the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the roasting-hot purebred border collie, here today just to talk about a couple of things. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Like It Hot”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Notice I’m standing in the shade, like any sensible purebred border collie would.

It’s been really hot lately. They say it might rain this weekend, but that will be too late for the ipomopsis seedlings. The guy I live with forgot to water them for just one day, two days ago, and at least half of them are now dead.
Mostly the ones in the peat pots. The guy I live with wasn’t too upset about this, because it happens all the time. It was 92 degrees (33.3C) with low humidity and wind, and he just forgot to fill the watering can that day.

Speaking of watering, the guy I live with has been using this sprinkler from time to time.
It does “get the corners”, but the thing is, this sprinkler is about sixty years old, and the aluminum blades often don’t turn, and don’t get the corners, so he’d have to walk up to the sprinkler and set the blades in motion with a stick. As you can imagine, he’d get soaking wet doing that.

Of course the rubber washers (you can see one of them) are the same age, and they sometimes cause the blades to stick.
He thought about going to the hardware store to find replacements, but then it occurred to him he already had a solution: camellia oil.

Camellia oil, or “tea seed oil”–which is not the same thing as “tea tree oil”), is made from Camellia oleifera (Latin oleum, oil, and fer, bearing; “transfer”, bearing or carrying across (trans); “translate”, born or carried across, like with languages, from the perfect passive participle of the Latin irregular verb ferre, to carry or bear.)
Anyway, whew, camellia oil is an edible oil used in cooking in China; in Japan it’s used to protect carbon-steel cutlery and other blades, like the fancy Japanese pruners we have.
That’s why I said that it’s not the same as “tea tree oil” because that oil is toxic if you ingest it, and it’s made from the Australian plant Melaleuca alternifolia, so don’t get these mixed up.

This is camellia oil:
The guy I live with put a few drops of the camellia oil on the upper and lower washers and the sprinkler worked just fine when he turned it on.
There was, naturally, a shout of triumph.

And that’s all I have for you today. I hope you stayed awake during the Latin part.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me lost in thought, enjoying the company of my second-best friend, the portable 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 this and that. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Adventures”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I like to do this, a lot.
The guy I live with said that someone, not saying who, when he was a puppy, chewed the carpet right there where you see the nail sticking out.

Anyway, it’s mostly been hot and dry here, though it has rained a little in the evenings. Like this:
Not too much is in flower, though the annual sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, are doing well this year. They’re native here.
Birds of course like the seeds, which can make it difficult to get these started in the garden. Maybe it’s kind of a common plant, but the guy I live with likes them.

Cyclamen are starting to flower, but we’re going to wait to show pictures of them.
The cow-pen daisies are flowering, but the ones in the “way back” border are having a hard time.
You can see how wilty they are. The daisies have a very shallow root system, and the soil here holds almost no water at all, at least down to about a foot or so. These sowed themselves here and I bet they’re sorry they did.
There are more, all over the garden, actually. They’re doing much better.

I have some news about the sinkhole. We did some investigating after hearing water trickling in the sinkhole, and saw water in it. That was pretty strange.
The guy I live with studied this for a while, though I wanted to look at other things, and he finally decided that the water was coming from the canal, flowing into the sinkhole, then trickling into the culvert (we could hear it echoing, the way it would), and then it’s flowing into the creek. The canal is leaking, in other words.
He left a message with the people who own water rights to the canal but maybe they can’t do anything until the county comes out and decides what to do.

The guy I live with potted up the rest of the Ipomopsis aggregata today.
He couldn’t find peat pots locally, and decided not to order any online, because that seemed like a pointless expense, since he had all these pots already.
He said that gardening can cost too much money and that sometimes takes the fun out of it.

Another thing, and this is kind of major in a sort of way that’s difficult to describe, is the storm headed toward Los Angeles. He talked to his cousin who still lives there.
There was a hurricane in Long Beach, where the guy I live with grew up, in 1939, and he wondered why he’d never heard of that, because parents and grandparents tell stories like that to kids, but then he realized his grandparents and his mom were in the Philippines then. Those things become memories, and then it’s almost like they never happened, unless someone tells a younger generation, or someone writes it down.

So that’s all that stuff.
Today he got a box in the mail.
This is a box of colchicums.
Three bags are Colchicum autumnale, and two are mystery colchicums which were sent to him to see if he could figure out what they are.
The guy I live with likes a good mystery, and likes figuring out stuff like this, even though he’s not a botanist. He kind of fixates on things like this and knows where to look up stuff. He told the person who sent them that he would do his best to sort this out.
He’s kind of a Sherlock Holmes when it comes to things like this.
The guy I live with hasn’t smoked a pipe for a very long time, but I thought I would show this anyway. (This is an Andreas Bauer calabash, if you needed to know. It still smells like expensive English pipe tobacco.) And he knows Sherlock Holmes never smoked a pipe like this except in movies.
Tomorrow will be Colchicum Planting Day. And then the game will be afoot.
He has this as a reference:

That’s what’s been going on here lately. A bit too much scary thunder for me, but not enough rain for the guy I live with.
And some mysteries.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me in my happy place, in a room full of mysteries and memories.

Until next time, then.