the miserable gardener

when the bindweed is in bloom

Hello everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, here to bring you the latest and greatest news from our garden. You may remember me from such great posts as “Cactus And Snow” and “The Awful Smell”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I bet you wish you had your own personal rug so you could lie in front of the refrigerator, too. Wait, how about another picture of me before I go into the gardening news?I’m not sure which one I like better. Both are pretty good, if you ask me. You can’t really tell how blisteringly hot I was when I had my picture taken, but that’s because I’m tough.

It was blisteringly hot today, and the bindweed was blooming, as maybe you figured when you read the title of today’s post, and the upshot of this was that when the guy I live with saw all the flowers, he realized that he’d missed pulling a whole bunch of bindweed. Not that he went out and pulled it all. He just realized it.

We got up pretty early this morning, maybe 7:30, and one of the first things that he did after making my breakfast and starting the coffee was to take a morning picture from the back door. My mommy bought that green star. And the bird that’s on the railing. I got to go on both my walks, of course, and it was super extra blisteringly hot, which I liked, and then I spent most of the day napping. The guy I live with kept saying he was going to do some gardening, and he was outside for a little while, but I was asleep, so I don’t know if any genuine gardening took place, or if he just wandered around looking at things other than the flowering bindweed.

He says a lot of people are kind of strange, and one way you can tell that they are is that they don’t grow this plant. He pushed it over the sidewalk so you could see it in all its glory.Impressive, no? This is Matthiola longipetala (M. bicornis), the night-scented stock. You throw the seeds on the ground and they come up. The seedlings will overwinter, too.

This is what it looks like when the sun goes down. I don’t know why this picture is so grainy, but it is. (I think he pressed the wrong button before he took the picture.)Still not impressed? Well, you don’t grow it for its looks. What you grow it for is the intense scent of cloves and vanilla that perfume a very large area of the garden. The scent carries on the wind, too.

If we could do smells on the blog, you could smell the flowers, and then you’d want to get a packet of seed from a place like J.L. Hudson.

While he was out in front, which is where the stock plants are, he took a picture of the desert four o’clock, Mirabilis multiflora.There was something munching on the plant, too. The guy I live with said the caterpillar was eating the leaves like people eat corn on the cob. My mommy used to buy corn on the cob, soak it in water for an hour or so, and then grill it. She and the guy I live with would eat it with lots of butter, out on the patio, while I and my buddy Slipper tried to remind them that purebred border collies like buttered grilled corn on the cob a lot.

Um, let’s see. Oh, there are a couple of red penstemons blooming right now, in the back yard. (Four species, really, but only two got their pictures taken.)

Penstemon barbatus. (Self sown.)Another P. barbatus.Plenty of flowers for the hummingbirds.

I guess that’s it. Tomorrow is supposed to be super hot, too, so I’ll go on my walks and make the guy I live with think I’m going to pass out at any moment, when I’m really having a very good time, and then I can nap for the rest of the day.

I’m very good at napping.

Until next time, then.

hot, dry, and crispy

Greetings and salutations, everyone; 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 from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Dog Days” and “Life With A Nut”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose, roastingly hot.The reason I say “roastingly hot” is because it’s been that way. The guy I live with claims to like it, and to tell the truth, I really do enjoy going on walks when it’s so hot my paws start to cook, but I can’t say why that is. I just like it, that’s all.

You can see how dry and crispy it was yesterday. That’s me there, if you didn’t know. Sporobolus airoides flowering on the left. You can see that little light spot on my side, which is a sore, and it hasn’t healed, and the guy I live with says I have to go in for surgery next week, to have it fixed. He isn’t telling me much more than that, but I can feel that he’s not totally freaked out, so that’s good. I don’t want to go, but I know I have to. I’ve been to the hospital before, and they were nice to me there.

You can see how crispy the garden is here, too. The little burlap things are to shade new plants. We can have dirt paths here, by the way. It got all dark and thundery today, and rained for a minute or so, and the guy I live with took more pictures. This is the path to the “way back” on the south side; my mommy’s little garden is on the right.Her little garden. You can see how badly the fence needs fixing. This little garden gets watered once a week or so. And the buffalo grass lawn in the “way back”, again, with Tanacetum niveum. The lawn is looking better every day, or so I’m told. I know we just showed a picture of this, but now we’re showing another one. That’s how we are around here. Speaking of lawns, the guy I live with decided it was high time to mow the one in front, so he did. This is it, mowed. Yes, that’s our front lawn. Blue grama. Like in case people came by and demanded there be a lawn in the front yard, we could point to this and say “Look, a lawn”. The desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, from the Chisos Mountains, has just started to bloom.Here’s “something you don’t see every day”, though of course we do. Ignore the dead stalk of Fritillaria persica, won’t you? A pink flowered Salvia dumetorum, I guess, and the naturally-occurring intergrade between Yucca rupicola and Y. pallida. (You can see the twisted leaves.)Later on, it got all dark and thundery, and rained for a few minutes. It’ll be nice and cool for sleeping.

The guy I live with “took advantage” of the darkness and took a bunch more pictures, almost none of which came out the way he wanted. The front garden, again. He put a new “trick-or-treater fence” in, but this will be replaced with a slightly longer one, made of the same material, heavy-gauge steel. This is one of those old-timey garden fences, of the kind he thinks he can’t get any more. The new one won’t lean so much, or so he says. The oaks in the front yard. Some of them, anyway.A corner of the front yard no one ever goes in. Basically on the other side of where the picture above was taken, back in the right. Well, okay, someone had to go here to take this picture, but I never go here. That’s Penstemon eatonii, blooming red. Oh, I almost forgot. The plants. The guy I live with is all excited about getting these plants. They’re “buffalo gourds”, Cucurbita foetidissima. He says you see them by roadsides all throughout the Southwest. These’re going in the “way back”. I guess that’s it. The guy I live with has native cucurbits to plant (but not to eat, for sure), and I have a fort to lie in.