the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you the latest news from our garden and its environs (I get to use that word a lot these days), as well as some other news. You may remember me from such posts as “Before The Deep Freeze”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. It was a two-Lamb-Chop day. Everyone should have at least two, if you ask me.

It’s been mostly sunny here, which is a nice change.Sometimes there are things that need to be surveyed, or just checked out. We see owls on my evening walk, almost every evening now.Sometimes in the tops of trees (talk about being able to survey stuff),and sometimes right across the street, like tonight. The guy I live with mostly just feeds the birds, since it’s been too chilly for much of anything to be happening in the garden. The other day, when it was cloudy and sort of cold, the birds waited for the feeders to be filled. If you look closely, in the cottonwood, behind and on the right, there was another, much larger bird who was not interested in the bird feeders at all. At least directly. Snowdrops are peeking their heads up, but not terribly eager to try anything like flowering, when it’s been so chilly. This is ‘Potter’s Prelude’, which would have flowered a few weeks ago if it hadn’t been so cold and dry here.There are some snowdrops flowering in the frame, too.

On the day I went to Day Care, the guy I live with and his friend went to Denver Botanic Gardens, and then to lunch. When they walked back to the car they saw this apple tree with apples still on it. The guy I live with said he’d never seen an apple tree with apples still on it this late in the year, but obviously it was possible. Still, it seemed mysterious, but then, he doesn’t know anything about apple trees except that they get apples, and, here in Denver, fireblight. It was definitely something unexpected. Sometimes we walk fairly late in the evening, just after the sun has set. 

The guy I live with sometimes sit on the couch with me, of an evening, and every once in a while he reads aloud to me. Right now it’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which has some scary parts, but when I’m all cozy lying on the couch it isn’t too terribly scary. Some of the cyclamen that were growing upstairs have died. The guy I live with was irked, but he has been very distracted lately. I think I should tell you why.

If you’ve been reading our blog for any length of time, you may have noticed two things about it. The first is that I obviously have an extremely good life, thanks at least in part to the guy I live with. He says some people say that we purebred border collies “need something to do”, but that’s not true if we live with people who are at home most of the time, like the guy I live with is. I do mostly what you see me doing, plus a few other things, which I sometimes get yelled at for doing, and sometimes not. We like our low-key lifestyle.

The other thing is that I occasionally talk about subjects which some people might consider to be serious.

If you were a purebred border collie, like me, and went on walks twice a day, you would become accustomed to seeing certain things, like owls in the evening, or hearing the sound of water running in the canal in the summertime, but if you turned a corner and there was a real-life effelant just standing there, that would be something unexpected, too. That’s how the guy I live with explained it to me. Like an effelant just standing there, when you expected a patch of grass, or a trail leading off to the right.

This is what has happened. The guy I live with has not been sick for a single day since he retired from the phone company back in May of 2007, but lately he’s been leaving me here and going off to see doctors. He’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer. A thing so totally unexpected that the guy I live with often wonders if it’s real. But it is.

Since I tend to get worried sometimes, the way we purebred border collies do, he told me that the doctor said this “wasn’t a death sentence”, but I understand that we may be in for a not-very-easy time for a while, now. So I get extra cuddles, and read to, on the couch, in the evenings.

And I still go on my walks, as usual. Sometimes in the dark, sometimes in the light. Sometimes in both. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on whatever it is that needs updating. You may remember me from such posts as “The Bulb Frame”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I really love the couch. Sometimes the guy I live with sits on the couch with me, in the evening, reading a book. He said that some time he might read me a story, too. He also says it might be time to consider getting new cushions for the couch, which is why there’s that maroon fleece covering the existing cushions, which are pretty worn out now. The original stuffing was kapok.  I’d never heard of kapok but we looked it up on the internet. When the guy I live with was little, practically everything was kapok, bamboo, rattan, or ivory.

“Ivory?”, you ask. Well, yes. Maybe I never showed a picture of this before. It’s on a little wooden platform on the wall; the guy I live with brought it to the house when he and his wife moved in. It’s very dusty, as you can see. (The guy I live with carefully washes it off about once a year.) These pictures are not hugely in focus. 

The fisherman has always been called “Leo Key” but that might not be right, since “Leo” doesn’t sound especially Chinese. It is ivory, except for the eyes in the dog and snake.

Some of the fins on the carp were broken off, but if you look right above the dog and snake you can see that the statue has been broken in half, which the guy I live with said they would say something about if the statue were taken to the “Roadshow”.  It was broken in half when it was knocked onto the floor when the guy I live with’s mom was dancing with her then boyfriend in the living room of the house on Oakwood Avenue in Los Angeles, where she and her mom were living while her father was in New Guinea, in 1944.

The statue sat on “the Magnavox”, which was a nice cabinet holding a record player and albums of 78s (the guy I live with said he can still remember the pleasant smell of the cabinet when the doors were opened), and the blue lamp you sometimes see in pictures featuring me. A plate of oreos, some celery, and a glass of milk were set out on top of the cabinet on Christmas Eve, for, you know, the visitors. And that’s what the guy I live with thinks of when he looks at the ivory fisherman.

Not very much has been happening here. The guy I live with said he was totally sick of turkey and would never have any ever, ever again. (I did get some.) He read that cooked turkey shouldn’t be kept in the refrigerator for more than four days (less it if was thawed in cold water, which it was), and so it was with a considerable amount of relief that he decided to dispose of the rest of the turkey. Of course I would have helped him dispose of it.

This is me thinking about turkey.But the turkey is gone. (Or at least out of the picture.)

The guy I live with took some pictures of the garden, with the phone. Just to show how dry it is here.  The crocus, Crocus niveus, is still flowering, even though it gets a little below freezing almost every night. This is a special form of it, I guess. There are some others which finished flowering quite some time ago; you can see the leaves off to the left.

He’s still learning how to work the camera on the phone. (Not to mention the other cameras.)

The cyclamen are doing pretty well. 

It’s okay if the leaf stems elongate while they’re growing upstairs. In fact, there’s a cyclamen he grew from seed which is really elongated.This is okay because the cyclamen do go dormant in the summer; when they get planted outside everything will be perfectly normal when the leaves grow again. By the way, the seedling cyclamen were grown from pretty old seed, which you can do even though some people say you can’t.  The packet of seeds came from the distribution of surplus seeds from the North American Rock Garden Society seed exchange. The seeds get the covering of gravel you see there, then the well-watered pot of seeds goes into a baggie which is folded over (not closed), and then into the closet until the seeds start to germinate. This can take several weeks.

The seedling cyclamen won’t go into the garden for a few years, at least.

My evening walks have been pretty interesting. Sometimes I feel like I’m being watched. The guy I live with says I am.This is a different owl from the one whose picture the guy I live with posted on Facebook.

If you didn’t see those pictures, maybe I should post them here. You can see this one has a white collar, or ruff, maybe. 

We hear them hooting every night now. The guy I live with said that when I was little and slept in my upstairs fort, I got scared when I heard the owls for the first time.

So that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with a typical picture of me on my walk, being watched by owls. 

Until next time, then.