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 some antsy news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Super Genius”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I look pretty noble and calm, don’t I? I’m just kidding myself, as you’ll find out in a bit.

Our garden is going to be on tour a week from today and the guy I live with has been freaking out about the weeds. He’s been doing some weeding, and as you can see here, I’ve been helping.I really like helping.

There are things flowering, though maybe not as many flowers as there were in years past, because a lot of the plants died or were removed.

Here’s a close-up of the buds on Asphodeline lutea:

And the gladiolus are starting to flower. There was the purple one, Gladiolus atroviolaceus, but the flowers were wrecked by cold. So the pinkish ones are what are flowering now. This is Gladiolus italicus. 

And the big buddleia, Buddleia alternifolia ‘Argentea’, is in full bloom now.And there’s more weeding to do. It’s been raining kind of a lot, here, and so the weeds are growing very quickly.

I’d talk more about the garden, but I have things to do. We’re having an invasion of gigantic black ants. The guy I live with says he doesn’t know why they’re coming into the house and what it is they want of us. Unless, of course, they were already in the house and are trying to get out.

The guy I live with says not to eat ants but I think it’s my job to try to get them. They run really fast but the guy I live with has been catching them in the “bug jar”. We have these old tall salsa jars with holes punched in the lids, for catching bugs and putting them back outside where they belong.

Just now he caught one of these huge ants and while he was trying to catch another one the first one climbed out of the jar and so he had to re-catch that one and then get the other one. It was almost too much for me.

I really can’t spend much time on this post, though, because of the ants. They’re pretty scary and I have to watch out for them. 

Until next time, then.