the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the roastingly hot purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on our roastingly hot, super sizzlingly dry garden. You may remember me from such other heat-related posts as “Beyond Super Roasting”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.This was taken in the morning, before it got so unbelievably roastingly hot. It was just really, really hot, and the guy I live with has some sort of allergy that’s making his eyes “all burning, puffy, and blurry”, and so he was in a bad mood today, besides being hot.

I have some pictures of the garden for you. It was so hot today that the camera almost melted. You can see a hose there, I think, but the garden doesn’t get very much hose water. It certainly hasn’t gotten much of any rain water, for months now. Except for that one time, when there was a little, but then the very next day the garden dried up again. This is me on what the guy I live with says is a lawn. If you memorize this picture, I’ll show you later what it looked like a long time ago, back when the guy I live with spent a fortune on water.

The agaves look pretty good. Maybe now you don’t wonder why this part of the garden is fenced off.The trough patio finally got cleaned up on a day when it wasn’t a zillion degrees out. The seed pots were emptied, after sitting there for a couple of years, and some of the troughs were moved. They weigh a couple hundred pounds each. The dirt still needs to be swept up.

Maybe you can see that the flagstones in the middle are laid out like the rays of the sun. The lady of the house designed this, but the guy I live with set these after she was gone. He didn’t know exactly how they were supposed to go. But you can see the “sun”, the two curving tiles by the brown pot there, and then the “rays”. Sort of. The lawn in the “way back” gets some water, but it’s still a bit crisp.So, well, it is kind of tiresome to talk about how miserably dry and pathetic the garden is, and so we decided to show you some pictures of how it looked before. (Before the lady of the house died, is what we mean.)

I’m posting these to make me feel cooler. They are also a bit sad. But I’m being selfish since it was so horribly hot today.

This is Flurry, when he was really ancient, lying on the green lawn. There really was a green lawn here. They called it “The Great Lawn”, after English gardening books. This was about fourteen years ago. It doesn’t look very roasting hot to me. And that tiny puppy on the left is Chess. 

This was the “Long Border”. The guy I live with took this out the year after the lady of the house died. He always wanted a dry garden there instead, but she liked this so much, he kept it, even though it needed huge amounts of water. No one ever paid any attention to it when they came over to see the garden, and when he took it out, everyone said how much they liked it. 

How it looked in autumn. Flurry again. The pool was filled up. It was a lot of work to maintain. I heard this story, though, that when Chess, the border collie who lived here before me, showed up, on his very first day, he fell into the pool. And liked that a lot.

Kind of a pleasant autumnal picture, don’t you think? The guy I live with doesn’t feel like saying whether he likes the garden and “lawn” that replaced this better, or not, but the way it is now requires a lot less watering, and that’s good.

Okay, one more cooling-off picture. A spring snow, on The Great Lawn. This is Slipper, on the left, about to attack Flurry, who was really too old to be attacked. But it happened anyway.I thought a nice cool interlude would be good. I know I enjoyed it, even though I wasn’t in any of the pictures.

Back to today, now. I had planned to talk about how endlessly hot the weather is, and that’s pretty much how things go these days, though this evening it got really dark, and thundered, and started to rain.The rain didn’t last very long, but it cooled things off quite a bit. You might also see that the small tree that used to be in the middle of pictures like this isn’t there any more. There’s a reason for that. It was removed. I’ll talk about that some other time.

It thundered quite a bit, and I know enough not to be outside when that happens. I’ll leave you with a picture of me not being outside when it’s thundering.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the roasting hot purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on our roastingly hot garden. You may remember me from such roasting hot posts as “Beyond Super Roasting”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. It’s been really, really hot. It does cool off at night here, which makes it somewhat bearable. But a few unusual things have happened lately.

It started to rain a little about a week ago, and thunder, and I was in my fort, and then lightning struck very close to the house. It was so loud we both jumped. I almost hit my head on the fort’s ceiling. The guy I live with thought the house, or something in the yard, had been struck by lightning, and he went out later and looked. But the neighbors who live near where we walk said the lightning struck just on the other side of the canal road. That’s not very far away.

