the miserable gardener

the equinox

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 the latest news, no matter how unexciting, from our garden. You may remember me from such posts where I tried to make things much more exciting than they really were, like “I Don’t Get It” and “Gray Day, With Drays”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Things are pretty much okay with me, now, though I don’t see why it has to keep thundering once we get to the equinox, but the guy I live with says, helpfully, that “it just does”. I’m worried that the thunder will never stop, and that the few nice days we had last week were just an illusion.

I mean, I’m like, just going along, doing something, nothing much in particular, and the sun is shining on me, and all of a sudden it thunders, because I haven’t looked at the whole sky and especially where the dark clouds are, and then I have to run for cover. Or walk for cover, really. My fort is the best place to be when that happens.

After the guy I live with dragged me out of bed this morning, at the ridiculously early hour of 8:30, it started to rain (and not thunder), which is pretty unusual for here. The guy I live with decided to emphasize its unusualness by filming the rain in black and white. If you didn’t think he was a nut before, like I keep saying he is, this should be proof.

The guy I live with also took some pictures in the rain, and some not. The rain stopped after a while, and I got to go on my morning walk. Here are some of the pictures. I know I’ve already posted pictures of these things, but the guy I live with says if I post lots of pictures, people might get the idea that we’re interesting. Some of these are enormously huge files, and can be embiggened, if you want. Some might even be in focus.

the front cactus garden

Salvia greggii ‘Furman’s Red’ and the honey mesquite in the side yard.

the back yard, from the bench under the tree

the back yard

looking down the north path, to the “way back”

Eupatorium rugosum ‘Chocolate’ and Sorbus scopulina

Cyclamen hederifolium in the other side yard (north side)

Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Fairy Wings’

Cyclamen confusum

Oh, and since it’s that time of year again, the baby cactus got moved into the upstairs bedroom. The guy I live with thinks they might be able to stay outside all winter, but they would probably be devoured by rodents.

stuff upstairs

the baby cactus

Well, that’s pretty much it for the equinox. We didn’t really do much of anything, which is how we both like things to be. Oh, one “hugely exciting” thing happened; our neighbors let the guy I live with toss some old pieces of wood and stuff into the dumpster they were renting. He hates having stuff that should be thrown away lying around for a long time.

I guess I’ll let you go.

Until next time, then.

bunches of 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 the most exciting news possible from our garden. You may remember me from such exciting posts as “Baby Pictures” and “Trouble In Paradise”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I look rather jolly, don’t you think?As many of you know, even with our internet being out for a while, I have been considerably under the weather lately, and my doctor was even talking about ultrasound to see what was going on in my tummy. I had to go to the Bad Place this week to have blood tests, and stuck with needles (that was to test the efficacy of my new medication, not because I was sick), but I also got my toenails trimmed, as maybe you can see.

This morning I lost my breakfast in “a most undignified manner”, and the guy I live with showed me what was in my tummy. That’s a wad of dried blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis) that had probably been in there for quite some time. The guy I live with said I was not a cow and to quit eating grass. I felt better almost immediately, so maybe I should take grass out of my diet. He’s hoping I’m much better now. I certainly feel better.

Here’s another creature who can eat blue grama and not have it wad up in their stomach.Things are changing around here. Summer was just one endless thunderstorm, but now we’re having the most beautiful warm, sunny, dry days, and the leaves are starting to turn. This is the Russian hawthorn, Crataegus ambigua. My buddy Slipper and I used to go into the rock garden under the hawthorn to eat the fallen haws, but squirrels get all those now, and so the beautiful display of dark red fruit is a thing of the past. Squirrels are kind of jerks. Last week, Earl was caught draining one of the hummingbird feeders, and the guy I live with threatened to squirt him with the squirt gun again, because Earl hopped up on sugar syrup was the last thing we needed.

The hummingbirds are gone now, and Earl built himself a fancy new dray up in the honey locust. He was trying to come into the house a couple of days ago, and the guy I live with said it was probably to swipe some of the etchings, so he could line the dray with them, so, well, you know. It does look like a cozy home, even if he is a jerk. There are lots of things in flower now, but mostly you’ll just have to take my word for it. Autumn is one of the best times for the garden here, though a hard frost can wipe out some of the main providers of flowers, the salvias and agastaches.

Here’s a self-sown agastache.And the cool red one he picked up from a local nursery, that was labeled Coronado Red, but isn’t. The hummingbirds really liked this one, as you can imagine. That’s the cowpen daisy, Verbesina encelioides, in the picture, too. One thing frost doesn’t spoil, much, is the crocuses. Today, Crocus pallasii subsp. turcicus started to flower. The shadow is the guy I live with’s head, which is why it’s so big. And, yes, there’s bindweed in the picture, too. If visitors come over he claims that this is a rare bindweed that only grows on certain slopes in a remote mountain range in Kyrgyzstan, and that it only looks like regular bindweed. I guess that’s it. I ate a bunch of dinner today, much to the guy I live with’s relief, and I had a good afternoon walk. We had a nice sunset and he took a picture of it. It looked sort of like lava in the sky.