the dog and the bottle tree

Posted on September 16, 2012 by paridevita

Yesterday Chess had an episode that caused us to go to the emergency room. I sat there for several hours, everything checked out okay, and we went for our morning walk today with the usual gusto (me being dragged along). Still, I’m nervous.

all ready for the walk this morning.
“an inch of time is worth an ounce of jade”

In the middle of all this trauma (dog owners can surely relate), it occurred to me to check on the status of my bottle. Yes, I secretly test bottles for winter hardiness. Not something you go around telling people, for sure. I thought the bottle would fill with snow, then ice, and burst, but no.

Cuvee Dom Perignon en magnum. Perfectly hardy in my garden.

I’ve been thinking about making a bottle tree. Traditionally made to catch evil spirits, but I suspect that this isn’t really effective.

The original plan for these bottles was for them to be cut, and the bottoms used for a mosaic or something similar. Nothing ever came of it, so I thought a bottle tree would be a good idea.

The decision to make a mosaic out of champagne bottles was an easy one. I had to buy the bottles, of course, and empty the contents.

I felt so sorry for myself today (the dog is of course oblivious), that I had to go to Tony’s and pick up some health food.

Italian butter cream, I believe. Now in the past tense.

 

strawberry cream cheese “everyday cake”. more like every hour cake.

 

cannoli. to be perfectly precise, cannolo. more than one came home with me, though.

 

Oreo cookie cake. It is entirely possible that I’ll come to my senses as usual and give some of these things to the neighbors.

Oh, I know, this is supposed to be about gardening. Well, the dog likes to garden and the bottle was in the garden, but here are some crummy pictures just to prove I know what this is really all about.

I’m not overly interested in “traditional” garden plants for my garden, but I do dote on asters.

‘Chilly Winds’. this came from Seneca Hill Nursery; it’s the first novae-angliae type to bloom here.

 

‘Septemberrubin’. September Ruby. with me trying to block out the sun.

 

a hybrid that appeared in the garden; larger flowers than ‘Harrington’s Pink’. we called it “Pooka’s Pink” since it appeared next to the shortcut that our second border collie made through the garden.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

the zen of planting manzanitas

Posted on September 15, 2012 by paridevita

Not really the zen of anything, but possibly a catchy title. Zen is short for zenna, which comes from the Chinese ch’an-na (and ultimately from the Sanskrit dhyana…in Pali, jhana) and means, roughly, “a meditative state of absorption in the non-duality of all things”. Nothing to do with planting manzanitas, of course. But it sounds cool.

There are some tricks to planting them. By “them” I mean the true manzanitas, not hybrids with kinnikinnick, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, which are much easier to grow and will accept a great deal more irrigation.

The first trick is not to want them so badly that when they die you’ll mope for weeks on end.

The second trick is planting them now instead of in spring when it’s followed by a summer with 100 degrees every single day and no rain at all. New manzanitas don’t like this. They spend the whole summer screaming instead of growing new roots into the surrounding soil.

Once the manzanitas have become established, they will easily survive here on the average ten inches precipitation (half of that falls as snow) in the rain shadow of Mount Evans (30 miles due west of here), and even on much less than that, because manzanitas are strongly mycorrhizal plants that rely on this root-fungus symbiosis to survive extended periods of drought. But they need to become established first.

They prefer awful soil, and I can provide that without lifting a finger. (Except to dig.)

perfect

 

Checking for proper depth. Removing the plastic and rubber band before actual planting is a good idea.

 

Ready to go. No fertilizer, no organic matter added.

 

mulched

I kneeled on a cactus, so I’ll pause for a moment while I pull out a whole bunch of cactus spines in my pants.

Rabbits like to bite manzanitas into little pieces and walk away. Maybe they think it’s funny. It isn’t.

Back to work, rabbit-proof cage installed.

The next plant went into a hole where two manzanitas had died in the past few years. Like selling someone a haunted house without telling them of its gruesome history.

That’s how I do it. I’ll cover the cages with burlap as added protection for the first winter, and make sure the plants get water up until the first heavy snow, if there is one. The soil doesn’t freeze very deeply here, if at all, so I need to make sure the plants are sufficiently hydrated before the onset of cold weather.

On to the third hole, and more perfect soil.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 4 Comments