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 similarly-themed posts as “Birds And Stuff”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Bright, I know. The guy I live with said that’s what happens when you point the camera at the setting sun.

It’s hot and dry here, now, which, in a way, is a relief from constant daily thunder;  the portable swamp cooler runs almost all day long, and into the night. I like lying in the path of the breeze made by the swamp cooler.

Even though it’s hot, the field is still green.
The ratibidas, Ratibida columnifera, are having a very good summer.
You can see that some have red-brown sterile ray florets; I think these are the ones, or maybe all of them regardless of color, that are called “Mexican hats”.

Yesterday his friend came over, and I took her out to the “way back” to show her how huge everything was there. Lavatera thuringiaca especially. Not the greatest picture in the world, I guess.
There are a lot; all self-sown.

Anyway, last week the roses came in the mail. The guy I live with wanted some for “the enclosure”. He’s never been able to figure out what to plant there since his wife died. So he decided on roses for the sake of sentiment.
The roses planted there last year all died over the winter, which made him sad, but he did admit to forgetting to mound soil around the little roses.
‘Celsiana’, “Léda’, ‘Kazanlik’, and ‘Banshee’.
This year he promises to remember to protect the little roses for the winter.
(Um, the cinder blocks. The troughs sat on those, and now that most of the troughs are gone, there are a lot of cinder blocks. He might find a way to give them away.)

There are other plants on the patio, being treated to the “super genius” method so that they’re well-rooted before being planted out.
And these. Some super-rare plants he successfully grew from layers. You can imagine the triumphant strutting. I know they don’t look like much. (The plants in the pots on the left, and in front.)  From the Pamir Range in Kyrgyzstan.
He hesitated posting these on Facebook, because then someone might want these super-rare plants for free, which he finds unpleasant, to say the least. So he’s contacted a couple of botanic gardens to see if they want these plants. (He says they’re crazy if they don’t want them.) If no one wants them, he plant them here.

So that’s what’s been going on. It’s hot. It’s the guy I live with’s birthday, and he can’t go out into the garden because of the laundry smell from next door, which he says smells like “poisoned perfume.” Though really birthdays aren’t that big of a deal to him any more.
Tomorrow will be hot, too. It’s supposed be 99 Fahrenheit (37.2C) on Monday, which is extra-hot, for us, and then maybe we’ll be back to thunderstorms for a while. 

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 bring you a partly scary post. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “A Different Kind Of Scary”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
That’s me, trying to talk the guy I live with into giving me a biscuit. You might have to embiggen the picture to see me.

Things have been mostly scary here lately. One thing after another. There were very loud explosions last night until one in the morning, even though fireworks are illegal here. And there was a terrific thunderstorm, as well. Two of them, in fact.
This is mostly what’s been happening.
And today, the guy I live with was up on the ladder, cleaning out the gutters, when his neighbor hung her laundry on the deck, and the smell was so “insanely strong”, as he put it, that he got so dizzy he almost fainted and fell of the ladder onto the concrete patio.
I wouldn’t know what to do if that happened. But fortunately the guy I live with has a lot of experience working on ladders (he even took a ladder safety class), and so was able to stay on the ladder. He finished cleaning out the gutters.

He took pictures of the lichen growing on the wood of the patio cover.
The patio itself has a green film on it. This has happened before, in years past.

Last night he took some houseplants outside so they could get rained on. Like this cactus.
Then it started to hail, so he took the plants back inside. The hail stopped, so he brought the plants back outside.

Not much gardening is going on, for obvious reasons.
Here are some Ratibida columnifera:
And the one plant left of Penstemon cobaea.
These are both self-sown, if you needed to know.

The milkweed along the canal road is starting to flower. Big healthy colonies, this year.
You can see how green the field is. That wood is leftover from the flood.
The creek has had water in it almost every day for a few weeks now.

Okay. So now for the ultra-scary part.
Some time last week, I forget when, the greenbelt was mowed, early in the morning. Well, early for us, anyway. We don’t get very early because we stay up until midnight. The guy I live with has done this for over thirty years.
Now if you remember the picture of the creek flooding, from a few posts ago, you can imagine how much water went into the culvert that goes under the canal. Some of it cut past the culvert on that day.
So on my morning walk, the day the greenbelt was mowed, I discovered this.
A sinkhole. It’s really deep.
The guy I live with called the sheriff’s department, who sent out the fire department.
The firefighters had a probe and stuck it into the sinkhole, but couldn’t see how deep it was. Then they suggested calling whoever manages the greenbelt, and so the guy I live with called that person, since he’s talked to them before, and also the company that manages the canal.
The sticks were a kind of feeble attempt to prevent people from falling into the sinkhole.

A couple of days ago this happened:
I guess we’ll see what happens next. Maybe someone needs to talk to an engineer to see what to do now, because maybe it’s not just a simple matter of pouring extra dirt into the sinkhole.
The culvert goes under the canal, and on the north side it’s at least ten feet below the level of the canal road.
Pretty scary, if you ask me.

So that’s what’s been going on around here. Lots of scary things, and it isn’t even Halloween.

Until next time, then.