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 for another somewhat didactic post. You may remember me from such posts as “Baked Again”.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This was when the sun was out, in the morning. It’s mostly cloudy here after about noon, these days.

The other day the guy I live left me in my fairly cool house to go out and roast at a cactus sale. There were other plants for sale but he only bought these two.
They’re not quite the same thing, even though they look like it.
They’re kind of weird-looking, if you ask me, like they have all these eyes looking right at me. I don’t like things that look at me.
The guy I live with said those brown things are glochids, and even though both of these are spineless, they’re not something you’d want to touch a lot.

He’s going to plant these in a pot, or maybe in a trough.
Hardy cactus do very well in pots and troughs and can be left outside all winter with no problems.
I should emphasize that this is for climates like ours; the guy I live with has no idea if this would work in wet-winter climates.
There are absolutely no issues here with the cactus growing in a soil-less medium that gets frozen solid in winter.
Hardy cactus begin to shrivel at the onset of cold weather, which means they’re losing water so they don’t explode when they freeze. Once the cactus have shriveled they have no way of taking up water until it gets warm again in spring, so shrivelling is a good sign, and not shrivelling is a bad sign. Sometimes you have to look very closely to see the shrivelling, like in echinocereus and others.

Here are a bunch of little cactus in a wooden trough on our driveway. These are mostly Opuntia fragilis.
These have been here for a very long time, and are sort of tucked away so a car won’t run into them.
No one has ever noticed them.

And here are some in a limestone trough.
That’s a Ratibida columnifera seedling. It doesn’t really belong there.
The grass is Festuca arizonica, or at least the guy I live with thinks it is, and you can see a small tuft of it growing on a round geode that his wife put in the trough years ago.

Here’s the “potato cactus”. The guy I live with said he could have removed the dead pads before taking this picture, but obviously he didn’t do that.
This is in a Mexican clay pot, and sometimes these will last quite a few winters outside.

Here are some in a glazed pot:
You can see the soil-less mix in this pot. This is stuff from an old trough which is now gone. There’s some coarse sand, scoria, and so on.
The highly-porous soil allows rain to infiltrate right to the roots, just like in real life.

So if you like cactus but don’t want to be stabbed by them in the garden, growing them in containers may be a good way to go. As long as the cactus are hardy in the ground, growing them in containers should be no problem at all.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me enjoying the benefits of a portable swamp cooler.

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 a few things that have happened. You may remember me from such posts as “Jam Session”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If the garden suddenly looks all green, that’s partly because the guy I live with has been watering, but also because, at about 10:30 last night, it started to thunder a lot, and then it poured rain for two hours.
It rained so much that the guy I live with’s neighbor ran out at night out to clear the storm drains so his front yard wouldn’t flood. The guy I live with didn’t see him do that, or he would have helped.
This bird bath was empty yesterday morning.
I could tell the guy I live with was very relieved by all the rain.
I thought it was scary, and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to go out before bedtime, but it turned out I was able to, and then the guy I live with dried me off with a towel.

Day before yesterday, the guy I live with spotted a huge crawdad right by the canal. Why it was strolling around on the path I don’t know.
He put it back into the water.
But then yesterday evening, before the storm, I encountered another big one that threatened me. 
It held up its big claws as if to say “You shall not pass!” but I just bravely hopped over it.
The guy I live with put that one back in the water, too.
He also looked up whether crawdads should be walking along paths and I guess they do that, but it’s not a safe place for them to do that, because there aren’t any ponds around here, and the creek is almost always dry these days. (It wasn’t, this morning.)

The guy I live with said this hawk might like to snack on a crawdad.
By the way, that’s how our sky has looked for days and days now; this picture was taken today but it’s not going to rain.

The other thing, and this didn’t really work out the way the guy I live with hoped, is the new growth on the ‘Folsom Blue’ oak. It didn’t work out because the phone camera didn’t capture the right color today, with all the new growth.
This is the right color:
You can see why it has “blue” in its name.

This oak was grown from acorns by the late Allan Taylor from a tree growing near Folsom, New Mexico.
Aside from that original tree, this may be the only one.

The guy I live with said he thought it was important to acquire plant selections made by gardeners from an older generation, which is why there are so many of these in our garden.
After the guy I live with’s wife died, he would prowl nurseries and sometimes there would only be one or two of something, and if the plants looked special, he would buy them.
Of course he did kill a few of those plants, which still annoys him.

He acquired two oaks with this label but the other one was mislabeled, and it deeply resented being transplanted after the guy I live with realized he’d planted them in the wrong place, which he does a lot.
This is the other one, which isn’t as big.
Probably because he didn’t get all the roots, it died back quite a bit one winter, but as you can see it looks healthy now. Healthy but little.

That’s all I have for today. Rain, crawdads, and oaks.
I’m more or less assured there won’t be any thunder tonight, but since we’re getting “the tail end of the monsoon”, anything is possible.
And here’s my tail end.

Until next time, then.