the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today after quite a long absence. You may remember me from such posts as “Practically Nothing”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is mostly what both of us have been doing for the last two weeks.
I had a considerable amount of digestive distress a couple of weeks ago; eventually the guy I live with helped me out of that, and then weekend before last he got really sick.
I mean really sick.
Things are better now but there were a few days when he wondered if he would have to be hospitalized, and worried where I would stay if that happened.
Both of us did a lot of serious napping, especially last week. As you can see, I’m an expert napper.

All the while, the garden smelled like what the guy I live with said was the smell of a 1950s candy counter.
The smell was from this.
The Russian hawthorn, Crataegus ambigua.
Sometimes it can smell awful, but this year it didn’t. Even the house smelled like candy.

We have gotten a little rain, though not as much as we expect in May, and there are other shrubs in flower.

Rubus deliciosus.

Rubus x tridel ‘Benenden’.

Lycium pallidum.

Mahonia fremontii.

The big thing is the fifteenth anniversary of his wife’s death. I know this has been weighing on his mind a lot lately.
Here’s a picture of her, with Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, taken a week before she died.
I know the guy I live with will never get over this, but at this distance in time I guess there isn’t much to say about such things.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me wading through the sea of smooth brome out in the field. We purebred border collies enjoy strolling through tall grass. I suppose eventually this will all be mowed, but until then, this is more fun than walking along the canal road.

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 show you the dishes, and not the ones you eat off of. You may remember me from such posts as “Horticultural Invective”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
As you can see, it didn’t rain like they said it would.
You can also see the ancient wheelbarrow, which the guy I live with said was a sign of work being done.

Last weekend the guy I live with left me for a while to go get some clay dishes, made in Mexico. There’s a place here that sells lots of them, and you’ve seen them in pictures of our garden. There’s one in the lower left of the picture above.
(You can also see the new ones if you look closely.)

The other day, when our neighbor came over, he was especially taken with the hens and chicks in the clay dishes.
I’ve shown pictures of these several times, but there’s no reason not to show one again.
You can see that this dish is crumbling. That happens.

A whole bunch of work is being done in the area close to the kangaroo bag in the first picture.
The north-south, or maybe it’s south-north, path is being redone. The guy I live with hated to remove so much buffalo grass, because seed is now super-expensive, but there were so many other grasses that had seeded themselves into the path he’s decided to redo the whole thing.
There’s one of the new dishes on the left. It’s not really slanted like that. The guy I live with said that was called “barrel distortion”; you can see that our house seems weirdly slanted too.
In fact, all three dishes are perfectly level. (He used a level to make them level.)
There’s a little square of cut window screen at the bottom, to keep the soil-less mix from sifting out.
I’ve already talked about “drainage” (the guy I live with gets irked when people talk about that, like it’s something that actually happens), but in this case it’s important for water to drain out of the dishes, of course, and the perched water table discussed in the post I mentioned in my introduction won’t be an issue because the soil-less mix here is highly pervious to water.
This came from a trough that had the plants removed; the guy I live with gave the plants to a friend.

The hens and chicks have already been ordered. They do very well in our climate and need almost no care at all. The roots can be frozen solid all winter with no problems. (The guy I live with suggested that that means the hens and chicks stop photosynthesizing, and just sit there, in a kind of stasis. He does that, too.)

The next step will be to order some gravel to spread on the paths and that part of the garden where most of the plants have been dug out (except for that “aster thing” which still needs to be dug out more).
The gravel will make the paths less muddy in the winter time.

The guy I live with said he wanted to title this post “The Hens And The Chicks”, which he said sounded like some 1950s epic novel made into a Hollywood technicolor spectacular, but there was already a post called “Hens And Chicks”, so “The Dishes” is what we decided on. I mean if you wanted to know.

And that’s what’s been going on here. We’re still waiting for rain.

Until next time, then.