the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the not so small, yet not so huge, purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up date on the news from our garden and about life in general, on this, our seven hundredth post. You may remember me from such posts as “The Cone Of Silence”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I wasn’t standing perfectly still, like I was supposed to. Here I am in a three-quarter pose, I guess they call it, just to make the post seem a little longer.I like the second one because I look so wolf-like.

Well. I’ve been gone for a while, and that’s partly because our internet has been so iffy, especially at night, and partly because the guy I live with said he couldn’t do much of anything until he got his hair cut. I didn’t understand that, but I think you know by now that he is kind of nut, and so the other day he went out for a while, and came back with a hair cut. And so now things are pretty much okay. And the internet is working, at least right now. Not only was there a big crisis about the hair cut, but there was also an enormously huge horticultural crisis which originated with the plantings in the central bed, that is, the one right in the middle of what passes for a lawn here. The guy I live with fretted about this a lot, and hemmed and hawed, and thought and thought, and eventually removed most of the plants in the central bed and replanted them with native grasses. So that’s what happened. Sideoats grama, mostly. There’s still plenty of room for me to race around, which I appreciate. You can see where I walked, in the lower left there. I guess it looks better. The guy I live with is a bit obsessed with finding grasses that will do well in this ultra-dry garden. I’ve shown some pictures of one, not a native, which has done very, very well this summer, but maybe not this close up.

Achnatherum calamagrostis

And, I guess the hummingbirds have left for the year. The guy I live with says “probably”, but we still have lots of plants flowering just for them. Of course these come from much farther south, or west, where the hummingbirds would still be humming. There hasn’t been any freezing weather here, and only three-tenths of an inch of rain since July 11, so the weather is pretty weird (at least that’s what I keep hearing), but the are still flowers to look at.

Zauschneria ‘Etteri’

I think that’s about it. Oh, there was a planting of snowdrop bulbs a few days ago, and a hawthorn tree got moved today, and one of the branches whipped against the guy I live with’s face, and he got all bloody, like happens pretty much every single day here, with one thing or another, but the hawthorn did get planted without anything else happening.

I also forgot to say that another reason, and apparently a good reason, why I’ve been so quiet is that the guy I live with has been raking up honey locust pods every single day. That’s mostly what he does, in between getting whacked in the face with a hawthorn branch and planting bulbs. There’s a steady rain of pods from the tree because squirrels are eating them, and dropping the pods on the ground. He says this is “extremely annoying”, but what can you do.

Time to let you go now. I’ll leave you with a picture of me, “getting all velociraptorish” on the guy I live with, a few seconds before I flew into the air and gave him a fairly good chomp.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the somewhat less than large 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 “Who Chewed The Hose?”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. This isn’t a horticultural pose per se, more like a squirrel guarding pose. I’ve been making sure the squirrels don’t come into the garden, which is an important duty.What you don’t see in the picture above is all the pods that have been raining down day after day, when the squirrels sit in the honey locust, there on the left, and chew on the beans inside the pods. The pods got raked up this afternoon. The guy I live with has been raking pods almost every day.

I said before that all the purebred border collies who live here before me liked to snack on the pods, but I think they’re an acquired taste.

Here’s another view, taken through the native grape vine, Vitis riparia. I’m not in this picture, which is why it isn’t as interesting. There are grape vines everywhere, but this is the oldest one. He also says he doesn’t know why he doesn’t make dolmades with them. I don’t know what dolmades are, but he says they’re good.  Something you do with the leaves, and something to do with eating. I like most things that have to do with eating. Once again, hardly anything has been happening. Besides the pod raking.The guy I live with said we had some internet trouble, which I guess you can’t tell from where you are, and so that’s why I haven’t posted in a while. Someone is coming out tomorrow to check everything out.

I think the biggest deal here is the ongoing horticultural crisis concerning this bed right smack in the middle of the lawn. The guy I live with says all the plants are the wrong ones, and there’s too much gravel, and not enough native grasses, and so on and so forth.

I wonder what horrible thing is going to be done here. We’ll see, I guess. The guy I live with says the garden is “an awful mess”, though there are crocuses blooming here and there, but I guess that’s because it hasn’t rained here since the eleventh of July, which I hear is a long time for it not to rain.

Crocus kotschyanus ‘Reliance’ with leaves of Cyclamen coum.

Crocus serotinus subsp. salzmanii

Crocus goulimyi

According to the guy I live with we were supposed to get a severe thunderstorm last Friday, with inch-diameter hail and a tornado, but that didn’t happen, for which he was extremely grateful, but he said that maybe we would get some rain out of it anyway. We didn’t. So things are ultra-crispy in a lot of places.

Here’s a view looking over the dry rock garden. I forget what it was I was looking at.Here’s the Russian hawthorn, Crataegus ambigua, and the “regular rock garden”, which needs to be watered, but hasn’t been. Here I am out in the “way back”, on my private lawn, looking at whatever it was that was done out here today. There was quite a bit of digging and planting out there, which is why there’s a bunch of dirt on my private lawn. The poles are for great horned owls to perch on, but I haven’t seen any do that. I know it used to happen. It could very well be that I’m so deadly and vicious that the owls are afraid of me. If you walked past me and then turned around, this is what you would see. I’m not in this picture, if you couldn’t tell. That was a grass path this spring. It isn’t now. That box was a squirrel feeder but the guy I live with said the squirrels were so stupid they chewed the box to pieces instead of just lifting up the lid. One squirrel figured out the lid business, but others wrecked the whole thing. If you turned and looked to the right, you’d see “the enclosure”; there’s a hose going in there because that little garden gets watered regularly. The guy I live with says it will be filled with crocuses in a little while, but that I have to keep the rabbits out. I think I can do that. Farther up the path, there’s Salvia azurea, which the guy I live with says is really hard to grow here, since if it doesn’t die, it just falls over and flowers on the ground. The guy I live with says it would be extremely excellent if the stems stayed upright, and that maybe it’s a lack of phosphorous in the soil, which causes “lodging”, meaning the stems flopping on the ground. A lot of soils in Colorado are said to be low in phosphorus, which is a good thing for native plants that rely on mycorrhizae to endure drought, because phosphorous is bad for the beneficial fungi, but that also a lot of gardens have very high phosphorous levels because of all the fertilizer put on them. Well, so really that was just a bunch of pictures like the last bunch. But more with me in them.

To finally get to the title of my post, because I’m a chewist, and have shredded most of my toys, which I confess I prefer, because then I can throw them around better, the guy I live with got me a new toy, which he says would stand up to my deadly gnashers better. I really like it. I forget who made it, but he said he got it at Whole Foods. I’ll leave you with a picture of me and my new toy. There are some other toys in the picture there, too, because like Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, I love to have a lot of toys. 

Until next time, then.