the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the more or less normal-sized purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest and hottest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Who Chewed The Hose?”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I am super roasting hot. I mean if you couldn’t tell. This is me, again, baking.There are some things you might not know. First is, we purebred border collies hate hot weather. Like totally ultra loathe it. And the second is, I’m a whole lot closer to the sun than most people reading this, so I think that makes me even hotter. Our garden is 5,596 feet (1705 meters) above sea level (whatever that is).

It “cooled off” a little, this afternoon. It’s been roasting now for quite a while. The guy I live with says that if it’s roasting, then there won’t be thunderstorms, but I’m not sure what kind of trade-off that is.

At least if it’s super-roasting hot I don’t left alone in the house very long to be broiled. The guy I live with says he “might” buy something called an air conditioner which he says I’ll like. He’s usually right about stuff he thinks I might like, so I say, go for it.

I got left alone last Sunday, but not for a very long while, because the guy I live with had to go see some gardens. Most of the pictures didn’t come out, which somehow doesn’t surprise me.

These are some pictures of Dan Johnson’s garden. He works at DBG. The guy I live with says it’s one of the prettiest gardens in the state, and looks very much like a California garden. (By the way, these are huge files, should you care to embiggen them.)

Of course he went with his friend.I guess since I’m still super-roasting I might as well show you some pictures of how our garden looks today. The guy I live with said a bunch of out-of-focus, overexposed pictures would be “atmospheric”. I think they just make the garden look hotter.

This is the south side of the house, which I understand is “only a little cooler than the surface of the sun”. That’s the “Cheyenne” mockorange, Philadelphus lewisii, in flower. (Named for the Cheyenne Botanic Garden where it did really well, and now is in commerce.)The path in this part of the garden, in the northwest corner of the back yard, has become impassable (except by me), because the guy I live with has let Rosa kokanica grow how it wants to. 

The “enclosure” with all the ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ roses. Oh, and you know how the guy I live with claimed that the big desert willow had died? I talked about that in my post called “A Sad Farewell”. Obviously he was wrong. He did say “probably”, so he wasn’t completely wrong. The new shoots are almost waist-high now (his waist, not mine); responding to the heat. Not the way I would do it. I would just wilt.The guy I live with says that if you think a plant has died, then give up on it, and it might hear you, and start to grow. I bet he’s pulling my leg.

He does care about me, though, as I could tell when he brought this home for me.And also, when it got super hot, he set out the “Noodlehead” sprinkler for me. It’s made of plastic. He got this at Garden Talk, where he’s gotten stuff for years and years. (This isn’t the same video that was posted on Facebook, if you didn’t know.)

I guess that’s it, for this roasting and bakingly hot day. I’ll leave you with another picture of me, just lying around, which is what I do, when I’m not playing in the sprinkler. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the I guess pretty regular-sized 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 Missing Grass”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You probably didn’t know I had retractable ears. They come in handy, sometimes. It’s okay to be jealous.

The last few days were extremely hot. I mean, I was roasting. The guy I live with was so worried that I might get baked, just sitting in the house, that he bought me a new toy. It’s pretty nice. But before I talk about anything else, like the irony of how roasting I was compared to today, I should explain the title of today’s post.

You may recall, in my last post (“The Missing Grass”), I showed the space where the missing grass used to be. I forgot to mention that there was also a depression, or low spot, in the “eminence” upon which I sit, and the guy I live with suggested it might be a “border collie wallow”, though I was quick to point out that we purebred border collies don’t make wallows, let alone lie in them.

Just yesterday, in the evening, as I recall, the real reason for the missing grass was revealed, and I have to admit that I wasn’t very proud of it, for, in fact, it turned out that the back yard wasn’t entirely bunny-free, as I thought it was. I chased the bunny out of the yard, but we both agreed that had to be the reason for the missing grass. It wasn’t giant invisible gophers after all.

Now back to how hot it was. It was really hot. Like a zillion degrees, or even more. At seven in the evening it was so hot in the house that I had to go outside to cool off, and it was hot there, too. I thought it might be a good time to think about an air conditioner, but nothing was done about it. We do stay up late, now, and so my upstairs fort is cooled off by window fan, by the time I’m ready for bed, and the guy I live with says that the night air is good for me. The guy I live with said that when the purebred border collie who lived here before me, Chess, began to get on in years, that he and the guy I live with would stay up late, and watch “Perry Mason”, while the fan in the upstairs bedroom window cooled things off, so that Chess was comfortable when he got into bed. And besides, when the guy I live with was little, he said, he used to visit his grandparents’ house in Los Angeles, and would go to bed hearing the theme music to “Perry Mason”, so there’s some sort of pleasant memory there.

I guess I’m digressing a lot. We purebred border collies are usually super-focused on one thing or another, but we also do digress. I guess since I’m talking about fans and “Perry Mason” I might as well say that, downstairs, there’s a fan which was a used as a prop in one of the “Perry Mason” movies. No, really.So I can digress, but make everything seem connected at the same time. That’s how advanced we purebred border collies are.

It really is time to talk about the weather again. Today things changed.Then the sun came out.

Then the second storm passed over our house.

Then the third storm passed over our house. Not all of this is just rain. And that’s the thing. Where we live, and especially (according to the guy I live with), when thunderstorms approach, gardeners begin to worry about hail. Golfball-sized (or bigger), garden-obliterating, hail. The guy I live with said it first happened here in 1991, and that every plant in the garden was completely defoliated, and bark was stripped from the trees. That sounds pretty scary indeed. The hail this time was “only pea-sized”, he said.

Then the fourth storm passed over our house. We didn’t get a movie of that one, and it rained for a while. The guy I live with said he hoped the rest of the summer didn’t go that way, the way it did two summers ago, when poor Chess had to endure what the guy I live with said he estimated as two hundred and seventy-five thunderstorms passing over or by our little neighborhood in a four-month period.  The guy I live with said he counted only ten days with sun all day. That sounded very scary, and very tiresome. So I hope we have a real summer this year, though I would just as soon not roast every day.

The guy I live with said that the best way to end a very dark and scary day, since the mystery was finally solved and it wasn’t a giant invisible gopher, was with a dried cow ear. There really is nothing like a dried cow ear, sometimes. You might just have to trust me on this one.

Until next time, then.