the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to talk about this and that and other things. You may remember me from such posts as “A Hint Of Rain” and “Lavender And Ice Cubes”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I was being bothered by flying things.I really dislike having things fly around me, and land on me, and then start crawling all over me. The guy I live with said I was lucky not to live in a warmer climate, where extremely large flying things might land on me, or even bite me. I think these things were gnats.

Not much is happening around here. The guy I live with said someone is coming to look at the roof next week and that we’ll almost certainly get a new one. He wasn’t going to get one and then realized (he can be slow sometimes) that if he didn’t, he would constantly worry about the roof until we did eventually get a new one.

Because, of course, he was worried about the roof before this summer. Then we had the two hailstorms and I guess that was the deciding factor. Otherwise he would just sit and worry. He worries a lot, as I’ve said before, and he probably didn’t need this extra, and very major, thing.

Well, so, anyway, some things are actually happening here. Little things, but still things. The cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium) began to flower after they were watered a few days ago.

You can see that there was some sun in the garden this morning, when the pictures were taken.

A highly illegal entrance-way was also discovered. The guy I live with said “Someone has been digging under the fence.” I couldn’t help but admire his powers of observation. There was sun on my walk this morning. You may have heard that I hurt my leg, my left hind leg, and that I was seriously limping, but it got better. I had to have what I thought was an excessively large amount of “quiet time” for a few days. The guy I live with called my doctor to see if I could go to Day Care this week, and the thought was I should stay home, and “play it safe”, but the whole time he was talking on the phone I was chasing squirrels in the garden, and he felt very weird about me not going, and his inability to make decisions, but he said what I felt about things was more important than him trying to make decisions, and that me chasing squirrels and running up and down and back and forth was a good sign, so he called again the next day, and it was decided that I could go to Day Care, which I did. My leg is fine now. Yesterday, and also this morning, the water in the canal was mysteriously low (and at normal height, or depth, in the evening). There were very interesting things to see in the water.

The guy I live with said these were pretty big trout, and there were a lot of them.

We didn’t look to see if there were any giant crawdads, but we did see the muskrat, paddling happily down the shallow water. The guy I live with didn’t have his camera ready. Naturally.

Around about noon the sky turned the way it has almost every day since maybe May. It was extremely dark for the rest of the day and was accompanied by a considerable amount of complaining.When this picture was taken it was ninety degrees Fahrenheit (a little over thirty-two Celsius), sixteen percent humidity, and not a breath of air moving. He said he thought he might go completely crazy.

If there aren’t storms, then there is no wind, for days on end. Denver used to be a famously windy place, but not any more. The air just sits there. The guy I live with said it’s probably the same air every single day and that if we breathed too much it might not have much oxygen after a while. There aren’t a lot of leaves on many of the plants to help with the oxygen.

You can see the pathetic eggplant plant is flowering, but we don’t have much hope for eggplants. The guy I live with said it was only for ornament anyway, because eggplant, except for the green Thai eggplants, isn’t eaten here very much. At least the eggplant plant wasn’t in a place where its leaves got totally shredded, like what happened to the tomato plants. Some watering has been done, but not nearly enough. It rained today; about a hundred drops. Several years ago the guy I live with planted some Salvia darcyi in the front bed, under the upstairs bedroom window, in the only part of the front yard that’s ever watered, and they get watered fairly often (like once every two weeks), because they need water in order to flower. The important thing here isn’t the flowers, really, because the plants become a bit unattractive in the later stage of flowering, but the visitors. Maybe you can see the visitor, here, sitting on one of the wire cages set there to keep rabbits from eating everything. I guess that’s all for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me in repose, after a long day of being me. 

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 the latest news from our garden on this very smoky day. You may remember me from such smoke-related posts as “Shedding Light”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I like lying by the back door.I often just fall asleep here. It turns out to be a nice place to lie. You can see the non-slippery rugs the guy I live with bought for Chess. He decided to keep them in the kitchen, just in case. You can also see that my hindquarters have a lot of mats. They’re being worked on, slowly. Trimmed and stuff. I hate being brushed.

If you didn’t see the picture of all the goldfinches at the feeder, posted on Facebook, here it is. He went out and bought another feeder and so now the goldfinches have disappeared. Maybe they don’t like all the smoke in the air.

I guess we’ve mostly recovered from the hailstorm last Tuesday. The guy I live with said the roof looks okay, but he really doesn’t know what to do. Most of his neighbors aren’t getting new roofs. He said he’s had a very hard time making decisions, since his wife died, and sometimes does nothing. It was good that he knew it was right to get me, though, of course.

The other day he said he was going to save up for a bunch of repairs to the house, or maybe take out a loan, and then we were going to move. I rolled my eyes when I heard that. Though living in a place where there aren’t so many storms might be nice. “Maybe with sun more than once every ten days in summer, too”, he said. I like it cooler.

I wondered if he might not benefit from some Rescue Remedy and maybe even a Thundershirt. This has been a very anxious summer for him. He’s a worrywart. (His wife was the opposite; she thought his worrying was stupid, which of course made him a little cross, but he misses hearing that calm voice.) We purebred border collies tend to worry about things, too, and I don’t like thunder and lightning at all, so I’m not really being critical.

He spends a lot of time looking at the radar (he’s kind of a nut, if you didn’t know), watching Endeavour over and over again, and also Q.I. I can tell when he’s watching Q.I. because he laughs so much. It must be a funny show.

Last Saturday they predicted bad storms again but instead it just poured rain. We got about half an inch of rain, which might help the garden recover. The storm drain across the street was completely blocked by leaves.

Anyway the garden doesn’t look so terrible unless you get really close to the plants. Some of the trees are in pretty bad shape. But he said the storm of 1991 stripped bark from the trees. The cercocarpus next to the house has almost no leaves. Probably too late for them to grow back and it might affect the plant’s ability to make sugars to prepare for cold in the winter. I guess we’ll see. Me, on patrol. The mountain ninebark, Physocarpus monogynus, has almost no leaves, too. We didn’t do much in the garden today because of all the smoke.

Oh, well, he did decide to toss the tomato plants. They were so pathetic it was painful to look at them. There were some tomatoes but they’d been battered by hail. So the plants were thrown into the garden. He said showing pictures of them would just be sad.

I guess if we grew a lot of vegetables they would be grown under a structure like the bulb frames, covered with hardware cloth.

It was an okay day, I guess, even though not much got done. I decided to enliven it a little by going on a snake hunt. “An illegal snake hunt”, the guy I live with said. Hunting snakes is a bad thing. But I like to do it anyway. He said I missed the really big one out in the corner of the yard. I did dispatch a large one a while back, and he was extremely angry with me. I got a lecture.

This one wasn’t very big at all. It was a Plains Garter Snake, Thamnophis radix. They’re completely harmless, except if you’re a mouse.

Here I am, hot on the trail of the snake. Maybe you can see the agaves in the fence behind the desert willow I’m looking under. The agaves are fenced to protect me from getting jabbed. I’m not supposed to be in the garden. Still looking. Meanwhile, the guy I live with was looking for it too. He said it was under the agaves, and heading west. That’s me in the lower right, looking. You can see its striped tail in this picture. 

I was still looking over here. Eventually the guy I live with undid the hose so he could water the side yard, and I got more interested in that. Hoses and snakes are kind of alike.

So that was our day. They say it’s supposed to be less smoky tomorrow. It might even rain.

Until next time, then.