the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about various things. You may remember me from such posts as “Mister Fabulous”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I know it looks like I’m not doing anything, but we’ve been working a lot in the garden, lately. Mostly digging up those onions I talked about earlier.

There isn’t a whole lot in flower right now, though we did get five millimeters of rain last night and early this morning. It was pretty nice. And they say we might get a little more, day after tomorrow.
The guy I live with posted a picture of the “flock” of Fritillaria pallidiflora on Facebook, so here are some slightly different pictures.
And the Fritillaria imperialis are flowering, too. They got knocked about by the wind.
I know it looks like they’re growing in gravel, but that’s just the north side of the “sand pile”, which also has gravel in it. The fritillarias are growing in plain dirt, under the New Mexican privets (Forestiera neomexicana). They’ve been here for years, but never set any seeds, unlike the Fritillaria pallidiflora, most of which are seedlings.

The wild plums (Prunus americana) are flowering along the canal. They have a very nice fragrance. The plums make good jam, according to the guy I live with.
And the cottonwoods are flowering, too.
Though you wouldn’t want these trees in your garden. Look what the roots do.
We had a visitor in the garden for a couple of days, as well. Everything got quiet when the visitor appeared. This is a Cooper’s hawk.
So that’s the flowers and birds part of the post.

The guy I live with ordered a book for his friend, to read to her grandchildren. He said it looks pretty good.
It’s about a grumpy badger. Not the kind of badgers we have here, though. European badgers.

Today, I went to the doctor’s office, for my annual checkup. I got stuck with needles and everything, but it was okay.
All the purebred border collies who have lived here have gone to the same doctor’s office. It does sometimes make the guy I live with sad to think of that.
The doctor said I had lost the six pounds I gained year before last. The guy I live with said that was excellent. It must be my new canned food, which I like a lot, though it’s kind of hard for him to find.
And also chasing the squirrel away from the suet feeder. That takes a lot of energy.
The doctor said I looked “fabulous”. I know it would be immodest of me to agree, but, well, you know..

It was my first ride in our new car. I get why people talk about “new car smell”; it was nice, in a different way. I rode in the back, wearing my Ruff Rider Roadie. (It attaches to the back headrest with a carabiner.)
The guy I live with hadn’t figured out how to turn the heat on, in the car, because up until today it hadn’t been necessary, but I liked the ride anyway.

It was pretty chilly today, and I guess it will be tomorrow, and the next day.

My evening walk was certainly chilly, but pleasant at the same time.
I think you can see that the canal looks way less grassy now. Maybe the canal people cleaned it up a bit. The water is also higher.
And the water looks a lot calmer than it did last Friday, which was another really windy day.
You can see the ripples in the water, blown by the wind.
By the way, though last Friday was another “fire weather” day, it was a lot less scary than the Friday before that. But it drove both of us slightly crazy. The wind blew all day long, at about forty miles an hour.

It’s funny how that seems fast, being out in the garden, but riding in the car at the same speed it doesn’t seem fast at all.

Anyway, you can see that things are starting to turn green here, at least a little.
Lots of people and dogs walk on this path. That line of dried grasses is the creek. I sometimes like to hunt for voles along the creek, even though the guy I live with says not to.
Just this evening, when we were walking along the canal, I leaped toward the edge of the canal bank, to try to get a vole, and then jumped in the water, to see if I could see the vole. The guy I live with said not to do that, and now I see why. The water was really cold. It comes from Mount Evans, which is a pretty high mountain (14,271 feet, or 4,350 meters), and not all that far away from us.
(Guanella Pass, which is on the west side of Mount Evans, is just an hour’s drive from our driveway, and a lot of that is on the winding, and occasionally scary, Guanella Pass Road. I’ve been up there, as you may know.)

