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 to bring you up to date on, well, not much of anything at all. You may remember me from such not-much-of-anything-type posts as “Nothing Again Nothing”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Pretty cool how the setting sun lights up the arbor, isn’t it?Not much has been happening here, lately. There are some crocuses in flower (though they close when the sun goes down).I was out in the “way back”, too. The guy I live with has been taking most of the pictures as the sun is going down, because we’ve been having some excellent sunsets, like the one a couple of evenings ago.But speaking of crocuses, this one, Crocus tournefortii, does not close at night. This was taken during the day, of course. The guy I live with posted a picture of it on Facebook, four stacked images, and he only realized the images were out of alignment (because he moved the camera for one picture) after he posted it, so here is one of the originals.

The crocuses and other bulbs get their pictures taken with the DSLR and are processed in Lightroom (mostly just cropping and fiddling around with the exposure); most of the blog pictures are taken with the point-and-shoot and not processed at all.This is the misaligned one, if you cared about such things. You can see how there’s a kind of “ghost image” at the edge of the petals. Obviously the original was better.

Here is Crocus hadriaticus ‘Purple Heart’. The snow we had a while back helped get these going.Anyway, you may be wondering about the title of today’s post.

There is a muskrat in the canal. The guy I live with wanted to get its picture, but only saw it swimming underwater, or the ripples it made as it hid from us as we walked by. I wasn’t paying any attention at all.

A couple of days ago the guy I live with saw the muskrat happily paddling in the canal, but didn’t have his camera.

We spent some time looking for it.

I looked over here, some. The guy I live with said that the muskrat lived in the water. I still felt like looking up here. It was really driving the guy I live with crazy. We’d be walking along, and there would be the muskrat and then it would disappear.

On our way back home this evening we stopped and looked back where we came from, and there was the muskrat. See it there? Just its head. It was swimming from left to right across the canal. So at least now we have proof that there’s a muskrat living in the canal. If there’s more talk about a muskrat, this is what we’ll mean, rather than some imaginary muskrat.

Other than that, there’s not much else to say.

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 to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Another New Toy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You can see that we got three pumpkins, just to get into the spirit of the season, and you can also see what’s happened to them. It didn’t take very long for this to happen. The guy I live with said it would, and was hoping it might, so he could post funny pictures on Facebook, but I think the pictures would not look out of place here, as well. Proof of guilt, you might say.

Pretty disgraceful behavior, if you ask me. The pumpkins were moved farther down the path so the squirrels wouldn’t make a mess on the patio.

It was in the seventies (Fahrenheit, of course) today, with fourteen percent humidity, so, if you have an idea of how the weather around here goes, naturally, it’s supposed to snow tomorrow.

Meanwhile the garden is looking pretty autumnal. There are snowdrops up:and the vine maple, Acer circinatum, is looking pretty good. This “tree” is about twenty years old and never grows much taller than this.There are leaves everywhere.You see those round rocks there? They’ve been there for a while. There is a reason for this. Not a mystical reason, but because they remind the guy I live with of a pleasant picture in The American Woman’s Garden.  (He has The American Man’s Garden, too, and maybe both the English ones.) He thought a pile of rocks on the side of the path would look good here, too.

You can see the golden leaves from the honey locust all over the garden on the south side. The cottonwood out in the field is still spectacular.Some crocuses in the “way back”. A bunny chomped on a few of them. I thought bunnies had been scared out of the back yard, but I guess not. Those are leaves from the apple tree.Well, not only are there leaves rustling in the wind, making things very seasonal indeed, but then, the other day, the guy I live with got a total case of the creeps. I didn’t notice this, but I did notice him getting the case of the creeps.

He looked out of the kitchen window, through the birch tree, and saw this:See that dark area in the center of the picture, a little more than half way up? He couldn’t figure out what that was.

Here it is, zoomed in.Maybe he’d been watching a scary movie or something, but he said he really didn’t know what was causing that black spot, and was afraid to go out and check.

He looked at the pictures before going out there. He asked me to go with him. I’m not sure what I was supposed to do in case it was something terrifying from an unknown dimension, except maybe run back inside the house, into my fort, while the guy I live disappeared into a vortex, and became just a tiny voice crying for help, but he said the two of us together could take on anything.

I didn’t have a chance to look over my contract before going out there, to see if this was included in my duties, but the guy I live with assured me it was. He said we take care of each other. I knew that was true, but I didn’t recall reading anything about encountering a nameless horror.

I thought it might be a good idea to look at the picture again. This time with the auto levels enhanced, in Photoshop.This really did not look like the sort of thing a purebred border collie ought to investigate.  It seemed to me that lying in my kitchen fort, with my Lamb Chop next to me, and watching the guy I live with go out there, would fulfill any contractual obligation I might have.

The guy I live with reminded me that I often go out into the far corner of the yard, in the Employees Only section, to bark at things late at night, and that he doesn’t like going anywhere near that corner of the yard at night.

That was different.

Well, we went anyway. This is what was making that black shape.The group of bats.The guy I live with said he knew it was the bats all along, and was just trying to scare me a little.

“Just a trick of the light”, he said. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

Right. So that was that.

We did have an excellent sunset this evening, to make up for all that silliness.That’s it for me, for today. I guess I’m going to have to review my contract, just in case anything else like this happens.

I’ll leave you with a reasonably autumnal picture of me, looking at the canal.

Until next time, then.