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 up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Awful Truth”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The reason I’m looking so noble here is that I got a new toy. Not only does it squeak, and is for chewing on, it can be floated in my pool, for times when I’m in there, like you saw in the last post.
Here I am with my new toy. The guy I live with’s friend bought that for me. 
This is me again. 
What a good start to a post, don’t you think?
It was a lot less roasting hot today, which was good for everyone. A few plants came in the mail, and the guy I live with snipped off the flower stalks and soaked the plants in a dish pan. “The way you do”, he said. These are Salvia ringens. 
You can see the bonsai shears which were used to snip off the flower stalks. The guy I live with said the plants needed to spend energy growing roots rather than producing flowers. The cork is to go on the tips of the shears so that no one we know stabs himself accidentally. 
And the plants came with this tag.
The guy I live with just snickered and said the plants will have to be watered almost every day until cold weather sets in. And that if, in fact, he didn’t water the plants a lot they would die. The soil here is almost never moist, except in the spring, when the snow is melting.
I guess there were some of these salvias planted last year, but I was a puppy and something happened to the plants, and I think we shouldn’t go into that right now.
We also now have a tomato plant. No, the world isn’t ending, not yet anyway, but having a tomato plant seemed like something we should do. 
You may also notice that there are some calibrachoas in the blue pot. Again, the world isn’t coming to an end. “One does want a hint of color”, the guy I live with said, and I guess I would agree.
The rest of the garden is still pretty gray and dry. We’ve had less than an inch (2.5 cm) of rain since the eighteenth of May, which is kind of a long time ago.
This is the yard on the south side of the house. There is Shepherdia rotundifolia, Salvia greggii, the mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa), and on the right, Solidago ‘Wichita Mountains’ (which is probably really just S. speciosa). We’re thinking of staining the fence blue, too. 
The buffalo grass lawn in the “way back” is looking pretty good, too. It got mowed, and then watered. We haven’t seen any owls sitting on the “owl posts” (that’s what those are, on the right), which is just as well, since I might freak out if I saw one. You see the path that leads to the part of the garden in sun, back there?
It leads to the “trough patio”. Right now the patio has two seed frames on it, which you can see, but they’re going to be moved some time this year, and so more troughs can be put there, or the area can just be left open. 
Heading back to the house, this is the path through the “lawn”. I admit it is fun to run through. And you can probably see why we can get away with having dirt paths. 
I guess that’s all. Oh, I had a cough last week, but it’s all better now. I had to have antibiotics for a week, and the guy I live with bought me some peanut-butter-flavored Pill Pockets, but I spit out the pills, and so instead he hid the pills in something called “Brie”, which I thought was extremely excellent. The guy I live with said he had “been down that road before”, which must mean something. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 