the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you about the transformation, as well as some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “House Of A Different Color”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that the hoses have been rearranged. A freeze was predicted a few nights ago; it didn’t happen, but the guy I live with decided it was time to roll up one of the hoses and just leave one. We have two long hoses, one on the north path and one on the south, all summer, but it was time to put one of the hoses in storage.

It’s been very dry here and so some watering has been necessary, especially with the (few) newly-planted plants.

The path off the patio looks pretty good, now that the guy I live with removed all the weeds growing in it. This path was made by Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me. He didn’t like rigidly-defined boundaries.
Some colchicums still in flower, too.
I heard that Slipper was fairly unusual, but the guy I live with said that purebred border collies can be very unusual indeed.
He went so far as to say that after the events of the last couple of months, with the antibiotic and so forth, I’ve been transformed into a total weirdo.
I had a fairly good time at the kennel yesterday, then got to go to the store, as I said, and then got scared by a huge bullsnake, but my biggest issue right now is flying things.
I don’t like eating if there’s a fly buzzing around.
The guy I live with said that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, was also a total weirdo and obsessed with flies. He wouldn’t even go to bed unless he was shown the dead “big buzzy fly”.
So I’m in good company.

The guy I live with said to talk more about gardening so I guess I will.
You can see the redbud, which came up in a pot containing a conifer, is turning color.
The guy I live with likes the redbud so it’s going to stay. The maples are turning color in the “way back”, as you can see, too.

There are still a bunch of penstemon seedlings on the shelf. They might get planted out, or maybe returned to the frame. There’s a little rain predicted for next week, so maybe he’ll plant them out to distract himself from jury duty, which is also next week.
The main thing here is the cyclamen; right now anyway. Some people think that cyclamen can’t possibly do well here, but that’s not true at all.
This is Cyclamen cilicium, with C. mirabile ‘Tilebarn Nicholas’ in the upper left.
This is also Cyclamen cilicium, self-sown, with scalloped leaves (lower right) and some leaves of C. pseudibericum (the jagged leaves near the ivy).
This is Cyclamen hederifolium, with various leaf patterns. The guy I live with says people grow cyclamen for the leaves. It’s strange that they produce leaves of all different kinds of patterns. And more ivy.
The ones that produce the most widely-different patterns are C. graecum and C. maritimum, but those aren’t hardy here.
This is Cyclamen hederifolium again. The oval leaves are C. cilicium, I think.
Because it’s been so hot here lately, and dry, the leaves aren’t emerging as fast as they might.
The guy I live with collects pine needles to sprinkle over the cyclamen for the winter. If the soil freezes, which it’s been doing the last several winters, that’s not good for the cyclamen because the tubers can’t pull water from the soil to keep the leaves healthy.
This tub was made for a sort of portable pond, with water going down that chute to another tub, but the guy I live with has never used it for that.
Someone gave him the tubs, and at one point he tried to give them away, but he’s glad he didn’t.
The last tubs of pine needles were left out for most of the summer, and all the rain sort of rotted them, but he used the needles to cover weeds on the path next to the cyclamen, so if necessary the needles can be raked over the cyclamen leaves.

And that’s what I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me, being a “total weirdo” watching for bees and other flying things next to the path.

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 my unpleasant experience, and some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Mice In The Rice”, among so many, many others.|

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see all the gray-leafed plants around me. Some of them had a difficult time with all the rain we had earlier, but they’ve recovered. (That’s the alkali sacaton, Sporobolus airoides, behind me, if you needed to know.)
The “partridge feather”, Tanacetum densum subsp. amani had some parts that rotted away, but it’s growing back.
And the “mystery centaurea” is doing really well again. It has a nice purple flower, but no one has ever been able to tell the guy I live with what its name is.
It grows like this; a flat gray mat.

The maples (Acer grandidentatum) are turning color now.
It may look like it’s going to rain in that picture, but it’s not going to. We had a few millimeters of rain yesterday, but the forecast calls for more dry weather. October is often a dry month here.

There are still some colchicums in flower. This is Colchicum cilicicum.
The guy I live with said it should be cilicium; that’s the correct Latin word meaning “Cilician”, from Cilicia in Turkey; he said, “Whatever”.

And there are sphaeralceas. They guy I live with posted pictures of these on Facebook, but he said why not post them here, so I am.
And, finally, there’s Solidago ‘Wichita Mountains’.
So that’s the gardening stuff. I saw a raccoon on my walk the other night; we hadn’t seen any for quite a while (years, maybe) until then.

The guy I live with told me one of the biggest sources of anxiety, for him, is having to set the alarm for something. The jury duty business means he’ll have to be there two hours before he normally gets out of bed, so he’s going to have to set the alarm four hours earlier than he usually does.
So, as I said in my last post, he’s been trying to think of every eventuality, and maybe find me a place to stay in case he has to do jury duty.
He called one place, and sent emails, but got no response. He said not responding is typical of the way things are now. He makes phone calls, sends emails, and so on, and gets no responses at all.
But finally he did find a place, not very far away at all.

It was hard for me to believe that I have documents, but I do, and so he downloaded a thing called an “app” on his phone, spent quite some time trying to figure out how to upload my documents to this app, and then he called the place, and someone answered.

Let me indulge in a little interlude here.
The guy I live with worked for the phone company for thirty years, and he gets very irritated when people don’t answer the phone. He said everyone has phones they carry with them, but no one ever answers their phone.
The latest in communication is something called “texting”, and he says that’s a perfectly good substitute, but people don’t answer texts, either.

Anyway, the people at the place I might stay talked to the guy I live with, and I had to go for an interview, like to see if I was a maniac or a weirdo or something.
(The guy I live with says that all purebred border collies are weirdos.)
And so we went.
I was absolutely terrified and didn’t want to approach anyone there. I even crawled under the bench that the guy I live with was sitting on. The guy I live with felt very sorry for me, but didn’t understand why I didn’t like the place, since I like going to my doctor’s office, and liked going to Day Care there.

I was afraid I was going to be abandoned, right then and there, but the guy I live with assured me he would never, ever abandon me, no matter what.
We’re going back next week, for another interview.

Of course, there’s a chance that none of this will be necessary, but the guy I live with said this was “just in case”.
I got extra cuddles and kisses after my ordeal.

And that’s the situation here, on a chilly, dry, and windy evening in October.

Until next time, then.