the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about bulbs. You may remember me from such posts as “The Last Of The Bulbs”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in characteristic pose.
You may be able to see the bunny on our tiny front lawn.

Much to the guy I live with’s disappointment, it hasn’t rained here on any of the days when rain was predicted.
All it’s done is rained flowers. These are flowers of Fontanesia philliraeoides, the “desert bamboo”. (It’s really in the olive family.)
He’s also been sick for like eighteen days, which he says is a bit much, but maybe he’s over the worst of it now. There has been a lot of moping around here.

There are some bulbs in flower now. This is Ixiolirion tataricum. It’s kind of a weed here.
What I really wanted to talk about, though, and this isn’t about me so maybe not all that interesting, is growing bulbs from seeds, and the mistakes the guy I live with has made over the years.
According to him, it’s been one continuous mistake. Maybe not exactly in the Zen sense of the phrase, but maybe kind of, too.

You may have seen pictures of bulb seeds being stratified in the refrigerator here. This technique, sowing seeds between damp layers, or strata, of vermiculite or sand, in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator for a period of time, has resulted in excellent germination. Depending on the species, it can take a month or more at 39 degrees F (about 4C) to activate the enzyme that breaks down the abscisic acid, the germination inhibitor.
The germinated seeds were planted in pots of peat moss, perlite, and sand, and never appeared again.
The tiny little bulbs, the size of the head of a pin, dried out within days, and that was that.
Every summer the guy I live with said he was going to pay more attention to watering, but that didn’t help. One continuous mistake.
A couple of years ago he said he was going to use the native soil, creek-bottom loam, which would insulate the bulbs against summer dryness, just like in real life, but he didn’t do that, and instead just kept doing the same thing over and over again.
Year before last there were three dozen pots of calochortus which never came up the next year.
Well, almost never.
You can see one seedling (Calcohortus gunnisonii) in front of the label in the first entire pot in the middle row, on the right. It looks like grass. This must have been one that didn’t germinate after being stratified.
But there’s nothing except weeds in the other pots.

So, since we don’t have a greenhouse, and it’s far too dry in the upstairs bedroom where the grow lights are, the guy I live with decided to sow the seeds outdoors in pots, last autumn.
This is Fritillaria recurva, from California.

This is Calochortus lyallii.
So far, so good.
The pots in the seed frames are watered regularly throughout the summer, so there won’t be much of an issue with the soil-less mix drying out.

But now there’s another problem: this next winter. Bulbs are only hardy to about 15 degrees F (-9.4C), and the little bulbs won’t survive winter in these pots. There’s not enough soil-less mix to insulate the bulbs against colder temperatures, like there would be in their natural habitat.
One plan is to mark every pot with bulb seedlings, and take them indoors for the winter, right after the first night below freezing (we don’t have frost here so we have to watch the temperature), and maybe put the pots in trays filled with sand. Another option would be to cover the pots with sheets of rock wool, out in the seed frames, though this sounds a bit risky to me.
A third option would be to plant the entire contents of the pots, or just plunge the pots into the ground, in an out-of-the-way place in the garden. The guy I live with says this may be the most practical thing to do, if cages are placed around the pots.
(He has had some luck sowing bulb seeds dry into the garden in late autumn, but rabbits tend to mow down the emerging foliage in spring.)

Other seedlings in the frames, not bulbs, don’t have that issue of being frozen solid.

I guess we’ll see if the mistakes continue.
Maybe my next post will be mostly about me, and so probably a lot more interesting. Here I am being fascinated by something on my evening walk.

Until next time, then.