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 mostly about the weather. You may remember me from such posts as “What Happened Last Night”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You only get one guess as to where the air from the swamp cooler is blowing, in that picture.

It’s been so hot that the guy I live with has hardly done any gardening at all for the last month or so. A lot of plants got planted, which seemed a bit weird to me, but all of them are okay, except for the ones badly bitten by grasshoppers.
Imagine being a plant, and coming from a nursery far away, only to be chewed on by grasshoppers when they arrive here. Sounds like the subject of a horror movie, if you ask me.

One thing that did get done, and believe me it took a lot of effort, was replacement of the squirrel baffle over the suet feeder, so it didn’t look like a giant translucent flying saucer was hovering over our garden.
You can see the new baffle here, right in front of the shed:
Almost invisible. It did get tilted a little, as you’ll see later.

Some seeds arrived in the mail, from Plants of the Southwest. The guy I live with looked at the website, read that mail-order seed sales were stopping this October, and so ordered a bunch.
The guy I live with said that everything in life is subject to change, but this is getting a bit too much for him.
He spends a lot of time looking at record websites (he calls CDs “records” now), and sometimes there’s a CD he thinks he might like to acquire, and then the next minute, it’s out of print and now costs ten times the original price.
One of those “carpe diem” things. Or “carpe C-diem”. (Sorry.)

So many changes. I hear the sighs every day.

Including, for now anyway, a pretty big change.

And then this morning. (That’s a blue jay right at the end.)

It’s so much cooler here now the guy I live with said he was getting twinges of autumn. That made him very sad, but he has gotten through this for all these years now. With, I must add, the excellent company of purebred border collies.

Anyway, we’re enjoying the cooler weather very much, and I’ll leave you with a picture of me walking in the newly-mowed field (yes, again).

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 our weekend. You may remember me from such posts as “Guarding The House”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m daydreaming in my Kitchen Fort, with the swamp cooler running.
It’s not as hot as it has been, though I guess this week won’t be cool, just not totally blazing hot. Or at least I hope it won’t.
The guy I live with said we’ve run out of sugar for the hummingbirds, which is mildly ironic since I understand they’re mostly leaving for the south right now. There was some complaining about having to go to the store.

I talked about the North American Monsoon in my last post, and there are a lot of hardy plants that would do well here, and serve the hummingbirds, like penstemons and agastaches, but they would need extra watering here, so that’s pretty much out of the question, unless it becomes necessary to install an irrigation system. The way things are going, it might be.
Still, Salvia darcyi is flowering now. It does need extra water now and then. You can tell just by looking at the leaves.
Very close by, is Hesperaloe campanulata. I showed a picture of this earlier, but I’m going to show one again, taken today, because we learned something.
This picture was taken at about ten in the morning.
The guy I live with read the monograph on the genus Hesperaloe, and it turns out that the flowers open at night, for pollination by bats or hawkmoths (we have both of those here), and then the next day, some time around noon, the flowers close into a tubular shape, for pollination by hummingbirds later that day.
Pretty cool, huh?

Both of these plants are native to Nuevo León in Mexico. That’s kind of cool, too.

Speaking of cool, but in a different sense, last weekend wasn’t very hot. We had a ninety percent chance of heavy rain this weekend and were under a flash flood watch; the guy I live with made sure the storm drain grate across the street was cleared a couple of days ago, and he pointed out the other, blocked grate to his neighbor, who cleaned that one out. You know, just in case.
It didn’t happen. This has been a theme this summer. Predictions of lots of rain, followed by nothing.

There was no heavy rain. He said he was “more or less disappointed”. More because he kind of liked the idea of a “tropical downpour”, but less because the idea of flooding is not very attractive.
The creek behind the house has flooded a couple of times since the guy I live with and his wife moved here, almost up to the fence in back, and one time the creek flowed over the canal and cut right through the bank on the north side. It was a real mess. They had to come in with equipment to repair that.
Other parts of the Denver metro area had heavy rain, and flooding.

But this did happen, on Saturday, and again on Sunday:

The guy I live with was content with that, even though he was hoping (and at the same time not hoping) for more.
We don’t get all day rain, or rain at night, or wake up to rain, or anything like that; the guy I live with said that used to happen here, a long time ago, but not any more.

So that was the last couple of days. There was a lot of scary thunder and I was glad that my Upstairs Fort felt so cozy and safe.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me in the newly-mowed and very green field.

Until next time, then.