the miserable gardener

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 today to talk about the rain. You may remember me from such posts as “A Rainy Afternoon”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with forgot to post a picture of almost the same view taken a couple of days ago, of an evening. (I always like to say that.)
The difference between the two pictures is because we got some rain. Finally. Rain started to fall on my evening walk on Monday, and it rained all day yesterday. We got well over an inch of rain.
The guy I live with is very much relieved. We’ll still have a big water bill for September, though, from earlier in the month.
So the first picture makes everything look kind of flattened. Even messier than in the second picture.

There are a bunch of Colchicum autumnale ‘Album’ flowering in the enclosure. This is kind of a messy area too, because of all the vinca which the guy I live with doesn’t want here.
I’m very much on the mend, by the way, and am almost completely back to normal. I’m still taking the antibiotic and eating prescription food, but the the guy I live with said that will only be for a few more days.

This morning I had a moment of, well I wouldn’t quite say sheer terror, but it was pretty scary indeed. The thing was moving.
The guy I live with said it was okay to give this nameless horror a closer look. He said I’d seen one before in my garden.
No one lives in this house right now.
I had to make sure it was okay to look.
And I did, when I got the “all clear” from the guy I live with. You can see how brave I was.
The guy I live with said the nameless horror actually did have a name: a “party balloon”.
I know without even thinking about it that I’ll never accept an invitation to a party, and I don’t know why they allow such things.

And that’s all I have for today. The garden is soaked, and now we’re just waiting for some colder weather to keep the yellowjackets from flying into our kitchen.

Until next time, then.

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 today to bring you the latest news from our garden and its environs. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Approaching The Equinox”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You wouldn’t know it, but I’ve been slightly under the weather. I have clostridium. My doctor said it was from eating rabbit poop, but rabbit poop is very tasty. It’s just grass that has gone through a bunny.
So I’m on an antibiotic and eating prescription food, and getting probiotic yogurt and pills hidden in wedges of Brie.

The guy I live with was almost more than under the weather when I dragged him out of the front door on our morning walk. He almost fell onto the concrete walk as I tugged on the leash.
He cut his arm, and there was a lot of blood, which is to be expected when you live with an older human.
I had an excuse though.
There was a fox on my driveway.

The fox followed us.
The guy I live with said it looked like it wanted to make friends with me, and he felt kind of sorry for it.
He also said there was plenty for a fox to eat around here, but he didn’t elaborate.

The guy I live with said next time he’s going to let me out of the front door a lot more cautiously.

And there are colchicums.
This is ‘Pink Star’.
This one has no label; it could be a seedling.
This one could also be a seedling. At first he thought it was ‘Jarka’, but that cultivar has pink at the bottom and white at the top.
There was a ‘Jarka’ here at one time, and maybe it produced this seedling.

‘Innocence’ is doing very well right now.
One ‘Innocence’ decided to be partly pink.

We walked around the garden to see how things are doing, like we always do, though usually I like to spend time barking at squirrels, but at one point I heard a little exclamation of surprise. The guy I live with said “Look there”.

The first snowdrop.

Galanthus bursanus.

The guy I live with said he could see more coming up. He said this is the best autumn-flowering snowdrop for our climate. This is considered to be hysteranthous because the leaves aren’t well-developed, as you can see. I talked about that in an earlier post.
He has all the other autumn-flowering species here, but this one does a lot better than the others.

There was a crocus in flower, too, but he forgot to take a picture of it.

I know he has mixed emotions about the coming of autumn. It was his wife’s favorite time of the year, along with Christmas, so he thinks about that, but this summer has been a really awful one, way too hot and way too dry.
He doesn’t have a lot of hope that we’ll get a bunch of rain, since we usually get less and less precipitation in the coming months, but at least it won’t be 95 degrees every day.
And maybe, he said, it will snow soon.

That’s all I have for today.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me photobombing what the guy I live with said was a very red sphaeralcea.

Until next time, then.