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 the latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Adventures”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m watching for bees.
You might have to look closely to see me. Or maybe not.
The guy I live with says bees are good, and I agree. They’re pretty tasty. He keeps saying not to eat them, but I can’t resist.

Yesterday, the new sprinkler came in the mail.
As you can see, it works. It isn’t as fancily-made as the sixty-year-old Rainbird sprinkler we have, which still works, but this tripod-mounted sprinkler seems to be just the thing for getting over taller plants.

A few days ago the guy I live with looked at this bare area and thought it should have some plants in it.
That self-sown Mahonia repens will have to go. There are already enough of them here.
The guy I live with said that thymes would be an excellent choice, so he ordered some from Mountain Valley Growers in California.
Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, showed pictures of the amazing way the plants are packed, but I’m going to show this again.
It’s really hot today, with fourteen percent humidity, so the plants had to be treated to the “super genius” method right away. They were repotted into larger pots and watered.
If these had been left in their little pots, or planted directly into the garden, they would have been dead within days.
The plants, with new soil around the root balls, will sit on the shelf for a week or so, well watered, until the roots leave the root ball, and then they can be safely planted.
I should emphasize that I take no responsiblity at all for the title of today’s post.
There are fifteen potted thymes on the shelf, and they’re ones that don’t need a whole lot of water. Sometimes, some thymes do (sorry), but these don’t.
The ones in the middle are Thymus odoratissimus (T. glabrescens), which is one of the best for our garden.

The only other thing I have to talk about is what’s here now that wasn’t here this morning.
The guy I live with went to see his friend today, and they stopped off at a nursery near her house where they sell “local” produce. By “local” I mean from the same state.
This is a cantaloupe from Rocky Ford, which is two hundred miles away from here, to the south. The guy I live with isn’t a melon chauvinist or anything, but Rocky Ford cantaloupes are the best. I’ve had cantaloupe. Purebred border collies love cantaloupe.
He also got two of these things, which are called “wallermello” or something like that. He gave one to his neighbor, the neighbor who lost his wife recently.
So that’s my news for the day.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me lying under the table, catching the cool breeze from the swamp cooler.

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 labels, and some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Rooting Around”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been pretty hot here lately. Usually it doesn’t rain when it’s really hot, and we sit in the kitchen with the swamp cooler running, but the other evening, when we thought we had little chance of rain, it suddenly poured rain here for quite a while.

I’ve been sort of under the weather, actually. I hurt my paw, and had to go to the doctor, where I got an antibiotic.
The guy I live with tries to watch for things like broken glass on our walks, and wonders what’s wrong with people who do things like that, but somehow I cut my paw and my doctor didn’t want me to get an infection.
Things like this have happened before, of course.

The guy I live with said that friends on Facebook, in Europe, were posting pictures of cyclamen, and as I said in an earlier post, we have some in flower, but it’s a lot hotter here than it is where the gardeners in Europe are, and he said that kind of delays things here.
This is Cyclamen fatrense.
The guy I live with grew this from seeds a long time ago, and some of the tubers are now six inches (15cm) wide.
I know this isn’t really in focus, and that one patterned leaf is actually Cyclamen cilicium.

This is Cyclamen purpurascens ‘Extra Fancy’
It used to be in more shade, but the honey locust branches that were shading it died, so now it’s in too much sun.

Well, the big deal here, aside my my regimen of pill-taking (the pills are wrapped in soft Mexican cheese; the guy I live with said that German immigrants to Mexico taught Mexicans to make very good cheese, and very good beer), was what you might call the triumphant acquistion of decent plant labels.
These are mostly for bulbs.

The guy I live with can remember the names of thousands of plants, but there are so many bulbs in the garden that he said it’s sometimes easy to forget where bulbs are planted.
He used to use those four-inch plastic labels, but now they’re very hard to find, and, besides, they get broken, either by being stepped on in winter when there’s snow on the ground, or by hail.
We had hail twice in 2018 and a lot of the plastic labels were smashed to pieces. (That’s why we got the new roof, too.)
The labels outside lasted for years, but the intense sunlight here made the plastic very brittle. There are broken pieces of labels all over the garden, still, and I could have stepped on one and cut my paw that way, too.

What the guy I live with wanted was inconspicuous labels. Nothing that would “announce itself”, if you know what I mean.
This is what he got:
You can see that they’re not very big. They’re zinc. I don’t know anything about zinc, and maybe I should learn a little about it.

The guy I live with said it was a bit weird that the main use for these is tagging animal traps, for hunters (being a dog, I have a different opinion),  but they can also obviously be used for plants.
He’ll make steel pegs, from old tomato cages, to drive into the ground, and then the copper wires will be wrapped around the pegs. Or he could just use large nails. That might be a better solution.
But now he has labels he can live with.

So that’s really all I have for today.

Until next time, then.