Hello everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Another Busy Day” and “Yet Another Busy Day”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in an exceptionally noble, pure-bred pose.
You may wonder what it is that we do every day, in order to enable us to bring you these gripping posts. The truth is that the guy I live with is an extremely busy person, and relies on me to supervise. I don’t always need to be awake to do that, which, you must admit, is in itself quite remarkable.
Just to give you an example, take today. The guy I live with spent several hours root watering. Though I suppose there are other ways to do this, he uses what’s called a root waterer to do this. With the water turned on just a tiny bit, the root waterer is stuck in the ground, making sure it doesn’t get plugged up, and the water is left on for a while.
root waterer
So that he doesn’t forget and leave the water running for hours, he writes “root watering” on a piece of paper to remind him of what he’s doing.
Today he forgot to look at the piece of paper and left the water running for hours.
He also spent some time rooting cactus. This is a cactus being rooted. There are actually four in the picture there. It can take up to a month and a half of diligently rooting them for roots to form.
cactus being rooted
In the same room–on the same table even–he also grows plants with weird, sometimes smelly, flowers.
Orbea paradoxa
Every now and then, he walks around the garden to see if anything is happening. I do this, too, but I’m less interested in what’s happening than in just walking around.
There was a Sternbergia lutea in flower. At one time, there was a big patch of these, but they disappeared “mysteriously”, like a lot of other bulbs. There are, or were (we’re not certain) other sternbergias in the garden, too. Oh, and I’m supposed to say that what looks like a lot of bindweed is really an extra-rare convolvulus from Tajikistan. (Yes, I know I said the last one was from Kyrgyzstan; well, this one isn’t from there. Or so he says to say.)
It’s covering Lonicera olgae, a dwarf honeysuckle from around the same place as the extra-rare convolvulus. 
And then there was a lot of pod-raking. It seems to me that he rakes up pods almost every day. Why not just wait until all the pods are down and then rake them up? The guy I live with says gardeners don’t do that.
There is a reason why pods are falling from the honey locust.
That’s about it. I hope you didn’t get too exhausted following our busy day. The guy I live with says that tomorrow might even be busier. I can hardly wait.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Chess you make me smile. but as adorable as you are that critter in the tree was too and a great shot by the guy you live with. 🙂 Don’t wear yourself out tomorrow. 🙂
Thanks; I guess I would have to agree that I’m adorable. It’s funny how people tell the guy I live with how he should be “doing something”. He says they’re just jealous of our modern lifestyle. Tomorrow, he says, he’s going to pour some distilled water into freezer bags that have seeds and sand in them, after he pours out the water that’s already in there. Cutting edge excitement, I say.
Dear dog, your six-hundred-and-one post! I’d wobble a bit after all that describing, commenting and opining too. So glad you seem poised to continue as your blog brings a bit of happiness into my life. Your lifestyle evidently is good for the long term. Good to see photos of the guy you live with’s work, although we also have evidence in the lovely garden shots; plus, your garden gets better and more mature, which in a garden is evidence of at least a little work.
I’d say that squirrel is irredeemably unrepentant. And you, even after 601 posts, Chess, define winsome and adorable in whatever mood you present yourself. I especially admire the post’s last photo with white hair forming a corona over your head. You look like you are modeling the halo of sainthood.
Thanks. I had a pretty rough summer, and the weather didn’t help at all, but the guy I live with hopes that I’m better now. I’ve been eating this dehydrated raw chicken stuff and it’s pretty good. Kind of like oatmeal with chicken chunks and sweet potato and other things. My walks haven’t been very long, but at least I get to go on them. We learned, a few days ago, that what we call “the canal” is really a ditch, and the water goes to golf courses and a school a few miles east of here. There was a man pulling branches out of it. I just thought I’d say that to illustrate how our modern lifestyle embraces learning as well as doing next to nothing. Squirrels are unrepentant. They chewed the feeder, the one bought for them, completely to pieces, and pull sempervivums out of troughs to nibble on them, and then look pathetic and try to come into the house.
A day without a characteristic pose is like … I don’t know why I constantly write myself into these kinds of corners. I have no talent for simile. I just wanted you to know that every new variation of your characteristic pose makes me happy that there are such things as blogging pure bred boarder collies to make this world a happier place.
New York Times, Sunday Review section, front page: How To Stop Time. It’s nothing you don’t already know but it’s all about how creative it is to resist the capitalistic imperative of productivity.
I can’t help it. I have a tiny crush on Earl.
Thanks; the guy I live with is kind of obsessed with my well-being, so I guess that’s good. There are a lot worse things to obsess about. The article, which is here http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/how-to-stop-time.html?_r=0 is pretty delightful. My mommy was a terrible procrastinator and made the guy I live with mildly crazy, since he had to get up and go to a job and do this and that, and he was expected hundreds of watercolors to be produced, but she lay idle, surrounded by me and my buddy Slipper. Now, after working pretty much constantly and facing the prospect of an empty, endless retirement without my mommy, he’s decided to become more like me, and do as little as possible. The alarm was set for 9 a.m. this morning, but he said I looked so content lying on the soft Pottery Barn sheets, with the fan blowing cool air in through the window, that he lingered in bed for almost an hour. We don’t believe in carpeing any diem at all; in fact, we just live hour to hour. There are of course fewer of those in the day when you wake up so late.
This is funny. (Not so much to the guy I live with.) The caption for the third picture should be “rotting cacti”, not “rooting cacti”. If you embiggen the picture you can clearly see the rotting. He forgot to remove the plastic dishes after watering the cacti. A considerable amount of self-recrimination followed, though possibly the tips can be saved.
The late Christopher Lloyd described rooting cuttings as “a race between rooting and rotting”.
Chess, I went to a medieval fest in Manhattan today with friends and we saw a hummingbird in the Fort Tryon heather garden! None of us had ever seen one before in NYC. Then we saw a groudhog (yes, alive and not dead from internal injuries like the one dropped by our mayor). We ended up in the middle of a crowd of French tourists photographing both the groundhog and an enterprising squirrel who decided that he needed to get into all the pictures. My friends were impressed when I told told them about your hummingbirds and Earl.
Earl and the Hummingbirds sounds like a doo-wop group from the late 1950s. (The guy I live with is old enough to remember when you heard doo-wop on the radio all the time.) I’ve never seen a groundhog, though I know both my mommy and the guy I live with watched a movie about one, over and over again. There used to be one in the rock garden at DBG, though whether that was a groundhog or a hoary marmot I don’t know. Just appeared there one day. You have to go up to the mountains to see them here. I’ve never been to the mountains. It could thunder. All the hummingbirds are gone now, and there’s just one lonely hummingbird feeder left up, swinging in the wind.