the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on almost nothing at all.
You may remember me from such posts as “The New Arrivals”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been really dry here. We had a little rain yesterday.
That amounted to about two millimeters, bring our total since the first of June to 14 millimeters.
And we had some rain today.
You can see how dry the grasses in the field are.
Our garden is just to the left of that little tree in the center of the picture.
Some of the native plants don’t care at all, though. This is Grindelia squarrosa, growing in the canal road.The other thing that’s discouraging to the guy I live with is the infestation of grasshoppers. They’re bad all over the eastern part of the state right now.
This is an echinops.

This is a different echinops. Maybe it’s time to remove these.
So this is just gross.

It’s also been super hot, except for the last two days. The titlle of my post refers both to the temperature (after it was almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit this last weekend), and to how old the guy I live with is now. Super ancient.
The guy I live with decided to order me a portable air conditioner. It’s pretty noisy, but drowns out thunder when I’m taking refuge in my Upstairs Fort.
At least that’s something positive.

That’s all I really have for this post. Incredible heat, drought, millions of grasshoppers, and a new air conditioner.
And even when it’s hot, it cools off nicely at night.

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 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.