the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about my least favorite day of the year. You may remember me from such posts as “Behind The Grape Vine”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Maybe you can see the hairs on my hindquarters being blown by the portable swamp cooler.
I didn’t really know this morning what day it is today.

So I wanted to explain, with the title of this post, that we’ve received forty millimeters of rain since May 1, not the 106 mentioned in the last post. (The guy I live with changed that to show the correct amount.) 106 millimeters is over four inches, which would be our normal amount of rain.
In other words, things are pretty dry here.

Meanwhile, the guy I live with went to a nearby nursery and bought some shrubs for the “way back” border. He knows how hot and dry it is, but he said he “had a plan”.
Even though it looks like clay if you just glanced at it, the soil in this border doesn’t hold water very well at all, so he used an old-time “water breaker”, which the guy I live with and his wife used to call “the microphone”.
He dug holes, loosed the roots on the shrubs’ rootballs, and used the water breaker to fill the holes with water, three times.
Then he planted the shrubs, poured coarse sand around the rootballs, watered again, and backfilled the planting hole, making sure that the soil-less mix around the rootballs was covered by at least a little soil (otherwise the peat moss in the mix would dry out instantly).
I hear this is a variant of the “super genius” method; hopefully the sand around the rootballs will help roots grow into the sand, and then into the native soil.

One shrub he planted was the fernbush, Chamaebatiaria milliefolium. We have others in the garden, but this is one the guy I live with especially likes, because of the scent of its leaves, which is like labdanum.
(Labdanum is a perfume made from the leaves of Cistus ladanifer. Some incense called “amber” smells like this, too.)
And that’s all I have for today. I ate my dinner, and then a while later the guy I live with took me for my evening walk, and the firecrackers started.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me in my Upstairs Fort, with the window air conditioner running. The guy I live with reinstalled it today. He’s pretty sure it won’t fall out of the window.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to explain our long absence. You may remember me from such posts as “My Summer Vacation”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
We’ve been away for a while. There hasn’t been much to talk about, except how hot it is.
Yesterday it was 96 degrees F (35.5C) with about 13 percent humidity.
It’s been really dry, too. Our part of Colorado is listed as “abnormally dry”; we’re received forty millimeters of rain since May 1.
The guy I live with said there’s no point in measuring in inches.

He bought some plants online, repotted them and put them in a nice shady place, and most of them are dead now. He grumbled something about “a waste of money”, but he said wasting money is the essence of gardening, and you can quote him on that, though he says a lot of gardeners don’t have much of a sense of humor.

He got some other plants from a local nursery, and here are two of them. This is Penstemon barbatus.
All ready for the hummingbirds. (I know this isn’t a great picture.)
The days of him growing tons of penstemons are over, but he thought he’d try these again.
People are always asking him to identify penstemons, but he gave all his penstemon literature away, and it does kind of remind him of when his wife was still living, and that’s kind of hard for him, even though people don’t know that, of course.
We’ve had both broad-tailed hummingbirds (Selasphorus platycercus) and black-chinned hummingbirds (Archilochus alexandri) in the garden, so far.

I’m shedding. The guy I live with said “shedding like crazy”, and maybe he’s right.
A long time ago, his wife built a little platform with nesting material for birds, and included dog hair. Most people say it’s okay, but some people say not to do that, because dog hair can have chemicals in it, from flea and tick repellents. Well not mine. I have a collar coated with natural stuff.
But anyway, we don’t have a place to put nesting material these days. The guy I live with said there was probably tons of dog hair just floating around the garden.

The desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, has begun to flower. He says if you want to read the quote by Peattie about the desert willow, look up the post “The Red One”. It was written before purebred border collies took over the blog and made it much more interesting.
This plant, which is pretty big (it’s thirty-five years old), has had its ups and downs in the last ten years, but now seems fully recovered.
There are hundreds and hundred of buds on it now.
Today the weather forecast said we had a “forty percent chance of severe thunderstorms”; the guy I live with envisioned all the buds being knocked off, and then came to his senses and realized that when rain is predicted here, it doesn’t mean for us.
Rain is predicted for the next five days, but he told me that’s for other people. I guess he’s resigned to the lack of rain now.

So that’s what I have for today. If you know anyone who needs some dog hair, just let us know.

Until next time, then.