the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all the recent events here. You may remember me from such posts as “Our Modern Lifestyle”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Not much has been happening here, though there has been some excitement. It rained a bit a few days ago, though now we’re going to have a week of dry weather.

Mostly what’s been going on here is a bunch of cleaning up of stuff, which in itself is pretty remarkable. The guy I live with removed three troughs just a few days ago. One of them was broken, and the other two had so few plants left in them that he dug out the plants that were left, then removed all the soil-less mix, and very carefully moved the heavy troughs onto the patio, using a dolly. The two troughs will eventually go to the Chatfield Arboretum, south of here.
What happened was that larger plants flopped over the troughs and so a lot of the trough plants rotted away during all the rain we had earlier.

The other thing, and it was a much bigger deal, was that two weeks ago our trash pickup was missed. The guy I live with was angry at first, and then he realized that the person driving the trash truck might have been new, and since we’re the only ones without a trash container (we just used bags), maybe he should have asked for a container quite a while ago. So he asked for one, and it was delivered. The kind that gets lifted onto the trash truck with a crane sort of thing.

The container is pretty big (96 gallons), so it took up a lot of space in the garage.
The guy I live with decided it was finally time to get rid of the mattress and box springs that have been sitting in the garage for about five years, taking up a lot of space.
The mattress was really old. About 65 years old. Yes, I know.
People came day before yesterday to haul those away, as well as an old wooden cabinet the guy I live with disliked, and some other stuff.
So now there’s a bunch of room for the big trash container. The guy I live with even sometimes goes out into the garage just to look at all this new space.

That’s our big news. The guy I live with said it was very nice to get rid of stuff.

Since this is a gardening blog, sort of, I thought I show show some pictures related to gardening.
This is me, if you couldn’t tell, not paying any attention to Aster oblongifolius. These asters are all over the garden and are flowering now. They don’t need any supplemental irrigation. There are some cowpen daisies, too.
The guy I live with is more interested in the colchicums, which are peaking right now.
There are even more colchicums flowering now, but I thought I would just show these.
The guy I live with has been making cages, covered with window screen, to protect the flowers from being devoured by grasshoppers, who eat the colchicums right down to the ground, even though colchicums are poisonous.

And that’s really it for today. The ancient mattress is gone, the three troughs are gone, and we have colchicums in flower.

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 bring you the latest news, which I have to admit isn’t much. You may remember from such posts as the similarly-themed “A Jar Of Ants”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been pretty hot here lately, so not much has been done in the garden.
But I have to tell you my little story.

A couple of days ago, we were out in the “way back”, and when I went to look out in the field (that’s why there’s nothing growing here; it’s one of my lookout points) I saw something under this lilac.
There was a rattling sound, and I jumped back about three feet. The guy I live with of course totally freaked out, thinking it was a rattlesnake, even though there was only a short bit of rattling.
He started to clear out a bunch of plants to the left of this lilac, and then he saw the snake.

It was a western yellow-bellied racer (Coluber constrictor, “the farmer’s friend”). A very large snake. So he looked online and sure enough, racers do rattle their tails in dry leaves, sort of to fake out purebred border collies who don’t much like snakes.
I’m glad I didn’t see the snake in all its hugeness.

So that was pretty exciting.

He’s been watering, some, with the new sprinkler. The garden doesn’t really need it, but there are all these cow-pen daisies that look pretty pathetic without water. They grew really tall when it rained a lot, and then when it stopped raining, they wilted.
He admits there might be too many of these in the garden. They’re annuals with very shallow root systems, and seeded all over the place last year.

The only part of the garden that gets regular watering (about once a week), besides the little shade garden on the north side of the house, is the garden in “the enclosure”.
The aster ‘Vasterival’ and its purple companion (on the right) have been flowering for a little while now.
The guy I live with thinks this is a pretty sad little garden, though people who see it don’t have any sense of that sadness, which he says is the way things are.
His wife designed this, and he’s slowly replacing the fence she built, because it started to fall apart.
Maybe when it gets cooler, like it’s supposed to next week, more work will get done.

The only other thing that happened was that he got some autumn-flowering crocuses in the mail. He just wanted more, like Johnny Rocco in the movie “Key Largo”.
The corms were soaked for an hour or so, in their bags, just to help them grow roots as quickly as possible. The corms need roots in order to form new corms for next year.
All 120 crocus corms were planted in a couple of hours. It’s surprising how quickly he does this.

I think that’s all I have for today. We’re hoping to get some rain next week, which will be nice.
I’ll leave you with a twilight picture of me on the canal road, with a view of the sinkhole.

Until next time, then.