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 inexplicable things. You may remember me from such posts as “Sad Little Mysteries”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
We were taking a break from work.

A number of inexplicable things happened today. I wasn’t able to arrive at a real solution to any of them, and so I’ll just leave them unresolved.

The first thing that happened today was that the guy I live with was just sitting at the kitchen table when a yellowjacket flew in and stung him on his ring finger. (The traditional ring finger, not the finger he wears his wedding ring on now.)
The last time he was stung on the finger his hand swelled up like a balloon, but that didn’t happen this time. Maybe he wasn’t as stung as before.

The second thing, and this was pretty weird even to me, happened out in “the enclosure”.
The guy I live with expressed his disappointment at the “lack of blueness” to the Echinops ritro ‘Veitch’s Blue’.
Maybe it will get bluer next year.

The reason he went into “the enclosure” was to pull out a bunch of hops, and also vinca, which has taken over three-quarters of the garden.
He pulled the hops off Acer monspessulanum, a plant which came from seed collected in northern Greece. He got it at a nursery some years ago.
And then, he walked into a hole in the ground.
The guy I live with isn’t as steady on his feet as he was before the cancer treatment a few years ago, and so I was afraid he’d fall on his face. His phone is in his pocket so getting it out and calling for help would be hard for me to do.
It was this:
You can see, besides way too much vinca, a big gap on the right of this firepit. His wife built this, and he didn’t remember this gap being there.
He thought about this for quite a while. Obviously the pit is square (his wife was a perfectionist), and the metal grate is immoveable, so the gap must have been there all along, and he just didn’t look at it all that much, because sometimes he feels unsettled being in this little garden his wife made.
But it was very weird.

Another inexplicable thing, as the guy I live with mentioned it the last post, was the death of the silverberry, Elaeagnus commutata.
Here it is, a long time ago, before the house was painted.
The leaves and flowers.Hopefully the new plants won’t die inexplicably.

The last thing was the most inexplicable to me. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you’ll know I get to listen to all kinds of opera, orchestral music, chamber music, and so forth.
Today, as we took our fifth or sixth break from working outside, the guy I live with finally played a new CD of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé which had been sitting on the kitchen table, along with a couple of other new CDs, for well over a month.
I was wondering when he would get around to this, but I also knew he was suffering from “post-birthday depression”, something that’s affected him ever since his wife died. He gets very down after a birthday.
The music was nice, but then, what to my wondering ears happened, but some totally different music started playing on the hi-fi in the kitchen.
He said this was something called “Jefferson Airplane”. He was afraid this music would make him miss his wife terribly, and it did, but he said it was okay.
We listened to three whole albums, and I have to say, I liked it. Inexplicably, maybe, but I liked it. I dug it, as they used to say. Maybe they still do.

So that was our day, filled with inexplicable things.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me “digging The Airplane”.

Unilt next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on at least some things. You may remember me from such posts as “What Happened Last Night”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’ve been in my fort a lot lately, because the sky constantly looks like it’s going to thunder. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

You can see how gloomy things look.
The guy I live with has been doing some work in this part of the garden; removing a lot of plants that he decided were too big, and so on.

One thing that got to me this morning, because I don’t like seeing the guy I live with sad, is when he read that attaching something called a “Slinky” to the pole with the oriole feeder might discourage the squirrels, and he thought about the times he and his wife went to toy stores, because she loved doing that. The toy stores they used to go to are gone now, and he became very sad, thinking of that, and all the other places they used to go to that are gone now. I know he misses her a lot.
But he looked online and found a toy store very close to us, one that sounds nice, so he’s going to go there this week, to get this “Slinky” thing.
He said even if it doesn’t work, it can also go down the stairs by itself. This I’ll have to see.

There are some plants in flower now. The beeplant, for one. There aren’t as many this year, which is too bad.
The best flower here right now is the “blazing star”, Mentzelia decapetala. It’s a native biennial so this will be it once all the plants flower. They flower in the evening.
And the guy I live with finally found some plants of the silverberry, Elaeagnus commutata, at ForestFarm. There was a large plant in the front yard, years ago, but one year it died, for some reason, and he hasn’t been able to find one since then.They do sucker like nobody’s business but the guy I live with said he could deal with that.

I am also shedding like crazy. The guy I live with said there’s dog hair all over the house. I do get brushed a lot, but still, I keep shedding. I might even lose some weight.
The guy I live with took me on a walk and hoped I would do most of my shedding outside. That of course didn’t work.
I did want to explore the creek on this walk, and the guy I live with said that was okay.

He took a picture of the creek. The top layer is the native soil, then below that, the native subsoil. You can see water seeping from the topsoil and the subsoil in this picture. All that dark part is wet.
Then sand at the bottom. After the flood there was much more sand in the creek than usual.
He said it was like a layer cake.
The guy I live with said it would have made for easier gardening if the developer hadn’t removed the native soil from around the house and spread this really icky clay all around. But he can dig down through the clay to get to the native soil, at least in places.
Only half, if even that, of the back yard is the horrible clay, which is why there are all the raised beds.

Anyway, I went down into the creek.
Then I disappeared. The guy I live with said he knew I was still there.  I wasn’t fooling him at all. The creek is much deeper now because of the flood.
I wound up on the wrong side of the creek.
Or maybe the guy I live with was on the wrong side.
I walked over to a bank that was easy to get down, and then climbed back up on the right side.

So that’s it for today. I hope you found this utterly fascinating. I know I did, at least the creek exploration part.

Until next time, then.