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 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.

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.