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 thunder, lightning, and rain. You may remember me from such posts as “The Rain Movies”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m in my Upstairs Fort, relatively safe from the thunder that was shaking the house today.
It happened yesterday, too. I got some Rescue Remedy, but things were still very scary.

In other words, it rained yesterday.

This morning, everything looked okay, but all of a sudden, the way things happen here, there was a “special weather statement”, with a warning that a big storm was headed our way. We didn’t get any hail, just rain, but the guy I live with took a picture of part of the garden in case bad things happened.
He took some other pictures, too.
This is Echinocereus caespitosus, though it probably has some other name as well.And then there are the ixiolirions. The guy I live with said last winter, which he complained a lot about, was “wonderful” for all the bulbs here, so he said he won’t complain any more. We’ll see about that.
Ixiolirion tataricum.
And then, well, this is sort of what you might you call an object lesson, the guy I live with spent all this time and effort trying to get buffalo gourd (Cucurbita foetidissima) seedlings, in the propagators upstairs. The seeds germinated, but the seedlings died.
So he sowed some seeds directly into the garden, and look what happened. One left, and one right.
Yesterday, and I know I’m kind of going back and forth, the guy I live with spent some time mowing his neighbor’s lawn. The lawn was getting more and more overgrown, but there were reasons for this. His neighbor’s wife died after a long illness, so he decided to do this, since it seemed like the right thing to do, and it was a lot more work than he thought it would be, since all we have for a lawnmower is this “push mower”.
This is a high-quality mower (Green Mountain Mower), but not really suited for mowing tall grass.
He also pruned the rose bushes, and tied up one climber with the Nutscene twine he got a while ago. He got a refill for the can that holds the twine. (You may remember the issue with the Nutscene and Earl, if you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, when Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, was the narrator. If not, see the post “What The Fescue?”.)
He hurt his back, and was very sore from arthritis and stuff, but the lawn got mowed.
He talked to another neighbor about mowing the back yard, with a gas mower, but then it rained. And rained some more.

Well, anyway, it rained today. I had to stay inside, just in case I might get struck by lightning. I hear that’s bad for you.
When the rain finally stopped, I went on my evening walk.
There was a lot of water in the creek.
I kind of wanted to walk along the creek, but the guy I live with said maybe that wasn’t a good idea, because of ticks, even though I have a fancy flea and tick collar which seems to work. It kind of reeks, though, He got it from Only Natural Pet, though he doesn’t think of me as a pet, but rather as a companion with equal standing in our house, and in our lives.
And there are an awful lot of mosquitoes this year.

I think I’ve covered everything. Really not much to report. Except for all the rain.

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 the weather. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “A Rainy Afternoon”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Here I am looking the other way.
You can see that the flagstone is wet.
This is what happened yesterday morning. The rain woke the guy I live with up out of bed. It was pretty nice, but I had to wait a while to go outside.

The garden has become pretty jungly, like it often does at this time of year.
This really is our “normal” weather, not the super-dry springs we’ve had lately, like April of last year, when there were high winds and fire warnings. Maybe not so much rain as has been falling along the Front Range (more up north), but still, June is often a rainy month.
This is me again, if you weren’t sure, looking at the path on the north side of the garden.Me once more. The hoses haven’t been used since they were attached to the faucet.
The water in the creek was pretty high, but not as high as it was a while ago.
And we have these:
The guy I live with took a picture of Daphne giraldii with a bug on it.
And this was supposed to be a Persian yellow rose, but it turned out to be an Austrian Copper, which is a sport of the yellow rose. The guy I live with said that the other rose he planted in the “way back” border must be the Persian yellow.
So about the title. The guy I live with ordered one of these, to deal with the tougher weeds, and all the chokecherry seedlings. It’s called a ground shark.
It has a pretty serious blade.
He says this works really, really well. And the ground is so easy to dig in.
It was kind of expensive, but the pointed blade does a better job of getting deep into the soil than the tree-planting spade does, and it’s less work to dig out the chokecherry seedlings which are all over the garden.

Well, that’s all I have for today. In between the rain, the guy I live with has been pulling weeds and playing with the ground shark.
We still haven’t figured out why WordPress doesn’t send us notifications of comments. Maybe they’re getting lost in all the rain.

Until next time, then.