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 news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Fast Learner”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Things here have been pretty boring, except for the day I got to go to Day Care, and also the day that I got to go to Guanella Pass. I’ve never been on a day trip before and the guy I live with’s friend suggested that I go, too.

It was such a relief to go someplace cool. It was really chilly, misty, dark, and totally great. Those mountains are high. Mount Evans is behind these. This is looking east, by the way. The one on the right, with snow on it, is Mount Bierstadt (named for the painter), 14,060 feet high (4,287 meters).We wandered around on the trails, and there was a lot of sniffing to do. I did all the sniffing, if you were wondering.

It was so, so nice to get away from all the hot weather here. The guy I live with said we couldn’t move up to Guanella Pass, because it gets cold in the winter, and super extra-windy. And this is where all the thunder and lightning is born. When I heard that part, I decided that being roasting hot every day can’t be all that bad. I guess it will cool off here, eventually.

When we got home there was some thunder, but it didn’t rain. I have a place to go when it thunders, now that I’m afraid of thunder. (It was that strike close to the house that did it, for me.)There hasn’t been much going on, except for a whole lot of complaining about the lack of rain. It isn’t like it rains here very much as it is, but the guy I live with says the garden could use a good, soaking rain.

The guy I live with decided to do some watering. The cow-pen daisies perked up right away. It’s not supposed to rain any time in the near future. “Maybe never”, says you know who, the eternal optimist. 

There were supposed to be “zillions” of these flowering now, but there are only a lot of them. The guy I live with says that every year, at this time of year, he wishes there were more of certain plants, like these daisies, and asters, and stuff, and says he’ll remember to order plants and seeds next spring, and then when the spring comes, guess what he forgets to do?

The cow-pen daisy is an annual, and easy from seed. It gets pretty big if it has some water. You can get seed from Plants of the Southwest, I hear.

The squirrels are eating the haws on the Russian hawthorn (Crataegus ambigua), and so that display is being spoiled. I’ve tried the haws and they’re pretty good, so I can’t blame the squirrels for eating them, though squirrels are pretty annoying.The guy I live with says that the purebred border collies who lived here before me, Slipper and Chess, would also graze on the haws that fell onto the rock garden. So I bring some continuity to his life.

I have been going on my evening walks again, because it isn’t thundering much in the evenings now, though there were firecrackers last night. If you remember the post from last year, we walked down by where the tiny native marigolds (Dyssodia papposa) are growing; they’re not much to look at, but they do have a strong marigold smell, which is kind of interesting.

I guess I don’t have anything else for today.

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. Not much news, but still news. You may remember me from such posts as “The Project”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically pensive pose.As usual, very little has been happening here. In a way, that’s okay, according to the guy I live with, who likes things to be calm, as maybe you can understand if you’ve been following the blog for any length of time, though he says I’m anything but calm, but on the other hand it would be nice if it really rained, instead of just raining a little.

Even the rain we had the other day, the one we made a movie of, wasn’t very much rain. Not what you would call a good soaking rain.

As a result, it’s been kind of boring here.

The hummingbirds are beginning to leave, for their long journey to Mexico. Maybe you can see this one, on Salvia lemmonii. (The guy I live with says some botanists call this S. microphylla subsp. wislizenii, or just plain S. microphylla. The latter seems to be the preferred name. Isn’t that interesting.)

There are a few plants flowering here, but not a whole lot, because of the lack of rain. This salvia seems to be more adaptable to drier conditions in late summer, but it has been watered. They stop at the feeder, too. The guy I live with takes down the feeders every day, washes them, and refills them with sugar water. We have a huge bag of sugar in the house, and of course every time sugar water is made, sugar gets spilled everywhere.

Just this afternoon, when the guy I live with was just standing in the garden staring at stuff, without his camera of course, a hummingbird came right up to him and looked him in the eye. And then flew off.

There are the little oaks. Two of them were planted last year, and began to suffer this summer (almost all the leaves dried up), so they were dug up (the roots hadn’t grown into the surrounding soil at all; this is a problem with little oaks grown in nursery pots), and repotted with extra homemade potting mix. The guy I live with sometimes goes on a rampage about nursery potting soil, but I’ll spare you that, this time. We might show how the roots have grown in the homemade mix (perlite, sand, grit, this, that, but no peat) when the little oaks get re-planted later this year.

You can see how they’ve regrown since they went into their pots, with extra mix. 

If you want to know what these are, well, we don’t quite know. They’re probably Quercus undulata, and the label said ‘Prickly Pete’ × ‘Folsom Blue’. The latter is an oak growing on the campus at the University of Colorado in Boulder. They should get about eighteen feet high (about five and a half meters), in about a zillion years.

This little one is a couple of feet (say sixty centimeters) high after about fifteen years, with leaves about two inches (five centimeters) long. It has the tiniest acorns. Tiny acorns.

That’s really all I have for today. It’s been darkish, and chilly, for a couple of days now, and looks like it’s going to rain, and then sprinkles here, and everybody else gets rain, and asks the guy I live with if the rain wasn’t wonderful, and he says “Uh huh”. Maybe we’ll get a good soaking rain, eventually.

Some pictures of me might make up for the lack of rain here. These are a bit different from the usual ones, but still entertaining, I think. 

Until next time, then.