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 “You Know, Because Raccoon”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I think you might also like this picture of me, with the morning light streaming in the upstairs bedroom window. The guy I live with says I look “rather coy”, which I think is acceptable. Anyway, it’s been pretty dry here, though right now it smells like rain outside. That’s because it is raining, a little. The guy I live with says he would not mind living in a climate where it rains, and that rain is much, much nicer than snow (I might not agree), especially when it’s rain without hail and tornadoes (that part I can agree with).

So, as I mentioned last time, the guy I live with has been watering. No, the world isn’t coming to an end; he just decided to do some watering, to help coax the autumn-flowering bulbs, a bit. This is one result.

Colchicum byzantinum ‘Innocence’.

And here’s another. This is Cyclamen hederifolium. The guy I live with says we’ve never been much into watering, though back in the days when the Long Border and the Great Lawn were all lush and green there was a lot of watering to be done, but he says that that’s sort of weird, watering so you can have a different kind of garden. He also says that watering to make up for the “normal” rain that didn’t fall is something different, and so that’s why he’s doing that.

There are a lot more cyclamens to come, in the shade garden, by the way. Most of the Cyclamen hederifolium here have white flowers. You can see one of them in the background.

The guy I live with, who has a tendency to lose interest in things (like he buys plants and then wonders why he did), said a while back that he’d lost interest in having a “summer garden” when we get about zero inches of rain, and so everything here has been pretty much super-crispy for months now. There are plenty of watered gardens to look at, around town, if he feels like doing that.

On the other hand, and here I should assure you that the world, once again, is really not coming to an end, the guy I live with is talking about growing a whole bunch of vegetables and stuff in his friend’s yard. For a change of perspective, he says. I don’t really like vegetables. The guy I live with says that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, like to go into the vegetable garden (yes, there was one of those here, way back when), and pick his own Swiss chard, as well as strawberries and raspberries. I do like fruit, though.

So, the cyclamen and colchicums are flowering. And it’s sort of raining. Not really raining, the way it does in some places (so I hear). We did quite a bit of gardening today and I’m fairly exhausted because of it. Plants were planted, plants were moved, there was some weeding, and so on. Some things needed to be barked at. And it’s still raining. Not pouring, more like sprinkling.

I forgot to say that the weather has suddenly gotten much cooler, and, for a purebred border collie like me, that’s just completely excellent.

And now, I have a movie for you. I’m sorry that it doesn’t feature me, which would have made it totally superior, of course, but late last night, while the crickets were chirping, there were coyotes. If you were wondering about the title of today’s post, maybe this will explain it.

I guess that’s it for today. I hope I didn’t scare you too much.

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 “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.