Greetings and salutations everyone; here I am again, Chess the purebred border collie, ready to delight and enthrall you with the news from our garden. You may remember me from such wonderful posts as “The Sphinx” and “Dumb Garden Pictures”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. The guy I live with says this is my “spoiled look”.
I’m not really spoiled, of course, because the soft Pottery Barn sheets I get to sleep on weren’t the most expensive ones the guy I live with could have bought, so that proves it as far as I’m concerned. Oh, and if I look extra cuddly here, it’s because I am.
Anyway, I know the other day I showed a picture of salt shakers, full of portent and mystery, but almost nothing happened today, and what did happen had nothing to do with salt shakers. Partly because we got up early and so the guy I live with decided to take a nap at about 8:30 in the morning, and then he took another one after lunch. No wonder not much gets done around here.
There are some baby cactus, just up after being sowed a couple of weeks ago. These are echinocereus, and despite what some people say you need to do to germinate these, he just sprinkled the seed on top of the soil-less mix and watered it a little, and up came the baby cactus.
The guy I live with also did some looking at plants out in the front yard, which I said a while ago you’re not supposed to do and yet he does anyway, and so he did it again.
This is me, doing the looking from my post in the living room. People try to talk the guy I live with into getting new windows, which we could use, maybe, but he says the ones we have offer the same effect as peeling stucco on houses in towns along the Mediterranean. He says it’s “shabby genteel”, and I’m sure he’s right. I’m the one who adds the elegant touch.
The hesperaloes look pretty good after the cold spell. This is Hesperaloe campanulata. I’m supposed to say that all of these plants are growing in about two feet (60cm) of pure gravel.
The Yucca linearifolia doesn’t look as happy. The inside leaves are beginning to look like they wish they’d never left Texas.
One of the new manzanitas looks “semi-iffy”. These were planted just a couple of months ago and never watered, which the guy I live with says is the only way to get them to overwinter if they’re grown in pots with organic matter added. He knows a lot about how to kill manzanitas. The cage is because bunnies like to bite off the branches for no really good reason.
And then the flowering kale. The outer leaves are history, obviously, but the guy I live with says the middle parts of the plants look “moderately okay”. He’s not a kale expert.
So that’s the front yard. Or what pictures he took of it anyway.
In the back yard, the new Yucca rostrata plants look very good. There are three of these in the back yard; they came from Timberline Gardens and ultimately from Black Gap, in Texas, which the guy I live with says sounds like a town in a 1930s John Wayne movie. He says the yuccas should have trunks “in no time”. I know elephants have trunks, and I can’t picture this yucca with one, but here it is anyway.
He also says the one called ‘Sapphire Skies”, which he’s tried a couple of times, has never made it through a winter here. I think you can see that someone has been nibbling on the lower leaves of this one. The plants have that to contend with, too.
Here’s a picture with the sun streaming into the garden, late in the afternoon. I don’t know who knocked over the empty flower pots half way down the path, but it wasn’t me. You can also see the one straight line in the garden, made with a piece of wood. The guy I live with doesn’t know what to do about it. He keeps saying “something needs to be done”, but nothing ever is.
Well, I tried to make this interesting, but I can only work with what I’ve been given.
I guess I’ll go now.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 