the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you about our latest adventures. You may remember me from such posts as “Ice Isn’t Nice”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.The last few days have been pretty exciting here, but not in a good way.
The first thing that happened was that I had some distress of one kind of another (the guy I live with said I got a string from one of my Lamb Chops caught in my mouth) and had to go out and eat a bunch of grass, twice, after midnight, a few nights ago. I’m okay now (the guy I live with cleaned up all the grass from the living room carpet); it’s a good thing there was still some green grass out in the garden.
But the guy I live with wasn’t very happy about this. I know he wants me to be healthy and happy, and worries about me.

The other thing was a much bigger deal, if you ask me.

Some time after noon yesterday, when it was really windy, gusting up to fifty miles per hour, the guy I live with smelled smoke, and a few minutes later, there was a large column of smoke west of us. The guy I live with thought it might be pretty close, so we went on another walk, to see exactly where the fire was.
I wanted to look for voles along the creek, because the wind was scary, but he dragged me up to the last street on the west side of our neighborhood (I’d never been there), and this is what we saw:
That’s Mount Morrison, where Red Rocks Amphitheater is, in the distance, about five miles away, to the northwest.
There’s a highway between us and where the fire was.
It was so windy, though, that the guy I live with was pretty worried, and kept wondering if we would have to leave. He was making a mental list of stuff to take. The most important thing, besides me, is a little bag of his wife’s jewelry that the coroner gave him.
The neighborhoods to the north of the highway were evacuated, but then he realized that the fire was moving east, and not southeast, so we just waited to see what would happen.
The wind died down at about five in the afternoon, and the fire was pretty much out soon after that. It burned over 400 acres; there were flames a hundred feet high. We have a very good fire department; the main building is close to us. We walk past it on our night-time walks (which we don’t go on when it’s really cold).

So, whew.
Now there’s the business of the weather. It’s supposed to get down to zero this weekend. No degrees at all. The guy I live with is not thrilled. “We need more degrees”, he said.

Other than that, things here are more or less the same.
On my evening walk today, I heard hooting. (This is me, hearing hooting.)The owls haven’t left to find a nest yet. They were just waking up.Look at those feet.
Pretty scary, huh? I tried to scare the owl but it wasn’t even slightly concerned. I think you can see why.

That’s it for today. We’re still here.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you about something new that’s going on here. You may remember me from such posts as “Not Quite Like Me”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You can see that I’m busy guarding stuff, even with this kind of blurry picture. You wouldn’t believe all the things that need to be guarded against here. I might not be able to name them all, but there are a lot, believe me.

There are things that don’t need guarding, like all the snowdrops which are up in the shade garden. They aren’t open because it hasn’t been warm enough. Snowdrops, if you didn’t know, contain an alkaloid, called galantamine, which acts as a sort of antifreeze to prevent the leaves from being killed during cold weather. Lots of hardy plants have their own sort of antifreeze to be able to withstand winter dormancy, but snowdrops have it because they grow during the coldest parts of the year.
The guy I live with says that he read that the tips of the leaves are slightly hardened to enable them to push through the soil.

In an early translation into English of the story by the brothers Grimm, Snow White was called Snowdrop. The guy I live with said he saw the movie when he was little, and he thought the evil queen was scary. I don’t like things that are scary.

It got up to almost seventy degrees (F) a few days ago, but mostly it’s been chilly every day, and the guy I live with says it will be cold all next week. Not incredibly cold, but not very nice, either. He’s really not used to having week after week of all this awfulness, though I don’t mind it at all.
The guy I live with says that’s because I’ve gained weight, but I maintain it’s just a heavy winter coat.

A pile of seeds, from Plants of the Southwest, came in the mail the other day, so there’s something to do. And there was a lot of raking and sweeping today, even though it wasn’t all that pleasant for people who don’t have heavy winter coats like I do.

Well, anyway, a few days ago, when the guy I live with was in “noticing mode”, which he isn’t, always, he noticed that the groundcover manzanita, which doesn’t have a name, was hanging over the sidewalk a little, and so, after quite a bit of thinking, he decided to try his hand at growing some manzanitas from cuttings.
Believe it or not, the guy I live with has never grown anything from cuttings, so this was a pretty big step for him.
The container of rooting powder, which his wife used, because she grew plants from cuttings, wasn’t where he thought it was, probably because it was long gone. You know the way you imagine things being on, like, a shelf, seeing them every day, sometimes out of the corner of your eye, and then one day it turns out that the thing hasn’t been there for years, that’s a bit weird.
A new container of rooting powder came in the mail, and so cuttings were taken, dipped in water and then in the rooting powder, and I guess we’ll see what happens next. If this is successful, I can see the whole house being filled with cuttings. Maybe even if it isn’t successful.

So that’s something new that’s going on here. Not hugely exciting, if you’re me, but I understand that if it’s an activity that involves mostly a lot of waiting, the guy I live with is very good at that.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me doing something else I’m good at, besides guarding stuff.

Until next time, then.