Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all our exciting and not-so-exciting news. You may remember me from such posts as “The Haunted Toaster”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This picture was taken some days ago, and is similar to the one the guy I live with posted on Facebook, with the grim news that we have voles in the garden.
The guy I live with rushed into action (sort of rushed, anyway), and sprinkled blood meal and Plantskydd (same thing, really), around all the vole tunnel entrances.
But he also mentioned that we purebred border collies loathe voles and like to hunt them, so without going into more detail I’ll just say that there’s one less vole now.
The other thing is that the guy I live with was thinking about doing some baking for the holidays, giving all the baked goods to his neighbors, when yesterday he turned on the lower over and the element was burning so brightly he thought he had hurt his eyes. The oven wouldn’t heat. The upper oven still works, but he’s going to have to call an oven expert to come and look at it. It probably just needs a new element, but the days of him doing his own repairs are long gone.
The oven, or range I guess, is a really expensive one that he got because his wife wanted it.
A few days ago a rabbit got into the garden and we looked all over to see where it might have gotten in. The rabbit had been eating the now-dormant buffalo grass in my Private Lawn. I think you can see the grazed area there. This doesn’t hurt the grass.
It turned out there were a bunch of missing fence pickets in the area we call the Employees Only section, because I’m the only one who goes in there. You can barely see the wooden fence, on the left.
This is the view from the north side, looking south. You can see the fence in the back of the picture. The fence is in pretty poor shape.
So the guy I live with went to the lumber store, bought some pickets, and screwed them into place. He originally thought he would need about thirty, but he only needed nine.
This was the spot where the telephone cable was cut, if you remember that.
The guy I live with said he was going to clean all of this up, remove a bunch of branches and so on, and maybe plant cyclamen there next year. It’s a pretty large area where nothing has ever been planted.
One really odd thing is what’s been going on with the canal. The water was shut off, then turned on again, then shut off, and now it’s flowing again. This is later than maybe ever before; usually it’s dry at this time of year.
You can see where the people who maintain the green belt filled in the abandoned muskrat den when they fixed the sinkhole. That was where the water was leaking into the sinkhole.
And speaking of water, guess what happened yesterday and today?
That’s right; it rained. Not a whole lot, but enough to make the guy I live with happy.
The moss–I think this is a native one–has turned green.
There were so many fallen leaves in the streets that the runoff water was brown.
This is where the little ditch for stormwater, on the left, meets the creek, and just before the creek goes into the culvert under the canal.
The creek on the north side of the canal looked like this:
So that’s our news. They say we may get some more rain or snow at the end of this week.
Until next time, then.
Looking at the canal, which has water in it again. The water has been turned on and off so many times now we haven’t been able to keep track.
The guy I live with said he was not thrilled seeing eyes glowing in the dark, but said it was probably a raccoon.
the miserable gardener 