Greetings and salutations everyone; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest and most interesting news from our garden. You may remember me from such interesting posts as “Gloomy Weather” and “A Moment Of Fear”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a squinting pose. The sun was out today, briefly. 
It’s thundering over the mountains, to the west, and the forecast is for “heavy rain”. I don’t like thunderstorms. The guy I live with says that maybe this summer won’t be like last summer, where I heard thunder almost every day.
Yesterday was hot, and some of us didn’t like it much. 
Other creatures just clung to stuff. Clinging to stuff is a good refuge, sometimes. This is the white-lined sphinx again. 
Here’s Echinocereus triglochidiatus var. mohavensis forma inermis–no, seriously–flowering. The guy I live with grew this from seed. Inermis, by the way, doesn’t mean “really big”, it means “without spines”, though as you can see this plant has spines, which is why some botanists say it should just be called ‘Inermis’ or “the spineless form”, but of course only when it really is spineless. That’s an asphodel in the way, there.
And the pink form of Echinocereus coccineus. He messed up the color on this one, a little. 
Buds on Gymnocalycium baldianum.
Anyway, today, the guy I live with decided that it was time to move the seed pots around. Some of the little plants are beginning to need more sun (though this doesn’t seem like the place to talk about sun, these days), and so he started to move pots. He moved a few, while I watched, and then realized this was going to be a lot more work than he thought, and so he stopped.
This seed pot almost got thrown out.
That little green thing is Phlox opalensis, a highly desirable rock garden “microphlox”, and it was saved.
But he also took a bunch of pictures of seedlings, which I’m supposed to show you, even though most people would consider this to be boring. “If you don’t include some boring parts, the interesting parts won’t seem as interesting”, he told me, and though I doubt this, here goes anyway.
Oh, and by the way, if you’ve never heard of these plants, that’s okay. Neither had I. The guy I live with said that “some are so rare they’ve never even heard of themselves”, which made me feel better, I guess.
Acantholimon curviflorum
Dianthus pumilus subsp. arpadianus
Achillea umbellata
Alyssum dasycarpum
Matthiola anchoniifolia
Jurinea cadmea
Anthemis cretica subsp. leucanthemoides
Achillea sipkorensis
Whew, huh. A whole bunch of Turkish alpine plants. Also he has a “bumper crop” of bitterroots, Lewisia rediviva.
Lewisia rediviva
So that’s it. Not to end on a boring note, here’s a picture of me lying under the kitchen table. It’s a pretty good place to be when it thunders. Or when I’m not in my fort, or lying beneath the living room window guarding stuff, or just at any time of the day. 
That’s really all I have for today. I hope you weren’t too hugely bored looking at all the seedlings. The guy I live with says he hopes it rains, but just rains, if you know what I mean, but not so much that the creek floods. He wants everything just so, doesn’t he?
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 