Well, that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me looking fabulous. It’s not all that difficult for me to do, really.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to talk about all the agitation of the last few days. You may remember me from such posts as “A Super Scary Day”, among at least as few others like this.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This was last Thursday, I think. You can see how I’m making sure that nothing untoward happens in the garden.
The guy I live with installed that squirrel baffle over the suet feeder, but it refuses to hang correctly. It doesn’t matter, because the suet is for the nuthatches and downy woodpeckers, not for squirrels.

Maybe on the same day, the guy I live with started this project, which he described as “neverending”, to dig all the smooth brome out of the garden, and to bury some of the boards previously used for the bulb frames right against the back fence, to help prevent the grass from invading the garden, which it has, everywhere.
Here I am guarding the spade.
Kind of an expensive spade, made by Bulldog, but the one he had before that was flimsy and broke after a year of use. This one is over thirty years old.
You can see all the smooth brome one the left side of the picture, too. And in the field behind the fence.

The smooth brome features prominently in my post. The grass, which is native to Eurasia, has been planted extensively, both as forage for cattle, and to revegetate disturbed areas. It’s an unbelievably aggressive grass which has, as I said, invaded our garden and is almost ineradicable. The guy I live with hates it.
It grows about three feet tall, but dries out in mid-summer if we don’t have any rain. There are acres of it in the field west of us, in the larger field on the west side of our neighborhood, and some south of us, too.

This last Friday we were under a “red flag warning”, as we have been almost every day this month, because the wind has been blowing constantly, and a “critical fire warning” as well, because the humidity was about five percent, and the wind was predicted to gust as high as fifty miles an hour, if not higher.

It started about mid-morning. I didn’t like it at all. The dust was so thick we couldn’t even see the foothills.
I could tell that the guy I live with was really nervous. A friend of his called; she lives in southern Colorado where the wind was even stronger, and I thought the guy I live with was going to burst into tears, because all of this possibility of loss had suddenly reminded him of the days and weeks after he lost his wife; memories he had suppressed until then.
He told his friend he was packing bags, just in case. She said that was a good idea and would do the same thing.

Well, I wondered what on earth he was doing, going up and down the stairs, and putting stuff in the car. The car which would start. (You know how you fix something, but then aren’t entirely sure it’s fixed, and this uncertainly lingers in the back of your mind? That was the car thing.)
I deduced, since we purebred border collies are pretty savvy, that the guy I live with really had two brains, like the two parrots I talked about earlier. One was the nervous brain, the other was the one that, like when he came home from the hospital after his wife died and sat down and made notes of everything he needed to do, phone calls and such, just went about methodically doing the things that needed to be done, so that if we had to evacuate, we would be ready. Instead of trying to figure out what to do when you only have a few minutes to make a decision.

He packed two bags; one for him, and one for me.

The wind blew and blew, and reports of wildfires appeared on the news. There was a plant sale he’d looked forward to going to, that night, but he didn’t go, because I was scared, and he didn’t want to leave me alone.

Fortunately, nothing happened, and the wildfires elsewhere along the Front Range were contained.
The wind blew again on Saturday, but this time from the northwest, and it was much cooler, with higher humidity.
The guy I live with went to the plant sale, but wasn’t gone very long.

He went to the plant sale again today, because his friend was working there, and so he stayed for a lot longer.
You can see he mostly got a bunch of manzanitas, which I guess are going in the front yard (caged against our resident bunny, for the first few years, because bunnies like to bite them into pieces), and a couple of dwarf conifers, both Pinus strobiformis ‘Loma Linda’, which originated from Jerry Morris, who passed away recently.
The guy I live with was very sad when he heard that news. I guess he was kind of in awe of Jerry; he said that talking to him was like talking to Treebeard himself. He’d never met anyone with such an intimate and extensive knowledge of trees and how they grow. The guy I live with’s approach to gardening totally changed after listening to Jerry.
(You can see pictures of the nursery on the older post, “Trip To Jerry’s Nursery”.)

Well, whew. That was the last few days. They said it might rain this evening, and it did, but not enough to make a difference. The guy I live with even saw a few snowflakes.
After all of this, I’ll leave you with a charming picture of half-asleep me.

Until next time, then.