the miserable gardener

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.

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.