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 weevils, and not much else. You may remember me from such posts as “Under The Arbor”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m sitting under the kitchen table, enjoying the air from the swamp cooler, because it’s been hot.
It’s been hot for so, so long. We had a few nice cool days when we thought it might rain, but we only got a few drops.
We’ve had a few drops of rain almost every day for the last three weeks but nothing substantial.
This is really boring, and stressful for the guy I live with.

A week or so ago the guy I live with noticed that one of the big yuccas in the front garden “looked wrong”. The leaves had turned purplish brown.
So a few days ago he decided to push against the trunk of the yucca, and sure enough, the trunk was rotted.
He said weevils did this. Specifically, snout weevils.
So he went about cutting down the yucca. The smell was incredible, sort of like artichoke and tequila, according to the guy I live with, though he hasn’t smelled tequila in ages.
It stank up the whole front yard. Not really an awful smell, but not the kind of smell usually associated with gardening.
The guy I live with said this yucca dying partly wasn’t bad, because it was planted under a desert willow (Chilopsis linearis), which he would have said was a dumb thing to do if he had known how big the yucca would get, but he didn’t.

But partly it is bad, because there’s a problem now: disposing of the leaves. The leaves have to be cut up, to make them safe for the trash collectors, and put in a paper trash bag. Even though we have a compost bin for things like this, with weevils you have to throw away the infected plant.
The base of the plant will have to be tossed, too.
Now technically, the soil is supposed to be drenched with some sort of poison, but that’s not going to happen here.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me showing my reaction when the guy I live with came up with the title for today’s post.

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 potted pines. You may remember me from such posts as “A Jar Of Ants”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been raining all around us; the guy I live with said there’s been flooding in some parts of the state, but all we’ve been getting is a few raindrops every afternoon or evening.
We’d just as soon not have flooding but some of that rain would be nice.

Anyway, time to talk about potted pines. I promise this is the last post on potted plants, because we already showed hens and chicks in pots a while ago.
You can grow dwarf conifers in pots, if they’re native, and if they come from cold-winter climates.
This is Pinus flexilis ‘Saunny’, named after the wife of the late Jerry Morris.
The guy I live with said that some years ago, nursery people wondered why trees and shrubs in containers were often killed during cold winters, and so a study was done, maybe by hooking up electrodes to the roots or something, and it was found that the roots of most trees are not very hardy. There wasn’t enough soil in the nursery pots to protect the trees and shrubs from being killed.
The roots of the saucer magnolia (Magnolia soulangeana) for instance, are only hardy to +25F (-3.8C), so if this were growing in a pot, even a really big pot, it would be done in by a cold winter.
The large volume of soil insulates the roots when the magnolia is growing in the ground.

Well, the roots of the limber pine (Pinus flexilis) are hardy to -79F (-61.6C).
The guy I live with says that is cold.
Blue spruce (Picea pungens) roots are even hardier.
Obviously there are no issues with growing cold-hardy native conifers, in pots, even when the soil-less mix (which is the same that he uses for cactus) freezes solid.

Growing dwarf conifers in pots keeps them smaller than if they were planted in the garden, though eventually the guy I live with may plant these in the garden, and then get more.

This is a limber pine, maybe ‘Damfino’, named after the creek in Colorado and Wyoming I think, and it has a cone.

This ponderosa pine, ‘Pennock Pass Pincushion’, will need to be repotted into a heavier pot before winter.
He got this earlier in spring.
This is a bristlecone, Pinus longaeva.
The guy I live with said he thought this was a dwarf one, but it isn’t, and he said it may outgrow its pot in a thousand years.
It’s very important to make sure these little conifers don’t dry out in the summer, so the guy I live with goes around with a watering can every few days.
The needles can be watered with a weak solution of Miracle Gro.

I hope you found this post at least moderately interesting.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me gazing at the sunlight in the field.

Until next time, then.