the miserable gardener

life with a nut, part three

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to, well, talk a little about the nut I live with. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Life With A Nut”, and “Life With A Nut, Part Two”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically appropriate pose.I’m feeling quite good, I must say, and the guy I live with has been taking care of me pretty well (even to the point of putting some butter on my freshly-steamed piece of pie pumpkin so I would eat it), but, you know, he is kind of a nut.

Take today, for instance. He suddenly got the idea that since the sclerocactus seed sitting outside in pots hadn’t germinated in a couple of years, which is typical, he decided to go through the pots and pick out the seed, to save it for later. (The seed will be chipped and germinated under pseudo-laboratory conditions. There’s a YouTube thing showing how to do that, you just look up “germinating sclerocactus seed”, and there it is.) Some of the seeds did germinate this past spring, but he said this was taking too long. Like there are other things to do.

So this was what he looked at. Go ahead, find the seed. The seed is black, shiny, and hard as a rock. It can sometimes take years for the seed coat to abrade sufficiently that water can get in, and start the germination process. Which is why chipping is quicker. Here’s the seed, right at the end of the tweezers he went out and bought. The little black thing.Another one. This is seed of the endangered Sclerocactus mesae-verdae. In this picture, seed of Sclerocactus havasupiensis, right smack in the center of the picture. The guy I live with collected more seed than you might think was possible using this method, with several different magnifying lenses, and then afterwards said he was really dizzy, and had to go inside.

He went back out a minute later to take pictures of the moss growing in one of the troughs, because it’s all green and fuzzy now, and he mentioned George Schenk’s book Moss Gardening a while ago. The moss dries to almost nothing during the summer. This one isn’t so in focus, but he said it was hard to focus when you’re so dizzy. (Orostachys spinosa in the picture, too.)

The guy I live with is mighty proud of this moss.

I’ve heard, and maybe told, the story of how the guy I live with tried to encourage moss to grow on the troughs by spreading buttermilk on them, and then a few minutes later heard this “strange, rasping sound”, which was my Uncle Pooka licking off all the buttermilk….. and so he collected a few pieces of moss when he was up in the mountains and planted them in the troughs.

Oh, I need to show one more thing. Two more things, really, with three pictures of them. After the guy I live with came home from the store, he made his typical round of the garden, and got all excited, the way he sometimes does, and came back in for the camera. (Then went back outside with it.)

This was what was in flower. Crocus niveus. The flowers are almost two and a half inches (6cm) across.

“To be precise,” he said, “it’s Crocus niveus AH.0166….” Whatever. I know stuff like this makes him happy, and so I go along with it. My mommy did too, up to a point.

Okay, that really is it for today. The guy I live with says he’s still dizzy, and I’m not sure I feel all that sorry for him, since anyone would know that this could happen. I’ll leave you with a picture of me taken while all the seed-searching was going on.

Until next time, then.

more autumn stuff

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you some pictures of our garden before it gets frozen solid. You may remember me from such posts as “Carpets” and “The S Word”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I regret to say that this wasn’t a day for totally focused pictures, but I think you can still tell it’s me.They say it might freeze tonight, though maybe not for our garden, since we’re so close to the foothills, and when cold weather comes from the west, it stays warmer over here because of the westerly winds, so, we’ll see. (When cold weather comes from the north, forget it.)

Here’s the cold weather. This is looking west-southwest. The guy I live with thought it might be appropriate to take some garden pictures, just in case. Some of these aren’t hugely in focus, either, but it started to rain a little, and he said it was hard to hold the camera and an umbrella at the same time. (Yes, we have an umbrella.)

I’m in the next couple of pictures, which of course makes them really excellent. In the second one, there’s practically nothing in focus, but you still get the autumnal effect.

The rarely-photographed path to the “way back”, by the shed.The rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ is blooming in the little garden, my mommy’s garden, on the right. The garden starts right by the post, there. And the willow aster, Aster praealtus, elsewhere in the garden. This starts flowering really late. (We’re not going to say “Symhphtytrhm” or anything like that; we say “aster”.)The redbud is all yellow now. This one is from Oklahoma. I’m not sure that makes a difference. And the spindle tree, Euonymus europaea.And what’s really flowering like crazy are the various selections of Salvia greggii. They either like the shorter days or the cooler weather. Maybe both. Oh, well, time for the big news. If you read the blog before I took it over (I know, like why would you, but, say you did), you’ll remember the trellis and the state of disrepair which it was in, well, look at it now.The guy I live with bought some lath, and spent some time rebuilding the whole thing. The only really weird thing about this job is that the ones slanting from upper left to lower right are inside on the left panel, and outside on the right. Oh, and the panel on the left is narrower than the one on the right. My mommy would not have approved of this faulty arrangement, and would have made the guy I live with redo the whole thing according to her exact specifications. Or she would have done it herself.