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 this and that. You may remember me from such posts as “Of Orioles And Rain”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m in my fort because it’s been raining. All day long. No, seriously. The guy I live with said the rain will make it easier to pull the smooth brome. Maybe you can see what he’s up against, here.It does give him something to do, if he gets motivated.
He said, early on in the lockdown that he would try to get some things done, like learn how to use the little Fujifilm camera, and also the camera on the phone.
He took these two pictures with the phone, the other day.
This is Clematis hirsutissima:Finally having a good year after being here for about twenty years. It likes more water than it gets.
And Acanthus syriacus, forming a flower bud.

I know it’s Sunday, but the post office delivered this box today. The guy I live with was pretty happy. And, no, it’s not decaf. That was just the box they sent the coffee (French Roast) in.
And more LPs have been arriving.

The guy I live with mostly listens to classical music, and has since he was eight (they had music back then, if you can believe that), but there was a time, right about the time he met his wife, that he was really into “new age” music.
He went to this record store where there were–and I kind of shudder to think of this–cats all over the place. He says when he was leafing through the records, there might be a cat sitting on the records and you would have to gently move the cat aside to be able to keep browsing.
Before they met, his wife went to the store, too, and it’s remotely possible that they were in the store at the same time, without ever noticing each other. He says he would have noticed her.
He bought a whole bunch of these Windham Hill records at the record store back then and is pretty glad to have them back.  Well, two of them. The music is kind of repetitious, he says, but so what.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eClQNCK2jTQ

These came in the mail last week. They spent some time in “quarantine” out in the garage, and now they’re downstairs. These are the headphones. Eventually he’ll get the rest of the equipment so he can listen to the LPs. 

So, anyway, if you’ve been following the blog for any length of time, you know what today is.
The guy I live with went down into his wife’s studio and sat there for a while. 
She’s been gone for eleven years, today.

That’s pretty much it. It’s still raining. Orioles are visiting the feeder but I tend to chase them away–not on purpose of course–but maybe we can post a picture eventually.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me patrolling the garden yesterday, when it wasn’t raining.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular (and modest) host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to fill you in on all the fascinating things that have been going on here. You may remember me from such posts as “Next To Nothing”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see how furiously busy I am.
In fact, hardly anything has been going on here, except a lot of weed-pulling, and even more smooth-brome digging. The guy I live with seriously detests this stuff. But you can see some progress has been made in the “way back”. The buffalo grass lawn does look fairly awful right now, but when the cool-season grasses that aren’t supposed to be there anyway go dormant in the summer things will look better.
The blue lyme grass that was where the trash can is was moved across the lawn to its place by the owl posts. Some of the smooth brome that had invaded the blue lyme was removed. The grass might not stay there if it keeps getting swamped by the smooth brome; that makes a terrible and unsightly mess.

It rained day before yesterday. In the evening. About a third of an inch. The guy I live with had to get out the ladder and clean pine needles out of the gutter before it started to rain. It’s been a very dry May.
The shade garden is still green, though when the colchicum foliage turns brown the whole area will look a lot less green. The snowdrops, on the left, are already dying down for the summer.And the dragon arum, Dracunculus vulgaris, is still growing. That’s a Solomon’s seal, behind it, that came from his mom’s garden. She got it from her best friend who passed away years ago. None of the plants he ordered have been planted yet. They probably should have been three days ago, to enjoy the rain. But they weren’t.

The guy I live with still hasn’t gone anywhere. He said maybe when they life the “Safer at Home” advisory he’ll go up and see his friend, because he really misses her.
And he misses being able to go out to lunch, all that stuff.
He’s having groceries delivered and totally freaks out washing everything, though he was sort of that way before. Not a germophobe, really, but someone who washes his hands a lot.

The LPs have begun to arrive. A total of four. There might not be that many more. You never know.
This was the first one. His wife had it when they first met, and it so strongly reminds him of that time he was afraid he couldn’t listen to it, but here it is anyway.

He ordered some headphones, but they have an adapter to use with this laptop and with the phone, so that’s about all that’s happened.

Really not much of a post. I went on my walk this evening, and a truck backfired or something on the highway. I got scared, but the guy I live with said for me not to spoil my walk, and he betterized everything by taking me into the sea of smooth brome (some of which has been mowed) so I could look for voles and stuff.
And even explore along the creek bed. There’s a whole lot of sand in there, and interesting little holes, or I guess you might say caves.

Until next time, then.