Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Mister Fabulous”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Just back from my evening walk.Some things have been happening which make me think that the serious gardening season is upon us. I really enjoy gardening. The guy I live with said that Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, enjoyed gardening, too. It’s more of a spectator activity, you understand.

I mentioned the post “Mister Fabulous” because it’s at this time of year when I get my shots, which I did, while I’m at Day Care, and I hear I was completely excellent when I got the shots. I also got a good report card from Day Care.

The next day, on our morning walk, there was this loud noise in the sky, which the guy I live with said was from a helicopter, and sure enough there it was, moving across the sky.

They fly over all the time, but not big ones like this.

The guy I live with said that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, would rush out into the back yard and look up into the sky when someone said “Helicopter”, so I guess I need to brush up on helicopters.

There was this creature, on the canal road.Also, there was some work done on a bird house. The bird house had been sitting in the workbench in the garage for about eight years. It got painted yesterday.It’s pretty deluxe, with caged windows for safety, and holes at the bottom for extra cleanliness.The guy I live with said that the bird house sat on the work bench because it did. I think I get that. He glanced at it from time to time, and then yesterday decided it might make a good actual bird house. At first he thought it was a purchased bird house, but when he looked at is closely he realized that it had been made right at the work bench, and only needed to be painted. So it’s going to go somewhere in the garden.

That was yesterday.

Today started out pretty scary, because there was a thing in the road. I don’t much care for things in the road.I did get a closer look. I learned that this was a bag of bagels. Someone must have dropped it. The guy I live with said he would leave it in the road, in case someone missed it and came looking for it. The bag wasn’t damaged, so the bagels might still be good.

He said it might be fun to see how long the bag stays there.

Things have begun arriving in the mail. That’s a sure sign that it really is the gardening season. The guy I live with said he wasn’t going to order too much this year, except for bulbs of course, but one item that had to be ordered was a bag of grass seed. There are empty spaces in the lawn which need to be fixed. He said he was going to get ‘Sundancer’, which is the latest buffalo grass, but the lawn right now is ‘Cody’, so that was the obvious choice. It was also slightly cheaper.

And a small order of hens and chicks came, from Shadow Mountain Succulents. The guy I live with said that there were too many cactus in the garden, many of which never flowered because the summers here are so dark, and that, after thinking about it for at least six months, he decided he liked hens and chicks better. So they were planted in the glazed pots you see in a lot of pictures of our garden, with some hardware cloth tents on top, because squirrels will eat the hens and chicks to pieces if they’re not protected before they root into the soil.

He said he might get more.

I think that’s all. The last couple of days here have been pretty interesting, as I’m sure you’ll agree. 

Until next time, then.