Hey there. Your roving reporting is checking in. I am in the fair city of Chicago for a couple days, taking in the IGC Show. Several thousand gardening peeps will be here to discuss the latest and greatest innovations in the garden center business. I am not talking big box stores, I mean the independent folks. Tomorrow is a 14 hour bus tour of the finest, most innovative nurseries in the Chicagoland area. As if I could be any more exhausted. Nothing like being over stimulated for several days in a row. With all things gardening. And more gardening.

Of course, you know and I know, I dropped the trug on posting 365 on gardening. Would you believe me if I told you I never once stopped gardening and not a day has gone by that I have not been consumed by gardening in one way or another? Please, believe me. I’ll be able to ’splain later. Wait, let me show you now:
The Rocky Mountain Gardeners’ Resource Guide. 384 pages. Covering 600,000 square miles. THAT’S what I’ve been doing.

So, I owe you a few days of catching up. OK, it will be hard, but I’ll go to 12 garden centers tomorrow and report back to you. They are serving fresh pie at one. Yes, I’ll let you know how that goes.

BTW, I am here to present on the Top Five Hot Button Issues and Gardening in the Intermountain West:Goldilocks and the water issue: too much or not enough; hitting pay dirt; going native isn’t pretty (enough);the land of fruit and nuts; and I WANT IT NOW! I’ll elaborate later.

If you have a pressing concern you’d like me to take up, on your behalf, with these nursery folks, just say the word.

Gardening 365, and its the 227th day.

If you are up and around, tune in this morning, about 7:35 am, to 94.9, THE RIVER radio station. I’ll be there, offering up all kinds of swell fresh advice for your garden’s health and well being. You, too, will fell better, just for having listened. I promised.

Western Idaho Fair is just ten days away. Do you have the biggest melons? How about a perfect zinnia or dahlia? Enter to win fame and fortune. Entry information can be found online or pick up a premium book at Zamzows, D & B.

This photo is from Garden Geek and Photographer Cool, Mr. Rick Cate. Check out more of his work here: Zenfolio.

Gardening 365 – Day 216.

Looking for something to like. When it’s 100 several days in a row, I have to work at finding something to embrace… besides air conditioning.

I spent some time this week going through the list of newbie coneheads! Lookie here now! Hot Papaya, Maui Sunset, Green Envy, Harvest Moon, Twilight, After Midnight, Ruby Star. Oh yes, yes, yes. The whole bunch of them can be found at Far West Nursery this week. Unless I get there first.

Rocky Mountains high, deserts low. Some deserts not so low. I am still making my way through the 300 or so plant profiles of bullet proof vegetative specimens you can grow here. Here. This area that covers a gazillion square miles, 6+ western states. I am going to keep including eastern Washington and Oregon until someone listens, dammit.

Here’s today’s view from Ranch du Bois. Missing from this photo? That’s right! Yours truly bobbin in the pond. I’ll get right on that.

Gardening 365 – Day 215

Gardening 365 – Day 214

After that meloncholy baby tune I was singing to ya yesterday, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps long enough to take a look around this joint to see if there was anything worth admiring. Well, low and behold, I just had to slow down long enough, take a deep breath, and let it wash over me. Sure enough. I found this:

And this will bedazzle me for a while. Me and the bees, bee’n dazzled. How would you like a hair do that color?

Dee? Carol? YooHoo?

I give up. Garden? What garden?

from Britannica.com

The heat has done me in and its not even close to record breaking. The Plague of Locusts – that is pissing me off. I’m certain the vine weevils are out at night as well. Raspberries are shriveling on the canes, and I need a cane to get over to see the gold pole beans. When I find one to eat, its tough as can be. Heat. Too much heat? And they are tiny. I picked them in the morning and they were just 2-3 inches long.

Furthermore and so forth and in the interest of transparency, I am behind 4 days postings on this here blog. That means we are lookin’ at 361 days a year instead of 365 until I come up w/some stuff to back date. Oh, trust me, I’ve been gardening, writing about gardening, thinking about gardening 24/7/365. It’s just that my garden sucks bilgewater right now. Oh, yeah, all those gorgeous dinner plate dahlias I bought as tubers? hahahahaha. The locusts have decimated their leaves and the buds were gnashed to gnothing by the earwigs. Yes, I powdered up w/De.

Send chocolate,
The Has Been Queen of Ranch du Bois

Gardening 365 – Day 213

Whoa nelly! It registered 103 on the car thermometer this evening at 6:30. Other than watering in the early morning to keep things alive, I’ve been hunkered down here on the BIG garden project. Tonight: more vegetable profiles. I am writing about the humble onion and it came to me! Eureka! The best thing ever written about an onion is this: Ode to an Onion by Pablo Neruda. For your reading pleasure

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

Amen brothers and sisters.

Well done. I have always admired this little piece of heaven in the foothills area of Boise. Actually in the Highlands, at the base. This week, it was completely popping perfect. I went to snap some photos and was lucky to find the garden owner toiling away in the front garden. We chatted, I snapped some pics.

This is a xeric garden done well. Not the bleached bones and cactus look. No gray gravelly garden. Tucked into a draw in the Highlands, the turf has been replaced with woolly and creeping thymes, and yards of uva-ursi arctostaphylus (Kinnickinnick), probably v. Massachusetts. It had the fattest red berries and the leaves were shiny and green. I don’t generally recommend using aspen in the valley, it is too hot here, they die out in 7-10 years and suffer from borers, but this stand is doing fairly well. In fact, the gardener reported that to be the case: a single trunk will die out every few years, but another one comes up. This colonizing gives the planting a handsome, natural look. To make it pop, liatris ‘Kobold’ is exclaiming all over the place: “Look at me!” Mountain ash is dangling gold berries in one corner and a handful of rudbeckia and pineleaf penstemon rounds out the scene.

An excellent example of the design motto: simplify and repeat.

We had some real excitement here today. A fire broke out in the foothills west of here, and you never know how fast things can go to hell until you’ve witnessed a range fire at full speed. This one was north of Eagle, and to the east of Highway 55 to McCall, but I double checked the hoses at Ranch du Bois, ANYWAY. And since the Lily Pond was full, and cool, and it was smoky and hot outside, well, I poured myself a glass of pinot g and slid on into the coolness. We have a new definition of gray water: what you get when the range goes up in smoke, the cheat grass is fried and falls back down into your pond.

All that smoke and hot air creates some very interesting weather. Check this out:

OK, now back to creating the rest of the 300 plant profiles. Let ‘er buck.