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 the latest scary news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Super Genius”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically frightened pose. The weather here has been ultra-scary.It was so scary yesterday that the guy I live with had me try on a Thundershirt worn by the late Chess. It was a little big, but I think it helped me somewhat.

One thing that happened a couple of days ago is that the huge spring above the garage door snapped in two, with a terrific noise, and so the car was stuck in the garage. Not that either of us go many places, except I go to Day Care and the guy I live with visits his friend and goes to the store, and sometimes the two of them go to rock garden meetings and things like that, but he doesn’t need to leave the house to go to work is what I mean.

So yesterday someone came and fixed the garage door. There was an awful lot of loud banging and it cost a bunch of money, but now we can leave the house and drive somewhere if we have too. It felt pretty weird to the guy I live with.

Besides, he was out of coffee.

I hid in my fort the whole time, wearing the Thundershirt, because before that, a storm came from the south. A really scary movie about gardening here could be called It Came From The South. That’s where the bad weather comes from, though not necessarily the most thunder.

And it is May. You know how when a certain time of year rolls around you tend to remember other things that happened at that same certain time of year? Well, May is when the lady of the house died, and when Slipper died, too, and though things have changed for the guy I live with, he still thinks of May, with those things happening and the terrible weather, as being a frightening month, like it’s left some reverberations from the past. So we were together in this one.

Though it was nice enough to go on my morning walk, it was sort of rainy all day long, and then in the afternoon the guy I live with looked online and saw that there was a severe thunderstorm headed right for us. That’s when I was fitted for the Thundershirt.

And it started to rain.

And then, it wasn’t raining. You can hear the guy I live with’s sigh of relief when it let up. You can maybe understand why the guy I live with says he doesn’t care if it rains at all from May until September. It almost always comes with this.

In places to the north they got really big hail, like bigger than a golf ball. The guy I live with said he knew what that felt like and it was pretty bad. There isn’t much you can say to someone who’s just had their garden completely wrecked; that people don’t really want to hear “It will grow back”, even though it will. It’s just not what they want to hear right at that time.

Today was a whole lot better. Gloomy, but not rainy. Some pictures got taken.

Lithodora oleifolia.

new leaves on Cotinus coggygria.

I’m not sure why things have to be so incredibly scary here so much of the time, especially with all the thunder. The guy I live with says that’s the way it is. I think that’s a pretty annoying response, like couldn’t someone do something about the thunder, though I suspect he’s right. He said we still might not have a bad summer, but that if it was a good one, I would be extra-roastingly hot for days on end.

The thing is, if the temperature is under ninety degrees, which is a little over thirty-two Celsius, then we get thunder, hail, and tornadoes. If it’s hot, then nothing happens. It doesn’t rain here when it’s that hot. So the ideal summer would be unrelentingly roastingly hot and dry, even though we purebred border collies super-prefer cooler weather.

The guy I live with did point out that I have a pool to lounge in if I get too hot.

So that’s how things have been going around here. The guy I live with said tomorrow would probably be okay, too. That suits me just fine. I’ll leave you with a picture of me being pensive. The guy I live with says thinking about the future is rarely fruitful, but that it’s okay to think about tomorrow. At least a little bit. 

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 “Much More Springy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.The guy I live with said I looked awfully nonchalant, which of course was true. “Look more alert”, he said, and so I did.Possibly overdoing the alertness.

I guess it’s time to complain, now. It’s been a bit too hot for me. And I haven’t been able to do all the things I’ve wanted to, because the guy I live with wouldn’t let me. The other day, the guy I live with’s friend came over, and I thought she might want to play with a dead sparrow I found in the yard, but she didn’t. It was taken away from me and buried.

And then yesterday all I wanted to do was catch snakes and eat pine cones, but the guy I live with said no. I suppose he had his reasons.

The water in the canal is flowing again, and there are ducks in it, as usual. I wanted to jump in the water and chase the ducks, but I think you know what the response to that was.The snow last weekend made everything pretty green. Some leaves did get frozen, and a few branches were broken, like on the chokecherry in the “way back”. They’re just chokecherries, so no big deal, I guess, but the branches will have to be removed, and there was a lot of complaining about that.

You can see how green everything suddenly is.

This is a dwarf limber pine the guy I live with got from Jerry Morris some years ago when he visited his nursery. The label said “Taos”. The guy I live with said that he and his friend drove past the highway that led to Taos week before last. There are snowdrops in the snowdrop frame now.Last week the guy I live with gave all the tomato seedlings, and squash seedlings, to his friend, and they also delivered a flat of agave seedlings to a friend who has a greenhouse and can take better care of them. He said he was trying to “downsize” on plants, which sounded suspicious to me. There are a lot fewer seedlings in the flats upstairs, that’s for sure.

The last of the tulips are flowering; these are probably Tulipa batalinii. And Clematis hirsutissima, too. This plant has been here “almost forever” and grows very slowly. I guess it doesn’t get as much water as it would like. 

And there’s this little onion in one of the rock gardens. The guy I live with doesn’t know what it is. It just appeared here. Or, it was from seed he forgot he sowed.  Or something. And then, something kind of funny happened. He had moved a big plant of the sea-kale, Crambe maritima, out to the border behind the enclosure, because he thought the plant might do better out there, rather than in the middle of the lawn. You may recall that when I was little I ate one of the plants. It was good. And then when the berm was re-made, there was a flat space, where the sea-kale was, and so it got moved. But look what he found in the same flat space, just today. I guess the sea-kale is going to be happy there, after all. So he moved the big plant back, next to these, to keep them company.

That’s really all I have for today. It’s supposed to be hot all this next week, and thundery. I don’t like either of those weather features. The guy I live with said this is the time of year for really bad weather, but I hope we don’t have any.

I’m sure I’ll get plenty of biscuits to make up for it. 

Until next time, then.