the miserable gardener

I think I better do this post. I mean, me, the dog, Chess. You may remember me from excellent posts like “Let the Whining Begin” and “Still More Spring”, because they were mostly about me, and that was what made them excellent. This just happens to be perfect weather for a border collie, which I’m. (The guy I live with said to say that. He says it comes from an old Foghorn Leghorn cartoon where the dog says, “the dog, which I’m” and he thinks it’s still funny. He thinks a lot of things are funny that no one else does. He says a lot of people don’t have a sense of humor, but maybe he just misses my mommy a lot and everything else just seems funny to him. Or he really is in his declining years, like he keeps saying. Anyway, the border collie, which I’m.)

Here I’m on the first day of May, as you can see. Things are pretty much totally excellent. It was really hot a couple of days ago and the guy I live with could tell how hot I was, and so he set the box fan in the window at night so I could sleep without fidgeting, which he says I do when it’s hot.

Oh, this is funny. You should have heard the guy I live with when he discovered that he had a manzanita seed germinating. They’re really hard to germinate, and when one did, well, you should have heard him. I remember him chipping them with a needle and the seeds flying all over the kitchen and the things he said when they flew.

Now (this is the funny part) he can’t find it in the bag. It should be easy to find, shouldn’t it?

The seeds are the part that aren’t vermiculite. The bag is in the refrigerator which the guy I live with says isn’t as full as it could be. Manzanita seed has a waxy plug, the periole, that apparently dissolves after being subjected to heat from a fire, but the guy I live with says you just chip that away and the seed “should” germinate after being exposed to 40 degrees for a while. (How long a while, he doesn’t say.)

He also says that the species in which he’s most interested, Arctostaphylos pungens and A. pringlei, don’t form burls and are killed by wildfires, so their seed must be easier to germinate than species which do form burls, like most of the ones that only grow in California. I’m not sure he’s right, but that’s what he says. It isn’t that interesting anyway.

What is interesting is the reason that the guy I live with said to do this post. The weather, of course. I think it’s excellent. We made a movie showing how excellent it really is.

Arctostaphylos patula, today.