the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on our news, as well as to talk about some arcane and esoteric things. You may remember me from such posts as “The Shapeless Ones”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’ve had a pretty good day, alternating gardening with napping, though I did get super in trouble and yelled at for trying to eat a bald-faced hornet.
The guy I live with said if I started swelling up like a balloon, we’d have to take a trip to the emergency vet. Or maybe the guy I live with has some Benadryl that’s not expired.
I eat bees and yellowjackets (and get yelled at), and nothing happens.
The guy I live with said Pooka, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, got totally swollen when he was stung by a bumblebee.
I didn’t swell up, so the guy I live with was just wrong. He often is.

So anyway, to keep talking about me, I’ve had this digestive issue, on and off, for a while, and the guy I live with was finally able to get a sample on my morning walk yesterday, and took it to the vet’s. I have clostridium and giardia. I’ve had this before, and Chess, another purebred border collie who lived here before me, got it all the time.
I have an antibiotic and this icky-looking gray prescription food that doesn’t taste bad at all.
There’s some yogurt with honey in the refrigerator, for my tummy, in case I need it.

Yesterday we had an invader.
Since I was sort of under the weather the guy I live with said it was okay if I didn’t chase the bunny away. I was asleep, actually.

Today, the guy I live with got a new spade in the mail. He already has spades, but this one if made by the same people who made the Garden Shark, and you can see it’s designed for very serious digging, just like the Shark is.
There are some things that even the Shark won’t dig up, but this spade will. He’s already tried it.
He has a couple of other spades, and he may give them away. He does things like that, a lot.

And now for some arcane and esoteric gardening stuff.
The guy I live with got a small box of autumn-flowering crocuses yesterday.
You can buy autumn-flowering crocuses, like the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, and C. speciosus and C. pulchellus, from bulb brokers or even at the local garden center, but these are different.
Well of course they’re different. The guy I live with is a bulb snob, if you didn’t know.

These were potted up today, so they can be watered, and planted out in August. (If they were planted out now, they might not form roots, unless they’re watered, and the guy I live with would probably forget to water them.)

He only ordered one of each, except for the next one, to make the order a small one, but also because he says you really only need one corm.
The corm pictured below is called a “mother” corm. Some autumn-flowering crocuses, like the saffron crocus, grow leaves right after flowering. The leaves overwinter and have to be protected from rabbits, who love crocus leaves.
With the two species below, leaves appear in spring.
When the leaves die back, and with either type it’s just about the same time in mid-spring, the mother corm begins to form little cormlets, or “daughter” corms, and the starch in the mother corm is transferred to the daughter corms.
If the daughter corms grow well, they’ll flower the following autumn, and the old mother corm will have withered away.

This is Crocus damascenus (C. cancellatus subsp. damascenus.) Look at the reticulated, or netted, tunic on the corm. (The tunic is the covering on the corm.) That’s one way to distinguish crocus species. Flowers are of course another way.
This is Crocus suworowianus. (C. kotschyanus subsp. suworowianus.) The smooth tunics are obvious, but there is one glaringly weird thing here.
I mean this is ultra super weird, if you ask me. The corms are on their sides. That’s because this particular crocus, and another one that also used to be subspecies of Crocus kotschyanus, C. cappadocicus, grow in the wild with their corms sideways like this. The flowering shoots emerge, and then turn at a right angle to the corm, and grow in the normal direction.
There must be some evolutionary reason for this, but it’s just plain weird.

The pots are sitting on the squirrel-proof shelves built by the guy I live with’s wife.
With some extra screening over the pots, just in case a squirrel can slither through a gap. I didn’t think squirrels slithered, but the guy I live with said squirrels can do almost anything.

Finally, we had a surprise last night. I began to hear thunder around 9:30 and headedup to my Upstairs Fort, for safety.
There was a lot of thunder and lightning, and then it rained.
We got about a quarter inch of rain, which the guy I live with said was excellent.

Well, that’s all the news from here.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, here to talk about how roastingly hot I am, as well as some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Hot Again”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic, if somewhat damp, pose.
The guy I live with soaked me with the hose yesterday. We purebred border collies don’t like hot weather at all. Fortunately it doesn’t get roastingly hot every single day from June to September, here.

It’s 90 degrees (32C), and about 17 percent humidity, which is kind of high for here when it’s this hot, but it did sort of rain a while ago.
You can see that the sun was out while it was raining.
The guy I live with says that there’s not much chance of thunder when it’s this hot, but I decided to play it safe.
Today, some people in a really big truck came by and stole our trash. They do this every week, and even though I try to stop them with deadly fierce barking, they still do it.
I’m going to have to have the guy I live with explain this phenomenon to me. I’m really not sure I like any kind of phenomenon, especially a weird one like this.
The guy I live with explained that the first truck who stole our trash was really stealing our recycling stuff.

Meanwhile, the guy I live with has been trying to take some movies of the garden, but hasn’t been very successful. In fact, the ones he took with the phone never even uploaded. The guy I live with said maybe the files were too big. Another phenomenon.

But we do have some pictures.
The Persian yellow rose is having a very good year, as usual. When he posted pictures of this on Facebook a couple of years ago, someone said something about blackspot.
The guy I live with said “Lol”. (Note the comment about 17 percent humidity, above.)

He’s never understood why people think all gardening climates are the same.

Anyway there are some other things in flower.
This is the rose ‘Veilchenblau’, almost done flowering.
Rosa kokanica:

Acanthus hirsutus, a different picture from the one the guy I live with posted on Facebook.
Salvia hypargeia, flowering in a sea of Marrubium incanum:
Amorpha nana. This was grown from seed collected in Boulder County.
And, finally, the rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’.
This unfortunately flowers all summer and will soon be covered with Japanese beetles.

I’m going to give you a break from all the flowers to talk about one of the guy I live with’s obsessions: cooking, and its corollary, eating. Of course I’m obsessed with food, but since the guy I live with has been sick (and I guess still not one hundred percent better), and couldn’t bring himself to eat much in the first week he was sick, the obsession has become worse.
This is “New York Deli Style” potato salad, marinating in brine in the refrigerator.
I’ve never had potato salad. The guy I live with makes different kinds of potato salad fairly often (he says Paul Prudhomme’s is the best, period), but he thought he would try this, because he likes trying new recipes (unless they sound icky, which this definitely didn’t).

Then the sun came out, so I was able to loll on the patio for a while.
And then, despite what the guy I live with said about thunder when it’s so hot, he got a severe thunderstorm warning on his phone. But now it’s only 80 degrees (27C).
The guy I live with said the warning was coming from a place called Aspen Park, which is about nine miles southwest of us, though a much longer drive because it’s in the mountains (foothills, really, but we would still say “in the mountains”).
The guy I live with looked at the radar and the storm was moving straight east, so, south of us. It’s dissipated now.
Thunder is definitely a phenomenon which I’m against.

In the garden on the south side of the house, Philadelphus lewisii has started to flower.
And the mesquite, which the guy I live with feared had been killed after two very rough winters, is coming back.
It will grow more with a lot of heat. It’s especially hot in this garden.

And, finally, the hesperaloe is flowering for the first time. It’s been here for several years, but has taken its own sweet time getting around to producing a flower spike.
This is a cross between Hesperaloe parviflora and H. funifera, so it’s bigger than regular H. parviflora.
And then, another truck came to steal our real trash. I did quite a lot of barking, but the trash still got stolen.
Then the truck came back and stole the neighbor’s trash, across the street.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me giving the trash thieves a piece of my mind. All in all, a very exciting day.

Until next time, then.