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 the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Much Less Roasting”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.The guy I live with said my hind feet weren’t positioned properly, so I adjusted them. I may have talked about this bed before. It’s just a mattress on top of box springs, and is fairly ancient. (There is another bed downstairs.) The reason why the guy I live with hasn’t purchased a new bed is because, as he says, it’s much easier for aging purebred border collies to climb onto. Much younger purebred border collies like to lie on it like I’m showing.

The pictures above were taken a couple of days ago. It rained for a few minutes, that day. Not enough to do much of anything for the garden, but it cooled off nicely afterward.

You can see that the garden looks pretty dry. These are pictures of the usual places that get taken pictures of.

There’s a temporary fence around the sagebrush because I kept getting in there, looking for snakes.

The squirrel has been tearing apart pine cones and strewing the remains all over the patio. This is me patrolling for squirrels. Some of the chewed-up pine cones were swept up before this picture was taken. They were used as mulch. The guy I live with repotted some plants which he had purchased in small pots. He says they need to be repotted, because if he planted these out into the garden, with their tiny root balls, they would die within a week.The plants were labeled Michauxia tchihatchewii, but he explained to me that these are really M. campanuloides, and that all plants in the trade are M. campanuloides. Which is okay since this is a nice plant. “The real M. tchihatchewii has erect stems with flowers clustered all around the stem. It’s even cooler.” If you look up this species on Google you will see images which are mostly M. campanuloides, with one or two correctly identified as M. tchihatchewii.

Yesterday was the guy I live with’s birthday. He and his friend went to the Lavender Festival at Chatfield, part of Denver Botanic Gardens. I slept in my fort.

Since I was so refreshed, I decided to do some patrolling late at night. I ran outside and started racing around the garden. The guy I live with jumped out of his chair, with a start, the way he always does, and started yelling at me to come inside. I admit I kind of ignored him, but eventually I did come in. I got a lecture when I came into the kitchen. The guy I live with was really angry with me for not coming in right away.

I still wanted to go outside, and didn’t know why I couldn’t. There was something out in the garden which I had never seen before.

It wasn’t a cat, and it wasn’t a squirrel. It was striped, black and white, and had a fluffy tail. There was sort of a funny smell around it.

The guy I live with said I smelled just like that smell. So of course I got onto the bed to think about that for a while. He said it could have been much, much worse, and told me stories of Slipper and Chess, the purebred border collies who lived here before me, who met creatures like the one I described. I could tell by the way he talked about it, a bit loudly to my mind, that he thought the things that could have happened were really bad, but to me they just sounded interesting.

The guy I live with said he had no idea how this striped creature got into the back yard. He said he would look around.

I might, too.

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 up to date on all the excitement around here. You may remember me from such posts as “The Upended Breakfast”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I look reasonably alert, don’t I? There’s a reason for that, which I’ll get to in a minute.

About the only things, gardening-wise, that have happened lately are the oaks got planted and the “trough patio” was cleaned up a bit.Besides that bit of activity, there has been other activity.

A couple of nights ago, the guy I live with decided to refill the hummingbird feeders, because that needs to be done pretty much every day, when it’s hot. (It’s been hot, trust me.) So he brought one of the feeders in; the sugar-syrup stuff had black flecks in it. The flecks turned out to be ants. Big black ants. Not as big as the giant ones we had a while ago, but still big. He poured the sugar-syrup into the sink. Most of the ants revived, and began to run around in the sink.

He got out one of the “bug jars”, and started catching ants. When the second ant went into the jar, the first would run out and then run up his arm. And so on. So there was a lot of language, while he tried to catch all the ants.

Eventually he did catch all the ants, and so there was a jar full of ants. Not really full of ants, but with ants.He let them go, out on the back patio. “You always let ants go”, he said. I knew that. They help spread seed of cyclamen, crocuses, and snowdrops.

So that was the ants-in-a-jar thing. The other thing, well……you’re not going to see any pictures of the other thing, so don’t worry. 

Just yesterday, the guy I live with was talking on the phone to a friend. We were both out in the garden. He heard a sound like a sprinkler head gone bad; a sputtering, you know, like shhhh-shhhh-shhhh, with a lot of air being released.

He looked down, and saw a huge reptilian tail disappear under the trough. This trough.He started yelling at me, really loudly (while he was still on the phone), and yelling louder and louder. Finally he hung up the phone, and made me go inside.

He called Animal Control and said there was a rattlesnake in the garden.

Animal Control said to spray water at it, with the hose. From “a safe distance”. Apparently rattlesnakes don’t like to be hosed off in the summer. So he attached a sprayer head to the hose and shot water at the base of the trough.

Nothing happened. No snake. The guy I live with totally panicked. I mean, obviously, neither of us would ever be able to go outside again.

Then he had a thought. It was kind of odd that he could both panic and have rational thoughts at the same time. He called another friend who has had experience with rattlesnakes and asked what they sounded like.

“Like rattling?”

“Pretty much. And bullsnakes make a noise sort of like that, but not rattling.”

So he went online and watched bullsnake-noise videos. It was a bullsnake. The guy I live with has seen plenty of bullsnakes here (so have I; they’re huge), and he saw the rattle-less tail, but totally freaked out at the noise. He knew they made a noise, but had never heard the noise before. When he heard the noise, it cancelled out everything else in his mind.

So then he had to call everyone back and say “Bullsnake” instead of “We have to move tomorrow”.

He told me he felt like kind of an idiot. I didn’t say anything.

We almost didn’t go on our evening walk because the guy I live with was afraid we’d meet up with the bullsnake and he’d feel like even more of an idiot when it started making the noise he’d never heard before, but we did go on our walk.

And guess what we saw?

Until next time, then.