And then the next evening, while we were walking, someone started shooting off firecrackers, and I had to go home. So the guy I live with said we didn’t have to go on our walks for a while. I’m not the one who needs the exercise. He says we’ll start again when things calm down here.

So last Thursday it turned all cool and everything. By that I mean eighty degrees, which is about twenty-seven Celsius. That’s cool, for this summer, anyway. And the guy I live with was gardening, and things were fairly excellent, until he read the weather forecast, which called for baseball-sized hail that evening. He told me how much he was against that.

So we watched the storm head toward us on the weather website. And at about nine o’clock that night, hail started to fall. Marble-sized, he said. Then these began to fall.He said those were the size of golf balls, but flat. The noise was scary. Then, everything stopped. The whole thing lasted about two minutes.

The guy I live with said “Whew”, and we turned on the TV.

Then the next night, very same forecast. The guy I live with waited all day for something really bad to happen. He said there was a plan, and if you look at the post called “The Deluge”, back when Chess was here, you see that we do have a plan. Hiding in the closet downstairs.

But nothing happened. The guy I live with said that we should have gotten some rain, for all the worrying he did, but we didn’t.

So he said he wasn’t going to complain about being roasting any more. I still get to, because we purebred border collies loathe hot weather.

In other news, a mouse has been trying to get into the house. Well, not trying, actually getting in. Down in the laundry room. It is cooler downstairs, so maybe that’s why. We’re not getting a cat. The guy I live with says cats are excellent (I disagree), but that this neighborhood isn’t safe for cats.

It’s up to me to patrol for stuff. Just the other night, late at night, a caterpillar crawled across the patio, and maybe you know how alarming those can be. I made sure it didn’t try to get into the house. I thought, because of the name, they were related to cats. The guy I live with said they weren’t. You may remember some moaning and groaning about the old desert willow (Chilopsis linearis) in the front yard. Here it is now. Taller than the guy I live with. (So, way taller than I am.) He says he’s not sure it will flower, since it seems to want to spend all its energy regrowing, which is a better idea. You can see from the sawed trunks that it was a much bigger tree at one time. There is another, smaller one in the front yard that’s flowering now. As so is the hesperaloe (H. parviflora). It has a visitor in this picture. You can see the hesperaloe in this shot of our front lawn. The lawn isn’t very big. A shrub died where that empty space is and the guy I live with is still thinking about what to put there. Maybe another oak, though there are three in this picture. The sun is very bright here, at our elevation. In the morning, the back patio is still cool.Then it gets hotter, after noon. The garden is ultra-dry and crispy. 

There are some plants which will tolerate the kind of summer we’ve been having, without additional watering. Here’s the desert willow in the back yard. Of course, it will grow even larger with a lot more watering, but I kind of have issues with the sprinkler. (This isn’t the same picture that was posted on Facebook.) The big desert willow out in front has pink flowers. You can see how ultra-dry and crispy it is here, if you look at the drooping lilac leaves in the “way back”. The little lawn, my private lawn, does get watered from time to time, but the sprinkler never gets to the lilacs.

The guy I live with said he didn’t want to have a garden that was entirely dependent on irrigation a long time ago. Or even one in which the plants were irrigated to make them “look better”. There are a few small areas of the garden that get regular watering, like once a week, while I’m at Day Care. That is, if he remembers to water. Sometimes our garden doesn’t look as flowery as those that are watered, but, he says, “Whatever”.

You can also see in this picture that the clouds are rolling in, but the guy I live with says nothing awful is predicted. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but we prefer to accentuate the positive. And also, those are the foothills out there, and the mountains do have different weather. (We’re not exactly on the plains, but not in the mountains either.)Well, I guess that’s all for today. I’ll leave you with an atmospheric picture of me. The guy I live with switched me to a new food, which I really like a lot, and that’s why there’s so much atmosphere here.

Until next time, then.