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 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.

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.