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 all about how I got into trouble, and also about some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Selling Insurance”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. You may notice a slight addition to the garden. It was constructed a couple of days ago.

Not really a huge amount of stuff has happened since I last posted. I explored the drainage culvert on the other side of the field yesterday evening. It was pretty scary, if you want to know the truth. Water drains from the street above it, down through the culvert, and into the field. Just into it, with no ditch leading to the creek.

“Either that”, said the guy I live with, “or it’s a tunnel of mystery“. Like a portal to another dimension, or something.The guy I live with made ma po tofu for dinner last night and wouldn’t let me have any. He said it was very hot. Back in the old days, the guy I live with’s wife would have baked a cake for Beethoven’s birthday, which was yesterday. There was just tofu here, though. He said the tofu was really good, but the whole thing was another one of those metaphors.

It is super dry here. Some of the garden soil is just dust.It’s usually dry under the arbor, though of course not when it rains or snows. The arbor has things written on it. Another mystery. You can see that the squirrels have been chewing away at the wood. There was a big hawk eating something out in the cottonwood. I watched, but I didn’t want to know what it was. The guy I live with said it was probably a tuna sandwich, with potato chips on the side. Or better yet, a pastrami sandwich with cream cheese on light rye, with a side of potato salad and maybe some pickled green tomatoes. The guy I live with worked in the bulb frames, for a while, today. I kept guard.A crocus was in flower in the big frame, which is the one you see here. This is Crocus hadriaticus ‘Celia’.  I’m not sure why this picture is so small.

There were some snowdrops in flower in the Snowdrop Frame.And, yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but I got into trouble today. The guy I live with was pretty ticked off. I think you can tell what happened just by looking at the title of today’s post. It could have been that I was paying as much attention as I might.
I didn’t really get yelled at, just lectured in what I thought was an excessively loud voice. Not that there was anyone around to hear. It probably didn’t help that I started to drink the bird bath water after that.

So the bird bath had to be all washed out, and then when new water was poured in, everything was fine again. It’s a very popular spot. You can probably imagine what we saw on our walk this evening. But you don’t even have to imagine.So that was my day. It was pretty good except for that one part.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me guarding the Madonna lilies (Lilium candidum, the green things there), while the guy I live with was fiddling around in the Snowdrop Frame, which is just out of view on the right.

Until next time, then.