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 seedlings. You may remember me from such posts as “Sowing Seeds”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You may be able to see how busy I was today. The swamp cooler was on full blast, and directed right at my Kitchen Fort. Not bad at all.
The guy I live with doesn’t remember what caused that big scrape on the garage door.

I got to listen to a bunch of preludes by Scriabin and then something called “Traffic” for a while. We’re not all that eclectic here but the guy I live with thought “Traffic” would be nice to listen to while he worked out on the patio.
Particularly one of his favorite songs, “Rainmaker”.
For possibly obvious reasons. We did get a bunch of rain on the first of the month, but the guy I live with is greedy for more, now.

Today the guy I live with potted up some of the Ipomopsis aggregata seedlings. He said it was exhausting work.
First of all, all the roots were bound together, even though these were teeny seedlings. He tried teasing apart the roots with a Widger
but something smaller was needed. And even then, it didn’t work.
So he resorted to his tried-and-true method, soaking the bunch of roots in a dishpan and kind of swishing the water around.

He says every gardener should have dishpans. These are Rubbermaid, and have been outdoors every day for over thirty years. Really.
This was the result.
You can see how long the roots are, for such tiny plants.

Then what he did was hold the tiny plants by their leaves over peat pots, and gently pour soil-less mix around the roots, into the pots.
Then the pots went on the shelves.
Believe it or not, there are still more seedlings that need to be repotted, He ran out of peat pots, though.

That was what happened today. And yesterday, too. Potting up seedlings while I listened to music and watched from the kitchen, with the swamp cooler blowing on me. As you can tell, my life is very rough.

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 some stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “Under The Arbor”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
As you can see, it was safe for me to go outside today. No thunder, lightning, or rain.

The guy I live with said that the weather forecast today was for baseball-sized hail, but he quickly added that that was probably for way out east, near the Kansas and Nebraska borders. I hear it’s really flat out there. I’ve never been.

All that flatness is the home of Mentzelia decapetala, and I have some more pictures of the flowers, taken at night.
The guy I live with messaged a couple of neighbors to come over and look at the flowers, and they came over, and were very impressed, of course.
The flowers are scented, too.

Another inhabitant of that flatness to the east of us is sleepygrass, Achnatherum robustum, and we have self-sown plants that kind of block the flagstone path into the garden, but the guy I live with says that’s okay. It’s kind of funny that these grasses didn’t appear where they were originally sown.

There are a bunch of oreganos in flower now, and the guy I live with tried to get pictures of them, but most of them were “resistant to being photographed”, whatever that means.
This is Origanum ‘Kent Beauty’.
This is one that the guy I live with has forgotten the name of, though I know if he thought about it enough he would remember.
Anyway, the guy I live with said today that he was “in a rut”, and I figured that was because of his almost total lack of motivation lately. It was kind of like a rut within a rut; he hasn’t been all that motivated since the pandemic started, and since I’ve heard the stories about how he worked almost every day for thirty years, sometimes late into the night, or even all night, I guess I can understand that lack of motivation is like the essence of his retirement. But the pandemic made that worse.

So today he said, outloud even, that he was determined to have a good day filled with positive (or at least non-negative) thoughts, and he spent some time straightening out the workbench in the garage, and a couple of hours weeding like crazy.
He put some music on the kitchen hi-fi, something called “Pink Floyd”, which I liked, except for the non-musical parts which I thought were moderately annoying.
I got a brief lecture on the difference between what he called “pre-1970 Pink Floyd” and the later stuff, and maybe I’ll get to hear the earlier stuff some time.

And he decided that rather than letting seedlings languish in the seed frame, and then die from lack of watering, like what usually happens, he was going to do something, so like for instance, the seedlings in this pot of Ipomopsis aggregata seedlings were going to be repotted before being planted out in a month or so.
This is going to involve a lot of finicky work but the guy I live with said these will be very important for hummingbirds next year.
This will be done within the next few days because it needs to be done soon.

He said that one thing he’s always liked to think of was having a bunch of these ipomopsis in the garden, like you would see driving into the foothills just west of us. He’s tried growing these from seeds for some years now, and nothing has happened. Hopefully, we’ll be “hummingbird-ready” next year.

I think that’s all I have for today. I might have missed something; you never can tell.

Until next time, then.