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 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.

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.