the miserable gardener

a trick of the light

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.

house of a different color

Here I am in a characteristic pose.There’s been some gardening going on, but not a whole lot. A few crocuses are flowering. The guy I live with went to a “box store” to get an extension for the gutter downspout and found some hollies on sale, fifty percent off, so he bought them, to put in a space which had been empty for over a year. I kind of liked the empty space, but the hollies look okay there.

They might even survive. They’re protected from our hot winter sun by the fence. In theory.This isn’t really the climate for hollies, or many other broad-leafed evergreens, but the guy I live with said you never know, and I guess you don’t, so there they are. It’s true that other hollies have been planted here in the past, and are no longer here, but that’s never stopped him from trying again. Especially at fifty percent off.

Getting a discount was nice. I bet you didn’t know that the guy I live with is, in fact, an ordinary gardener just like everyone else, and has always paid retail price for the plants that go into the garden. This is why, sometimes, he gets irked when people say such-and-such a plant will grow in “dry soil” when in truth it needs lots of water. He won’t talk about the amount of money spent on dead plants.

Occasionally friends send plants, or seeds, but, basically, the guy I live with goes to nurseries, or orders plants through the mail.

The really big news here, and I guess it’s created kind of a crisis, is that the guy I live with, who as you may know has decided to paint the house again, is considering painting the house a sort of brown, I think. He’s studying colors and thinking a lot about this. So it will be a house of a different color.

Well, so, that news is out of the way.

Another thing happened. A moth flew into the kitchen.

the moth

He caught it, eventually, and put it outside. That was a huge relief. I do like the way I make multiple shadows.

The only other thing that happened–actually it happens almost every evening now–is that we’re beginning to get some excellent sunsets. I wanted to share these with you. The first thing that happens is the back yard turns all reddish.And then…

Can you see the moon in this picture?

That’s it for today. I know this is a short post but I did want to show the sunset pictures. The guy I live with said that there were a whole bunch of snowdrops up, already, and he thought that was pretty exciting. We do like the break from gardening that winter offers, though it isn’t as much of a break as you might think, considering all the things that go on here. I suppose if we lived in a climate where you could garden year-round he would like it, at least at first, and then probably start complaining about how much work it all was.