the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here on a roasting hot day to bring you some news. You may remember me from such posts as “Unbelievably Roasting Hot”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with said not to lie outside for very long. I might get completely roasted.

I chased the squirrel off the oriole feeder a couple of times, but the guy I live with has a new weapon in his arsenal.
A pump-action squirtgun. It has a longer reach than the other squirtgun.
Today there were lots of orioles at the feeder.

We walked around the garden for a little bit, and then came inside. The guy I live with said the late Henry Mitchell wrote that he used to make onion sandwiches, get them very cold in the refrigerator, go out to his water-lily pond munching on the sandwiches in the heat and humidity of Washington, D.C., and then go back inside.
The guy I live with didn’t have any bread.

The cowpen daisies (Verbesina encelioides) in the “way back” border are completely wilted in the heat. The soil there doesn’t hold very much water at all.
The guy I live with said it was kind of the daisies’ fault, for sowing themselves into this very dry border and not having very deep roots.  There are plants all over the garden, in heavier soil, that are doing fine.

The echinops is flowering. The guy I live with said he didn’t know which one this was; his wife planted it very long ago.
But the big deal here, at least to the guy I live with, is getting Incarvillea olgae to flower without being eaten.
The guy I live with said this is the same “olgae” as the honeysuckle pictured a while ago, named for the Russian botanist Olga Fedchenko.

In order to try to keep the grasshoppers from eating all the flowers, he made a garlic spray, with a whole head of garlic. Grasshoppers supposedly don’t like garlic. Peeling a whole head of garlic is not the guy I live with’s idea of fun, but he thought it was worth a try.
A whole head of garlic in there. Plus a little soap.
And so guess what our garden smells like?

The guy I live with said at least we won’t have to worry about vampires now. It is something that occasionally keeps me awake at night.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me in my fort, enjoying the cool breeze from the swamp cooler.

Until next time, then.