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 bring you a short film about bats and some other stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “The Green Horrors”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Okay, maybe a slightly silly pose.

So it’s August now. The guy I live with said that could be the whole post. It seemed to me that would be pretty ridiculous, especially with all the work that was done in preparation for this post. There were probably about a dozen movies made, none of which turned out to be entirely satisfactory, even the one that took hours to upload.

Fortunately no caterpillars have fallen near me, like they did on the post mentioned above, which took place about the same time of the year, though I am really beginning to dislike having so many flying things land on me, and crawling things crawl on me. The guy I live with said winter would be here before we knew it. “It can snow next month”, he said.

Some work was done yesterday, which was kind of interesting. A small area in the “way back” was renovated, with some expanded shale dug in. This is the first time expanded shale has been dug in; I’d never even seen it before and don’t know what it’s used for. I guess it’s shale that’s been expanded. The digging didn’t take very long at all. Some Yum Yum Mix was added too. This little area was the site of the old compost pile and there are still some charcoal briquets from when the barbecue used to be emptied into the compost pile. One time the compost pile caught on fire and the guy I live with thought that was hysterical. He said he was the only person who thought it was funny.

Anyway, it got later, and eventually the guy I live with noticed that the bats were out. You can see one, there, in the distance. 

This is a bit better. Possibly even a bit scary, especially if you embiggen it.

That’s really all I have for today. There were a whole lot of bats out tonight. It is odd that the high point of summer is next week and yet at the same time it can, as I noted above, actually snow in five or six weeks. The guy I live with has always hated that about living here, but there’s not much that can be done about it, and hating weather seems pretty pointless. Though I did hear something today about the fact that it was sunny all day, which it was. For the first time in weeks and weeks.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me lounging in my fort.

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 Hose, You Know”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Believe it or not, a couple of nights ago it rained. And not just rained, but really rained. We got over an inch (two and a half centimeters) of rain.

The guy I live with made a bunch of rain movies, and then accidentally deleted them. Partly because he used a new program to fiddle with the movies in the first place (a program which was on the laptop when he bought it but never knew it was there), and partly because, well, you know, he just deleted them. “Like you sometimes do”, he said, though I never delete anything, unless it’s something which might implicate me in some kind of naughtiness. He spent some time working with a program which restores deleted files on the card, but then decided the heck with it. He often decides that. I guess you’ll just have to imagine the rain movies, though I do have some things which might help with that, like a much shorter movie.

It does sometimes rain here, at this time of year. People who live here like to talk about the monsoon, which actually takes place a couple of thousand miles to the south, and where they have plants adapted to flower at this time of year because of the rains, but the guy I live with said he didn’t feel like arm-wrestling anyone over whether or not you could call rain at this time of the year “the monsoon” because it seems to make people happy to call it that. “Even though …”, well, never mind, huh.

Not a whole lot has been happening here because of the monsoon. I decided to type that even though the guy I live with would start in on how Colorado, etc. Some plants have been purchased, which I know comes as a terrific shock, there are actually new plants here, and they haven’t been planted. In this picture, not so many, just the plants in the flat right there. All the plants in the flat, here, in the picture below, and the two Artemisia stelleriana. (Talk about being overexposed.) Same Steller as Steller’s jay, according to the guy I live with. I’ve never seen a Steller’s jay but I hear we have them, in the mountains. We might go camping sometime, and see one, but just between you and me, camping sounds fairly scary. No Pottery Barn sheets to sleep on, on a rainy afternoon. And my forts just got refitted with new rugs which are very nice. Anyway ….The thing here that’s, well, the guy I live with wants to call it revolutionary, but it’s really just something that practically anyone who’s ever seen a plant has done, at least once, but what’s going on here (since I’m supposed to say, and you get to decide whether or not it’s totally revolutionary or just a complete embarrassment, as usual), is that instead of planting everything  by washing off the peat moss and stuff, the roots have been teased out and all the plants have been repotted in a size larger pot, so that hopefully the roots will start growing out of the root balls, instead of just sitting there, and the plants can be planted maybe later next month.

The potting mix, if you needed to know, is mostly just sand and perlite, with a tiny amount of peat moss. And it’s supposed to rain more. I guess technically the plants would be happier planted in the ground, if it rained a lot, but someone tends to forget about newly-planted plants, thanks to a wandering mind, or something, so really, the plants are safer growing here right next to the patio. I mean if they were planted, and then it rained almost every day for a month, maybe that would be okay, but the guy I live with decided not to take any chances.

So that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with with a picture of me in my fort, not scared or anything, just relaxing, though I do think this does look a bit noirish, like I could be Sydney Greenstreet, in the back room of a bar, maybe at the edge of town in some remote part of the world, and the air is all electric with the coming of the monsoon. 

Until next time, then.