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 today to talk about an object lesson. You may remember me from such posts as “Creeped Out”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see how hard I am at work, gardening.

The guy I live with said it may be about time to replace that ramp. The guy I live with’s wife built it for Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, when he was getting on in years. There’s little space to step out onto the patio because a previous owner added an extra sliding glass door and never thought about a way to extend the concrete step.
The ramp bounces now.

Anyway, our streak of hot, rainless days continues. All the rain is falling to the south or east of us now.
Here I am putting a brave face on this situation.
Before I talk about the object lesson, here’s a picture of my Private Lawn. This is ‘Cody’ buffalo grass.
That line is from the hose, because he mowed the lawn a few days ago, and buffalo grass does need to be watered after mowing.
Other than that, it just grows, assuming at least some rain falls, which is an assumption we can no longer make.
And another picture of Mentzelia decapetala taken right before I went on my evening walk.
Hopefully this plant will produce some viable seeds, because it behaves like a biennial here, though it can also be perennial.
Claude Barr wrote that an excess of moisture would cause the plant to die, but it’s clear that this plant would have benefited from more rain.

In most summers, the guy I live with would just let the garden dry out, but during the grasshopper infestation last summer he started watering more, because he read that grasshoppers attack drought-stricken plants.
The watering didn’t stop the grasshoppers, but it made the plants look healthier.

So this year he decided to water more. He bought a nice Melnor oscillating sprinkler (the one with a metal base) which he says is a good one, and now we have a lot of plants in flower for the hummingbirds.
Salvia greggii won’t flower in dry soil, so he set a smaller sprinkler in the side yard and the plants started flowering almost immediately, which makes sense since they’re native to west Texas and adjacent Mexico where monsoon rains fall, almost coinciding with the flight of hummingbirds back to Mexico.
Normally Penstemon barbatus stops flowering in a hot July, but look at it now, after watering. An object lesson for the guy I live with.
There are other red-flowered penstemons, and Penstemon eatonii, P. cardinalis, and P. rostriflorus are often available in the trade as plants or seeds, but there are others, like P. centranthifolius, P. superbus, P. utahensis, P. floridus, and P. rubicundus that have to be grown from seed.
And quite a few Mexican species which are difficult to come by. The guy I live with grew a few of these a long time ago.

The agastaches in “the enclosure” are very happy with the extra watering.
If you look closely, or enlarge this picture, you can see a broadtailed hummingbird, just to the left of the big metal chicken.
In keeping with the hummingbird theme, the guy I live with had a pot of Ipomopsis aggregata seedlings which he repotted just today. Hopefully these will have red flowers, though populations with pink flowers and with white flowers are common in the foothills here. This is a biennial.
The pots will be surfaced with fine gravel.
This is the soil mix he used. I’ve shown pictures of this before, but I think it’s worthwhile to show how different this is from commercial mixes.
This is a highly porous mix which allows all the water to go straight to the roots.
The mix was used for troughs, most of which are at the Chatfield Arboretum now.

And I have one other hummingbird-related item. A swing.
That’s right, this is a hummingbird swing.
It’s supposed to be close to a food source but it isn’t, right now.

So that’s all I have for today.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me next to an unhappy hackberry tree in the little field to the north of us.

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 today to talk about the three out of four.
You may remember me from such posts as “The Box”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been so hot here that the best time for me is in the evening, lounging on the patio rug.

We’ve had no rain (ten drops almost every day don’t count) for twenty-eight days now, and the guy I live with isn’t happy about this. He has been watering, though; much more than he usually does.
The “blazing star” (Mentzelia decapetala) isn’t as tall as some plants have been, but you can see it still has a lot of buds.
It flowers at night and this was the best picture he could get last night. Tonight’s pictures weren’t as good.
He took a picture of the Colorado four o’clock, Mirabilis multiflora, as we started on my evening walk.
We’ve been seeing a lot of hummingbirds in our garden lately. I mean a whole lot.
The guy I live with had a feeder out for most of the summer, but the last time he went to clean and refill it, it was full of dead giant ants, which made him feel bad, so he decided not to put up the feeder any more.
Because of all the watering, we have lots of plants in flower that hummingbirds like.
The most common hummingbird here is the broadtailed, Selasphorus platycercus, and if the guy I live with had had his phone camera on he would have gotten a nice close-up picture of one just today.
We also have black-chinned hummingbirds, Archilochus alexandri; they like to dive-bomb the guy I live with, and me, sometimes.
You can see a picture of a black-chinned on the post “How To Avoid Gardening”.

Also today, since he obviously didn’t learn his lesson (he is kind of old), the guy I live with was standing around looking at some agastaches that needed watering, and a broad-tailed hummingbird came to look at the flowers, and it was chased away by a rufous hummingbird, Selasphorus rufus. The rufus are kind of bossy and territorial but we don’t see them that often.

The only one we haven’t seen, and the guy I live with thinks he’s only seen one once or twice, is the calliope hummingbirds, Selasphorus calliope.
This is the smallest bird in North America and we would only see one when it was on its migration south to Mexico.
The migration is probably starting about now, which may explain why we’re seeing so many hummingbirds (we do have an open bar for them), so maybe we’ll see a calliope.

These are the only pictures we have for now.
And that’s all I have for today. We’ve seen three out of the four possible species of hummingbird that come to our garden.
That almost makes up for how hot and dry it is.

Until next time, then.