the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today, after a longish absence, to bring you up to date on all the happenings here. You may remember me from such similar-themed posts as “Frightful Times”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically sun-drenched pose.
If it looks like things here are becoming greener, well, they are.
Even the buffalo grass is turning green.
You may have to look closely to see the green.
Some people around here don’t like native dryland grasses because it takes so long for them to turn green in the spring, and this year the grass (this is my Private Lawn) took longer than usual to turn green, but the buffalo grass needs hardly any water during the summer, which makes it excellent for a dry climate like ours.
The guy I live with said he might plant some bulbs in the grass this fall, because for some mysterious reason bulbs really like growing in buffalo grass. By the time the bulb foliage has died down, the lawn is ready to be mowed.
You only mow buffalo grass once or twice a summer, and after it’s mowed, it does need to be watered, a little, especially in hot weather.

Since I mentioned the weather, I should tell you about our scary weekend. In fact it was absolutely terrifying.
It started to get windy Friday before last. I mean super windy.

Then on Saturday it got extra super windy. The wind was gusting to about 70 mph (112 kph). The guy I live with attached a leash on me so I could go out and tinkle and know that he was close by me.
The wind blew and blew all night long, and then on Sunday, too.
This was all accompanied by “fire danger” warnings, though the guy I live with explained to me that the “forecast area” included most of eastern Colorado, which is a very big place; the Kansas border is about 180 miles (289 km) east of us, and most of that part of Colorado has had very little precipitation in the last couple of months.
Still, he made sure our bags were packed, which of course added to the stress.

I got to go see a huge blue spruce (Picea pungens) that was blown over by the wind, a block from my house. It looked scary; it had fallen on a garage.

This month has been pretty dry, which the guy I live with said was disappointing, but the forecast for next week calls for rain, which hopefully we’ll get. There might be some scary thunder but I can deal with that, since I have three forts in my house now. The guy I live with said that most dogs only have one fort. And some have none at all.

So that’s the scariness.

Meanwhile, Viburnum farreri is flowering.
The guy I live with and his wife would make pilgrimages to Denver Botanic Gardens to see this in flower in December, January, or February, but this has been a very long, strange winter, and times have changed since they made those pilgrimages, so he’s happy to see it in flower, even this late in the year.
The flowers are strongly scented of heliotrope.
He said that when he went to Toronto, one year, the viburnum was in flower in April, which he thought was strange, since he considers this a winter-flowering shrub, but it’s doing this here, this year, because of how our winters have been, lately.

I’m also going to show pictures of some color forms of Corydalis solida, which are seedlings from the tubers he planted which he ordered from nurseries in the Baltic states some years ago. He posted these on Facebook but I might as well post them here, too.
The plants are crossing and seeding like crazy.

Oh, one other thing. See this?
I think you know what this looks like, and you would be right.
It’s a fake hornet’s nest. The guy I live with bought some of these after seeing some hanging around his neighbors’ house.
Apparently hornets and yellowjackets see these, and go elsewhere to build nests. The guy I live with talked to his neighbor and his neighbor said he was pretty certain that they worked.
Two have been hung under the eaves on the front of our house. One blew away during all the wind but he was able to find it and reattach it.

That’s all I have for today. Kind of a lot, I guess.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, sitting next to the decrepit dog ramp, with a hope for some rain next week.

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 “the pump”, as well as some other stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “Hens And Chicks”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
See all the conifers? Those all came from the late Jerry Morris. I’ll talk more about that in a bit.

The guy I live with is kind of irked with the puschkinias. This year, they’re all over the garden, despite him pulling a lot, last year. Here are some of them:

It rained here a bit, a couple of nights ago. There was even a little snow.
Yesterday there was water in the creek again.
And the field is pretty green now.
So the guy I live with was talking in the last post about the conifer he planted in a pot, and how he would water it with a very weak solution of Miracle-Gro.
As I’ve said before, the first time he met Jerry Morris he was dumbfounded at Jerry’s intimate and extensive knowledge of trees, especially conifers.
He showed the guy I live with and his wife a bonsai which had been “rescued” from its owner. The tree didn’t have many needles, and the tray was full of roots.
“Do you know about the pump?” The guy I live with just stood there, the way he often does.
Jerry explained that with so few needles, he would have to cut a bunch of roots in the tray, because the tree didn’t have enough above-ground resources to pull water from all those roots. Likewise, if there were a lot of needles but not enough roots, the above-ground parts couldn’t be sufficiently hydrated with so few roots.
In order for “the pump” to work properly, there has to be roughly equal below-ground and above-ground masses.
Since conifers absorb water through their needles, as well as roots, watering the needles would help a conifer with not enough roots.

So that’s that story.

Something else has happened here, and it’s about time.
In this last picture, you can see that the “ditch-rider” has been through here; last year this part of the road was totally overgrown.
I think that’s part of an old sluice on the other side of the canal.

That’s all I have for today.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, looking at the guy I live with, who was telling me just how many bags of biscuits there were in the pantry, and that they were all for me (just not all at once). It was a pretty interesting story. I like biscuits.

Until next time, then.