the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about a change. You may remember me from such changed-related posts as “More Changes”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m gardening, if you couldn’t tell, and looking at something I thought was important to look at.
The guy I live with suggested that calling myself “your popular host” was getting to be a bit immodest, and suggested going back to the old introduction, so that’s what I did with today’s post.

Things are suddenly different around here, because we’ve gotten some rain. The guy I live with isn’t sure if it’s because of the monsoon, or El Niño or La Niña or what, but he said whatever, it rained. There was lots of very scary thunder, including a lightning strike that was way, way too close. I was safe in my Upstairs Fort at the time, but it still scared me.

Plants like Salvia greggii are suddenly coming into flower, if not in focus.
We still have zillions of grasshoppers, but they haven’t touched these. The guy I live with thought it might be because of terpenes, which can act as protection against the plants being eaten.
Like for instance, the grasshoppers totally devoured Salvia darcyi, but didn’t touch the plants of S. greggii, or plants with greggii in their genetics, growing right next to them.

Here’s a list of other plants, besides the euonymus I showed before and Salvia darcyi, that were devoured by grasshoppers. At least one is surprising.
Acanthus spinosus, Brunnera macrophylla, Allium senescens, Mentha longifolia, Fendlera rupicola (that’s the surprising one), Alcea rugosa, Lavatera (Malva), thuringiaca, and every echinops in the garden.
The grasshoppers also ate all the Geranium macrorrhizum growing in sun, but didn’t touch the ones growing in shade.
They also nibbled on a lot of plants, too, of course.

So today was the first day without any scary thunder for a while now. It sprinkled a tiny bit this morning, and the guy I live with decided to take all the new autumn-flowering crocuses back outside, now that it isn’t roasting hot.
All of a sudden he got very excited and would have danced a jig, except that he doesn’t dance, and there wasn’t any room for things like jigs.

This is why. We’re waiting for the inspector to come and look at the new breaker panel and stuff, so the big shelves were moved. You can see the other shelves at the extreme right of this picture, where the red compost bucket is. No room for dancing.  Anyway, this is what made the guy I live with happy.
These are emerging flower stalks of Crocus suworowianus, a high-elevation crocus from Turkey. Maybe you remember me showing how these grow with the corms positioned on their sides. Even I know this is weird, but that’s how they grow.
The pots are covered with screen against the grasshoppers.
This is a species that doesn’t produce leaves until the following spring, so once the flowers are done the corms with be planted out in the garden. On their sides, of course.

I guess that’s all I have for today. There may have been something else, but if so, I’ve forgotten what it was.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today after quite a long absence, which I’ll explain. You may remember me from such posts as “More Midnight Striped Adventures”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If it looks like it rained, that’s because it did, just today. It rained a little a couple of days ago, too.
That cage is to protect against grasshoppers.

In the weeks since my last post things here have been pretty awful, if you ask me. Every day was at least 95 F (35C), the air was filled with smoke from a fire not too far from here, and the grasshoppers have been horrible. Every time I walked out into the garden I was landed on several dozen times.
This is a grasshopper, if you didn’t know. It took the guy I live with most of his life to realize that a grasshopper was something that hopped on grass. Like a pancake was something cooked in a pan, and other things.
There’s certainly a lot of hopping here. It’s disgusting, if you ask me.

Take a look at what they did to the spindle tree, Euonymus europaeus.
They even chewed the bark.
The guy I live said he’s going to cut down the spindle tree, because it doesn’t belong in this garden. The leaves wilted all the time.

About ten days ago the guy I live with made a potion to repel the grasshoppers. He mashed three heads of garlic and boiled them for hours, with a little cayenne pepper, then steeped the potion overnight in the refrigerator, and then strained it.
This went into a spray bottle and was sprayed on some plants.
Then he got some Garlic Barrier, and he sprayed that. The smell is something else, believe me.
I’m not sure if it worked.
Besides the euonymus, the grasshoppers totally disfigured Yucca rostrata and Yucca pallida, defoliated all the echinops, Acanthus spinosus, Mentha longifolia, and Salvia darcyi (but not the other salvias growing next to the plants of darcyi).
Mostly they haven’t bother the native plants, or any plants with a lot of terpenes in them.

The guy I live with was pretty discouraged, even though it was too hot to go out into the garden to be discouraged, but the other day he went to a nursery and came back with some plants.
He found these at the nursery. He said he almost fell over when he saw these, because they’re native to the western slope here and need no watering at all after their first year, and plants that need no watering aren’t all that popular around here. There are some in the front yard that have been here for thirty-five years and are never watered, because they don’t need it.
These are Peraphyllum ramosissimum. There’s some controversy about the old common name, but a suggested new common name, “wild crab apple” makes people think of crab apples, and these aren’t crab apples. Same family, but not crab apples.
His wife drew this, in fruit, with a cecropia moth.
These have already been planted.

I forgot to mention that a few weeks ago the guy I live with found a toad in the middle of the street. A toad, of all things. He rescued it and put it in our garden.
And then just yesterday, on my walk, I saw a fox. That was the most interesting thing of all. The guy I live wouldn’t let me chase it, even though I really, really, really wanted to.

So that’s what we’ve been doing; roasting, and smelling garlic and smoke.
I think the rain helped put out the fire to the southwest of us. The guy I live with’s nephew is a firefighter and worked on one to the northwest of us.
Hopefully things will be better now.

Until next time, then.