s tons of complaining. There’s bound to be, as you might guess.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me, surveying my domain.

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 the latest news from our rather damp garden. You may remember me from such rain-related posts as “Misty, Drizzle, Rainy”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic, and ultra-noble, pose. I look a bit like a show dog, don’t I? We purebred border collies have an inherent nobility, I think.

You may not know that the “border” in “border collie” comes from the border between England and Scotland, where we’re from originally, and so we purebred border collies really like misty, cool weather.

It’s been raining quite a bit here. Well, for us, I mean. The guy I live said he was beginning to worry a little about the garden, especially the trees and shrubs, but it’s rained enough that he feels a lot better about things.

It even rained last night. It almost never rains at night here. But it did; four tenths of an inch.

The other day I went to Day Care, and played in the mist. The guy I live with asked me what we did at Day Care, besides play, because one time he looked through the fence and saw me and a buddy listening very intently to something. I told him that we had lectures there. That day we had lectures on Nadja by André Breton, the flora of Ethiopia, falsi bordoni, and the benefits of having a good breakfast. I liked the last one best.

The guy I live with and his friend went to Denver Botanic Gardens, in the mist, while I was at Day Care. He took some pictures of the plains garden there, and posted them on Facebook, but he said they would look better on the blog, so here they are.

Pretty cool, huh? The guy I live with said we needed to get Maximilian sunflowers again, so I guess we’re going to. I don’t know what happened to the ones we had. I’m not so sure about the little bluestem, which contributes so much color to the plains garden; every single little bluestem (a lot) planted here over the years has died within a year.

The guy I live with said that since little bluestem is native practically everywhere in North America that there are regional ecotypes which need a lot more water than the native little bluestem does, but the non-native ones are the ones in the trade. He did grow some native little bluestem from seed and will plant it out next spring. (The grasses will have to overwinter in pots.)

Speaking of pots, the guy I live with talked on the phone to a friend in the nursery industry and she was growing agastaches in pots, and so the guy I live with decided to plant the ‘Big Bazooka’ agastaches in pots. That way they can get all the water they need. Unless he forgets to water the pots.

If you remember the horribly root-bound plants he got, well, look at the roots now. This took a little over two months. The guy I live with strutted around a bit, talking about what a “super genius” he was. I went inside until he was done with that.

Here are the plants in the pot.You see that little dish there, just to the left of the pot? That usually has water in it, often pretty gross water, which of course I drink sometimes, but the water is for the snakes in our garden. Kind of creepy, I know.

I guess maybe the blog should have a special segment, “hopefully irregular”, as the guy I live with said, not in every post, and so I’m going to introduce it now. We’re going to call it Unusual News. You may agree that this is pretty unusual.

Next door, they put up a small shed.

I guess you’ll see it, more, in garden pictures, later. We don’t have horses in this neighborhood, if you were wondering. There’s just a shed next door.

Well, whatever. That’s our motto here. It kind of has to be.

My evening walk was pretty good, though. We went a different way. A bit too close to the highway, maybe, but we just walked around this office building and then got back onto a path that leads home.

We could see Green Mountain before we got onto the path. It’s almost always brown, so must have been named after someone named Green. It’s not very high. There were some ducks in what I guess you might call a retaining pond. That’s the reflection of a utility truck in the pond. And the ducks.As we got onto the path, the guy I live with said there was one tree which was slightly different. This picture isn’t in focus at all, but it’s Populus balsamifera, the balsam poplar, which, here, is really a montane species. He said that maybe seed floated down the creek from the mountains. The leaves and stems are coated with a pleasant-smelling resin, or something like that. I’ll wait for the lecture at Day Care in order to understand this better. There’s an older, and slightly scary, regular cottonwood next to it.Then along the creek, which is the same creek as the one behind our house, there are all these new cottonwood trees. This area used to have a pond, which may sound bucolic, but the guy I live with said it was filled with old tires and stuff like that. On the other hand, there were frogs, and he said you could hear them “breeping” (his word) from our back yard, at night.

The pond belonged to a farmhouse, of which only the foundation remained when the guy I live with and his wife moved here, thirty years ago. There was a little bit of woodland, and when the apartments were built, all of that was bulldozed except for the old cottonwood, and people came in and planted a bunch of wetland plants. The guy I live with and his wife went down and looked at the plants, and the labels beside them. And wondered if they were ever going to be watered. Just because they were wetland plants didn’t mean they didn’t need to be watered. They weren’t. So there aren’t any wetland plants there. But in the mean time a bunch of cottonwoods seeded along the creek and this is the result. You can see some of the leaves are turning. I know I’m ready for cooler weather, and the guy I live with said maybe the sun would come out, now that it’s autumn. You really can’t imagine all the complaining that went on, this past summer, about the almost total lack of sun and lack of rain. Autumns here are usually very dry, so the rain we had is a nice change.

I guess I’ll sign off now.

Until next time, then.