the miserable gardener

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.

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.