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. 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.

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, on this very beautiful day. You may remember me from such posts as “The Fast Learner”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose.Pretty funny, huh?

If you couldn’t see me there, this picture is zoomed in.There was a lot of gardening today. That’s because it was seventy-four degrees here (about twenty-three Celsius), sunny, and, well, downright gorgeous. So there really wasn’t any excuse to stay inside and talk about all the things that need to be done in the garden.

Though, as you might be able to guess from the title of today’s post, the guy I live with has a severely lazy streak, and has decided to write a book called How To Avoid Gardening. It might be a best-seller; you never know.

That’s probably enough humor for the day, don’t you think?

We spent quite some time being very still, trying to get pictures of the hummingbirds in the garden. I was less still than the guy I live with, but I wasn’t racing around or anything like that. These are the only pictures that came out even reasonably well.

That’s a male black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri). They make a lot of whistling noises as they fly through the garden, and sometimes they fly up really high and then dive-bomb us. Today they were sharing, or sort of sharing, the feeders with a broad-tailed hummingbird.

There aren’t that many flowers for the hummingbirds because it’s been so dry here. They visit this sphaeralcea (S. fendleri), but just to look. Sometimes they look at the Rocky Mountain beeplant, Cleome serrulata (it has another name now, like Peritome or something), but they seem disappointed. Here’s the beeplant with bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoregneria spicata). That would be all I have for today, but things happened yesterday, and I’m going to talk about them now, if you don’t mind.

In the afternoon (yesterday) it got really windy. (It was even windier than this, but there weren’t any movies being made then.)

And it sprinkled a little, and then stopped, but then, finally, it did this.

It rained for a couple of hours. It wasn’t a huge amount of rain, but it was “totally excellent” according to the guy I live with.

I know I haven’t said very much in this post, but it was such a nice day that it left both of us pretty speechless. Well, it did me, anyway. 

Until next time, then.