Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you what’s happened since the storms. You may remember me from such work-related posts as “A Bit Of Work”, among at least a few others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m looking at a bee in the grass.
There’s still water flowing in the creek, but it looks clear and clean now. Instead of being all muddy. I didn’t go in, though the guy I live with said I could.
There’s no water in the canal, though. Maybe the lake it flows to is full with all the rain. You can see that they mowed on either side, just to make it ugly, I guess.
The canal was dug in the 1880s. The concrete is part of an old sluice that let water flow to a farmhouse, which is long gone.
And as I said last time, the guy I live with found his penny.
It says 1966 on the other side. That seems like a very long time ago to me. It wasn’t so much for the “luck”, just that he found it in his wife’s things, and as I’ve showed before, there is quite a bit of stuff downstairs, especially in little boxes and tins.
There are some plants flowering; the guy I live with said he might rethink his idea of not having much in flower at this time of year, because the hail we had hardly did any damage at all. The rain flattened a lot of the grasses and other plants, and the path along the north side of the garden is impassable in places.
Salvia ringens is in flower now.
Ringens means “gaping”, in the sense of “showing teeth” (like I would do in my most deadly posture) and you can see that the flowers do that.
The plants themselves aren’t very easy to photograph.
The tops of the flowering stalks are taller than the guy I live with.
Salvia sclarea is flowering, too. They used to say this was variety turkestanica, but I guess no one says that now. It’s a really smelly plant. That’s feverfew in front of it. The guy I live with’s wife wanted that.
And the rose, ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ is really putting on a show after all the rain. You can smell it from pretty far away.
Of all things, there’s a snapdragon in flower.
Look at my Private Lawn. It’s ‘Cody’ buffalo grass, and only needs mowing once or twice a summer. It does need some water; if it doesn’t rain, the guy I live with sets a sprinkler back here maybe once every two weeks or so. It already needs to be mowed again, but it might not be, because if it gets mowed, it needs to be watered. He says the flowers are attractive.
Anyway, what he did yesterday and today was clear out the path between the raised bed in the center of the yard, and what used to be called The Long Border on the left.
The path was a real mess.
There were a bunch of grasses and other plants that had fallen over the path, so he took out all of them. (Those red flags mark little seedlings of Penstemon cyaneus, but they’ve probably been smothered by California poppies.) “Too many of the same plant”, he said, and so now the buffalo grass will fill in the whole path, probably by the end of the summer.
The Ground Shark got a lot of workout, let me tell you.
This is something the guy I live with had been thinking about for quite some time. He thinks and thinks, and then does something, and about half the time regrets what he just did. But not this time.
So that’s my update for today. And I guess it’s summer, because when the wind blows from the west, it’s scented by the ponderosa pines way up in the mountains on a nice, dry night.
Until next time, then.
The guy I live with said that tomorrow is supposed to be dry and breezy. I can hardly wait.
the miserable gardener 