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 just one plant. You may remember me from such posts as “How To Avoid Gardening”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Those pots are mostly hens-and-chicks, though there is a pot of a not-very-hardy agave, Pinus strobiformis ‘Loma Linda’, and some pathetic herbs. Holy basil just to the right on me.
The guy I live with bought two of those pines, which are dwarf, earlier this year (they weren’t cheap); he planted one and it died pretty quickly. He forgot to water it and said he knew better, but got distracted when it was so hot here.
This one, way over on the left of the picture, will be planted later; maybe in a pot, where it will be fine.

Well that wasn’t the plant I’m going to talk about, but I got carried away.

We had a ten percent chance of rain yesterday, but around nine last night, storms moved through Denver, and we got some rain. It rained pretty hard for a little while.
The guy I live with said if we lived farther east we would have gotten a lot more rain; there was a terrific display of lightning out east, according to the guy I live with. I was hiding in my Upstairs Fort.

It’s not like the garden needs all that much rain; just the normal amount would be nice.

Yesterday there was a card on our front door from the electric company saying that they were going to do some work in our yard.
The guy I live with freaked out, imagining all sorts of gigantic equipment tearing up the “way back”, so he called the electric company to talk to the person in charge of all of this to see what was what. While he was talking to this person the tiny rational part of his brain kicked in, and he realized that he had been involved with work like this before, but with telephone cable, and the “way back” wasn’t going to be dug up, they just needed access to the electrical box in the corner of our yard.

So today a lot of work was done, clearing out dead chokecherries that blocked the way to the electrical box. He said he knew how frustrating and annoying it was to have to work around overgrown shrubs and stuff, and now everything is ready for the people who are coming to do the work.
You can see the telephone pedestal now; the electrical box is behind the two chairs no one sits in any more.
You can also see me, and the little wren house (the guy I live with calls it a “wren wranch”) on the chair, and another one on the arbor.
The snow fence is where the very first part of the garden was started; now it’s mostly just the Persian yellow rose growing there.

And the groups of Sedum telephium ‘Matrona’, which is the plant I’m going to talk about. It’s a German cultivar that does very well here with only occasional watering. (The guy I live with says he likes it better than ‘Autumn Joy’, another German cultivar also known as ‘Herbstfreude’ which is its real name.)
There’s also Alcea rugosa (the upright plants which are done flowering and should be cut down), Stachys byzantina ‘Helene von Stein’ (also known as ‘Big Ears’), and the ‘Gray Gleam’ juniper that’s been broken by snow many times.

Here’s another picture, taken on our evening walk.
The guy I live with set the sprinkler before we went on our walk, to water that part of the buffalo grass that was drying out (you can see it in the picture before this one) after my Private Lawn was mowed.

When the guy I live with was working back there, he noticed how good the sedums looked, and that they were covered with bees. Bees everywhere.
I tried to eat a couple, but the guy I live with told me not to. I still tried, anyway.
That’s a lot of bees.

I don’t know where the phrase “the bee’s knees” came from, though maybe just because it rhymes, but I’ve never seen any knees on bees.
Whatever; there are a lot of bees on the sedums.

That’s all I have for today. It was more than I was planning, but things are like that.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me walking past yet more chokecherries, and some plums, toward a couple of ducks who thought I was out to get them. I wasn’t, but I appreciated their sense of how tough and deadly I look.
Those ducks are the ducklings I posted pictures of a while ago. All grown up now.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on various things. You may remember me from such posts as “The Cow-Pen Daisies”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is my hoping-for-a-biscuit pose. (I got one, of course.)

Well, so, now it’s hot again, with no rain in sight for, like, forever, or even longer.
But, as the guy I live with pointed out, this happened just the other day when we had a ten or twenty percent chance of rain.

He said “Just imagine what might happen with a zero percent chance of rain.”
You may chuckle, or even guffaw, but the guy I live with pointed out to me that when there’s a ninety percent chance, nothing happens.
This is what the sky looks like when it doesn’t rain here.
I know rain is important but it often comes with scary thunder.

As usual, not much is happening here. The guy I live with said that some people like it when lots of stuff happens, but we prefer it when almost nothing happens. Except for rain, of course.

The plums along the canal road are getting ripe now.
These are Prunus americana, and are native here. The guy I live with said that if he were the sort of person who made jam, he would make jam out of these, but then he’d be stuck with a whole bunch of jam.
The coyotes will probably get most of these, though we haven’t seen a coyote in a while now.
Our neighbor said there was a bobcat in another neighbor’s yard.
I’d really like to see a bobcat, but the guy I live with said I really wouldn’t. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.

There was something different in our yard, just today. A pigeon tremex.
These are harmless, but pretty big, and when they fly around they sound kind of like little helicopters. It’s a horntail.
I don’t know why they have “pigeon” in their name, because I’ve seen pigeons and this isn’t what they look like. Humans can be very peculiar creatures with all their insistence on naming things.  This one’s scientific name is Tremex columba. Columba as in dove, or I guess pigeon. What a weird name.

The same thing is true of the “cow-pen daisies”. I don’t know what a cow pen is, though the guy I live with tried to explain it to me. I’ve never seen a cow, or a pen, except the kind the guy I live with writes with.
I tried to picture a cow writing, but that didn’t help much.
I guess, really, these daisies show up around the perimeter of places where cows are kept. I try to picture a place where something I’ve never seen is kept, but no luck.
The daisies have a scientific name, Verbesina encelioides.

You can see here that they were kind of wilty today.
There are also some sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, right in the middle of that picture.

I guess the sunflowers and the cow-pen daisies, which are also annuals, need a little bit more rain than we’ve been getting, so the guy I live with watered them just this evening. This picture was taken before the watering.
The daisies in the “way back” border are so wilty and pathetic I don’t have the heart to show what they look like, but all of these are self-sown, so I guess it’s not all that bad.

There’s not much else to report. I mean there are lots of things to report, but most of them aren’t all that interesting. A pigeon tremex is interesting, but, say, what came in the mail today isn’t. (The mail was thrown away.)
Hot, dry, rainless weather isn’t all that interesting, either, though the nights here are very cool, and I make excellent use of that.
Maybe you can see the crack in the patio. That part of the patio was poured after the part on the right, and no expansion joints, like the one I’m lying on, were used, so the newer concrete cracked in the “awful” winter of 2006-07. I may have mentioned this before, considering the number of posts on this blog, but it’s one of the many “to-do” things that would have been important thirty years ago.
I could make a list of things the guy I live with says are no longer important, but it would be a long one. He says that’s one of the advantages of being over seventy. Kind of liberating, he says.

Oh, I guess I’m starting to ramble. We purebred border collies aren’t always as super-focused as we’re made out to be.
I’ll say goodnight, then, with another picture of me enjoying my patio, cracks and all.

Until next time, then.