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 some areas outside our garden, too. You may remember me from such posts as “Crickets And Coyotes”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. The carpet was shampooed last Wednesday.“They” said it might rain today, and indeed, it’s been drizzling for a little while now. As you can tell just by looking at that picture. The guy I live with said we need some “real rain” in order for the water to get down to plant roots.

I guess today is the first full day of autumn, and it’s pretty chilly outside. And inside. The furnace just got turned on, for a furnace test, and there’s that dusty furnace smell in the house, which the guy I live with says is a pleasant sign of the change of seasons.

If I listened to him more, I would say that this past summer has been one of the most dreadful ever, with a little over an inch of rain since the solstice (four “rain events” of more than two-tenths of an inch), and only a few days of sun. I liked the summer because I don’t care whether or not it’s sunny, so long as there isn’t a lot of thunder, which there wasn’t, just lots of clouds and darkness, along with all the complaining.

On our morning walk a few days ago we came across an expired animal and decided not to go that way for a while. Then when I was playing with my buddies at Day Care, the guy I live with said there was a vulture circling over him. At first of course he thought it was looking at him, but then he remembered what we’d seen on our walk, and sure enough, the vulture landed right near it.

He tried to take some vulture pictures but this is all that resulted from that attempt. In the first picture he said that the vulture was there, “somewhere”.  He said he only had the point-and-shoot with him, and so just pointed and shot. I guess that makes sense. But you can definitely see it here.

I saw the vulture the next day, on my morning walk, circling over me, but the guy I live with said I was safe, and explained vultures to me. I got a case of the creeps.

Nature is icky, if you ask me. What with vultures, and all these bugs constantly landing on me, it’s almost too much.

The guy I live with said to look at the water in the canal. That made me feel better.Even though they’re just Siberian elms, they make nice shady spots on the canal road. That same day, a box of bulbs came from Brent and Becky’s. The bulbs come in bags, which is extremely handy.That way they can all be soaked at the same time. It would be a mistake to soak the bulbs without the bags, unless they were done one kind at a time. Soaking gives the bulbs an extra drink of water so that when they go into the bone-dry ground they’ll have a tiny head start on life.A lot of the plants sitting out on the flagstone path were planted in the last few days, because the roots had grown out of the root balls, just like the guy I live with said they would (I didn’t hear much boasting about that, which was surprising), and because rain was predicted.

When it started to drizzle, the guy I live with decided to take pictures. That didn’t sound right to me, but he used the point-and-shoot instead of the “big camera”. So here are some pictures taken today, on a dark and drizzly day. They’re kind of gloomy. See if you can see me in the first one.

the little yard on the south side of the house

me

Zauschneria ‘Etteri’

Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ and Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ in the enclosure

some Sedum sediforme ‘Turquoise Tails’ were planted on the left side of this path, to fill in

Leptodermis oblonga

the “way back” with the poles for great horned owls

The dirt path there, in the picture above, is one of the many “problem areas” in the garden. It was grass, at one time, but had to be watered an awful lot, and eventually most of it died. Before that it was dirt, and so I guess it’s going to be dirt again, for a long time.

the purple smoke bush and blue lyme grass in the “way back”

Salvia lemmonii after it got watered

Colchicum ‘Innocence’ just beginning, in the shade garden

That really is it, for today. It’s beginning to rain more, now, though in our climate that doesn’t mean it will keep raining. We hope it does.

Time for me to talk the guy I live with into another biscuit, before I go on what might be a very wet evening walk. I might not even go on my walk, if it’s thundering, and that would be just fine with me. Walks are spoiled by thunder, if you didn’t know. I have to race back home, dragging the guy I live with behind me. 

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 garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Fast Learner”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in  a characteristic pose.I know, super cute. It comes naturally.

You can see the stain on the carpet near the door; the guy I live with said he was “semi-resigned” to having to work on it every few days. I think it’s a pretty boring subject. But I guess this is what his retirement has turned into. Cleaning the carpet, and staring at the floor. The funny thing is that the guy I live with actually likes doing both of those things.

And the other day he went to the paint store with a piece of paint scraped from the garage door. The door has had some kaolin-based primer on it for several months. What the neighbors thought, I don’t know, but there are weirder things than that going on in other yards, so, whatever, I guess. Anyway, one of the people who works there helped him match the color exactly, and so he painted most of the door, and decided that he’s going to paint the whole house again. He loves to paint.

Some gardening took place today. The first garden-related thing was that he realized the aster in the previous post wasn’t ‘Alma’ but instead it was ‘Septemberrubin’, or, if you insist, ‘September Ruby’. There used to be tons of New England asters here but most of them were given away. The beautiful pure white, ‘Chilly Winds’, is flowering in his friend’s garden. This is the time of year when the garden starts to come to life again, after a dreary summer like this one has been, and he always regrets not having enough asters and other autumn-flowering plants. Some need too much watering to be good garden plants here, but others do well.

Then a plant of Salvia greggii, which wilted every single day, was dug up and given the once-over. The root ball was mostly peat moss, dry and hard as a rock. You can see that some roots have been growing out of the root ball, but this plant has been in the ground for several years, so this was totally unacceptable. It certainly explained the wilting. It was repotted, and the rather minimalist border on the west side of the house, where it was growing (and wilting) was spruced up, some. The milk can was moved from the north border. I think it looks better here. The French scare cat in the lower left is just there because it isn’t anywhere else. That’s a big, non-wilting Salvia greggii in the lower center. It isn’t flowering because it’s been so dry. Then it almost rained. Some locust pods were raked up; there was a bit of tidying, and then it really started to thunder. I had to hide in my fort.The guy I live with looked at the weather page online and it said something about a “significant weather event”, complete with hail, which was headed our way.  At this time of year. There was a great deal of colorful language in the house.

But, as often happens, the storm dissipated just as it moved over the foothills. We don’t really live on the plains, more like nestled among rolling hills and mesas. The plains do begin just a bit to the east of us, though.

It rained for about ten minutes. Not enough to penetrate down to roots, but it was still nice.You can see our tomato plant in the lower left. There are even tomatoes on it. I don’t eat tomatoes. One tomato ripened on the vine, and the guy I live with started talking about tomato and cheese sandwiches, but a squirrel bit into the tomato an hour or so before the guy I live with was going to pick it. You can imagine what he said about the squirrel. And the tomato.

The rain wasn’t enough to perk up all the cow-pen daisies growing in what used to be a lawn, but is just now a bunch of plants. I guess, if you’re the kind of person that notices things, like I certainly am, you’ll notice the solar lantern is back on its post. It doesn’t work. The post looked dumb with nothing hanging from it. The guy I live with said the solar panels were “shot”. The plastic covering on the little panels wore away over the years and now the sun can’t recharge the batteries in the lamp. So it’s just there, the way so many things here are. The mulleins, on the right, definitely need to be cut down. They’re Verbascum densiflorum, if you were wondering. After dinner, there was a walk that needed to be gone on. So we went.

It was pretty uneventful, though there were some of those powered hang gliders flying around.I watched them for quite some time. It isn’t something I’d want to try, but it’s pretty interesting watching them.We stopped to look at some red ants, too. The guy I live with said I should call them “harvester ants” instead of “red ants”, even though they are red.The gravel around abandoned red–sorry, harvester ant piles makes a superior mulch for seed pots and even troughs, if it’s washed first, so there aren’t the trillion weed seeds that usually come with “wild-collected gravel”.

So that was my day. Partly interesting, partly scary, partly fun, partly instructive. 

Until next time, then.