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 all the excitement around here. You may remember me from such posts as “The Upended Breakfast”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I look reasonably alert, don’t I? There’s a reason for that, which I’ll get to in a minute.

About the only things, gardening-wise, that have happened lately are the oaks got planted and the “trough patio” was cleaned up a bit.Besides that bit of activity, there has been other activity.

A couple of nights ago, the guy I live with decided to refill the hummingbird feeders, because that needs to be done pretty much every day, when it’s hot. (It’s been hot, trust me.) So he brought one of the feeders in; the sugar-syrup stuff had black flecks in it. The flecks turned out to be ants. Big black ants. Not as big as the giant ones we had a while ago, but still big. He poured the sugar-syrup into the sink. Most of the ants revived, and began to run around in the sink.

He got out one of the “bug jars”, and started catching ants. When the second ant went into the jar, the first would run out and then run up his arm. And so on. So there was a lot of language, while he tried to catch all the ants.

Eventually he did catch all the ants, and so there was a jar full of ants. Not really full of ants, but with ants.He let them go, out on the back patio. “You always let ants go”, he said. I knew that. They help spread seed of cyclamen, crocuses, and snowdrops.

So that was the ants-in-a-jar thing. The other thing, well……you’re not going to see any pictures of the other thing, so don’t worry. 

Just yesterday, the guy I live with was talking on the phone to a friend. We were both out in the garden. He heard a sound like a sprinkler head gone bad; a sputtering, you know, like shhhh-shhhh-shhhh, with a lot of air being released.

He looked down, and saw a huge reptilian tail disappear under the trough. This trough.He started yelling at me, really loudly (while he was still on the phone), and yelling louder and louder. Finally he hung up the phone, and made me go inside.

He called Animal Control and said there was a rattlesnake in the garden.

Animal Control said to spray water at it, with the hose. From “a safe distance”. Apparently rattlesnakes don’t like to be hosed off in the summer. So he attached a sprayer head to the hose and shot water at the base of the trough.

Nothing happened. No snake. The guy I live with totally panicked. I mean, obviously, neither of us would ever be able to go outside again.

Then he had a thought. It was kind of odd that he could both panic and have rational thoughts at the same time. He called another friend who has had experience with rattlesnakes and asked what they sounded like.

“Like rattling?”

“Pretty much. And bullsnakes make a noise sort of like that, but not rattling.”

So he went online and watched bullsnake-noise videos. It was a bullsnake. The guy I live with has seen plenty of bullsnakes here (so have I; they’re huge), and he saw the rattle-less tail, but totally freaked out at the noise. He knew they made a noise, but had never heard the noise before. When he heard the noise, it cancelled out everything else in his mind.

So then he had to call everyone back and say “Bullsnake” instead of “We have to move tomorrow”.

He told me he felt like kind of an idiot. I didn’t say anything.

We almost didn’t go on our evening walk because the guy I live with was afraid we’d meet up with the bullsnake and he’d feel like even more of an idiot when it started making the noise he’d never heard before, but we did go on our walk.

And guess what we saw?

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, some of it explosive news, from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Licorice Lips”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. There might have been something funny happening. I forget. It’s a daytime pose, for sure, considering the time of year.It’s been hot, but not very sunny. This is a picture of the usual view, when it was sunny. The sun has only been out for a few hours since the guy I live with returned from Portland, where they had lots of sun. “Darker than any normal person should have to endure, considering it’s summer.” Denver can be very dark during the summer, and since we live on the extreme western edge of the city, it gets darker here, sooner, because the clouds roll in from the mountains to the west.

This is the path on the north side of the garden. I know I show pictures like this all the time. There’s something to be said for sameness. This is me, in case you were wondering. The sun was definitely not out, in this picture.Here I am again, when the sun came out for a moment. One of the yuccas is flowering. This is one called “Santa Fe yucca”, because maybe it’s a cross between something and something else, and comes from around Santa Fe.There’s kind of a lot of Melica ciliata in flower right now, but we like it. It doesn’t have stickers like some of the native grasses do. This is what the “lawn” looks like, right now. It would look different if we had some sun, according to the guy I live with, who complains about the lack of sun all the time, if you hadn’t noticed. The actual lawn, the buffalo grass lawn in the “way back”, looks more like a lawn. The fenced-off area is where more buffalo grass was seeded; the seeds haven’t germinated as well as they usually do, for some reason. It’s been super dry here in the last month. (That’s not why the buffalo grass seed hasn’t germinated, because it gets watered, some.) Like less than an inch (two and a half centimeters) of rain. One of the plants that flowers with just a little bit of watering is Lavatera thuringiaca. Before the garden was on tour a few weeks ago, the guy I live with got all worried about the rose, ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’, which climbed up the pergola and over the shed. The stems were so low he thought people would run into them, so he cut the rose almost to the ground. The cotoneaster was hacked away at, too. You can see the bats, though.One place where the are a lot of flowers is along the path. This is kind of surprising, since the soil there is hard as a rock. Most of the plants were grown from seeds, sown directly into the soil, which does make a difference. So that’s the garden, today. Oh, except for the two oaks. They came from really far away, the guy I live with said. “Almost the edge of the continent”, which sounded a bit scary to me.

You probably can’t see them here, but they’re just to the left of where I’m standing. The white bucket has some water in it, with a plant being hydrated. The pool is empty right now. 

They’re Quercus douglasii, the California blue oak, which is hardy here. The guy I live with checked with an oak expert before buying them. Sometimes he doesn’t do that, and guess what happens?The reason the oaks are just sitting there, instead of having been planted right away, is that he wanted to make sure the leaves were fully hydrated before they went into the ground. Sometimes we get plants in the mail and they’re a bit wilty, so they sit on the patio getting hydrated before they go into the ground. Then of course they have to be watered, but he said it was easier to hydrate them first and then plant, rather than trying to do that after they’re planted. The uppermost leaves were wilted when the plants arrived, and now they’re not.

My walks have been a bit different, lately, because the grass in the field was mowed. Only in certain places. The grass is so dry where it was mowed that the guy I live with says it’s now a fire hazard, especially at this time of year, and that if the grasses were left alone, there would be fewer weeds. People don’t get that. I do, because he’s said it so often that I finally understood.

The field would look like this, otherwise. That’s mostly smooth brome, which the guy I live with hates. But at least it keeps down the weeds. (“And every other plant on the planet.”)The water in the canal always looks nice. I don’t go in, because there are big rocks on the bottom, to prevent erosion. The banks are really steep, too. There are big fish in the canal, and of course crawdads. The dry mowed grass is prickly. That’s a red ant hill right in front of me. There are a lot of them around. The guy I live with said not to let red ants, or “harvester ants”, crawl up me. They sting, or bite. So I try to be careful. 

Farther down the canal road, hops are flowering. Hops are native here. This picture isn’t much in focus, but you can still see the flowering hops.The guy I live with once, or maybe more than once, said that hops were the perfect companion plants to rabbitbrush, and nobody got it. “There are times when it’s best just to give up”, he said.

That’s about it for today. As you probably know, this is the time of year when most dogs, including purebred border collies, are not hugely thrilled. Last night, the loudest firecrackers either of us have ever heard exploded all around the house. It’s all completely illegal, but people who do this don’t care.

At least I have the guy I live with to comfort me, and the safety of my Kitchen Fort. I’ll leave you with a picture of me being ultra-safe, but not very happy at all, in my fort.

Until next time, then.