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 some antsy news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Super Genius”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I look pretty noble and calm, don’t I? I’m just kidding myself, as you’ll find out in a bit.

Our garden is going to be on tour a week from today and the guy I live with has been freaking out about the weeds. He’s been doing some weeding, and as you can see here, I’ve been helping.I really like helping.

There are things flowering, though maybe not as many flowers as there were in years past, because a lot of the plants died or were removed.

Here’s a close-up of the buds on Asphodeline lutea:

And the gladiolus are starting to flower. There was the purple one, Gladiolus atroviolaceus, but the flowers were wrecked by cold. So the pinkish ones are what are flowering now. This is Gladiolus italicus. 

And the big buddleia, Buddleia alternifolia ‘Argentea’, is in full bloom now.And there’s more weeding to do. It’s been raining kind of a lot, here, and so the weeds are growing very quickly.

I’d talk more about the garden, but I have things to do. We’re having an invasion of gigantic black ants. The guy I live with says he doesn’t know why they’re coming into the house and what it is they want of us. Unless, of course, they were already in the house and are trying to get out.

The guy I live with says not to eat ants but I think it’s my job to try to get them. They run really fast but the guy I live with has been catching them in the “bug jar”. We have these old tall salsa jars with holes punched in the lids, for catching bugs and putting them back outside where they belong.

Just now he caught one of these huge ants and while he was trying to catch another one the first one climbed out of the jar and so he had to re-catch that one and then get the other one. It was almost too much for me.

I really can’t spend much time on this post, though, because of the ants. They’re pretty scary and I have to watch out for them. 

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 very damp garden, and also to bring you a sentimental post. You may remember me from such posts as “A Short, Sentimental Post”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.It rained again yesterday evening, and I got very wet on my walk. There wasn’t any thunder, which was kind of amazing. The guy I live with suggested we might have entered a portal to another dimension, where it doesn’t thunder every single time it rains, when we walked into the field. It was nice, for sure.

All the rain has made the garden super green. The snow helped, too. You can see the Kentucky coffee tree out in the “way back” hasn’t leafed out yet. It’s those branches sticking up to the right of the shed. The “old rock garden”, with a view to the Russian hawthorn, with its weirdly-growing branches. The big rose, Rosa kokanica, has started to block the path to the back. The path is called “Pooka’s Shortcut” because he made it, many years ago. He couldn’t be bothered to run around the rock garden and down the path. (You can see the steel hoop fence on the north side of the path. I would agree that that would be too much trouble when there’s stuff that needs to be barked at out in the field.)The water was gone from the canal for a few days, which was strange, but now it’s flowing again and the ducks like it.

Also, the guy I live with said that a western tanager has been at the oriole feeder for the last two days, and he really wanted to take a picture of it, but it always flies away when it thinks it’s going to have its picture taken. It’s yellow with a red head, so pretty noticeable.

As I suggested, this is going to be a sentimental post. I mentioned Pooka’s Shortcut, but there’s another shortcut. This is Slipper’s Shortcut. (I use it, too.) He made this when he and his buddy Chess played hide-and-seek in the garden, which they did a lot. Slipper would use this shortcut to sneak up on Chess. It was kind of cheating, but they both enjoyed it.

The guy I live with said that the blog has already talked enough about the lady of the house, who died eight years ago tomorrow, and so he thought I should show some pictures of Slipper, who was Chess’s buddy, and who died here seven years ago today.

Here he is when he was about six months old. He was named after a character in The Irish R.M. (like Flurry before him was). 

Here he is on the stairs.

Probably in his second winter.

Here he is, meeting the turtle. The turtle was here for a very long time.

Here’s Slipper learning to pick his own raspberries and eat them.

Here’s Slipper meeting Chess, the first day Chess came to the house.

Here they are on the couch together. They were first cousins, but also great friends. That’s all I have for today. I hope you enjoyed all the pictures of Slipper. The guy I live with thought it was about time that we did something like that, and it’s been too wet to do much serious gardening here. Besides, lots of pictures of purebred border collies are excellent, even if most of the pictures weren’t of me.

Oh, and the guy I live with did get sort of a tanager picture.I will leave you with a picture of me, chewing on something, though, just to add to the general excellence.

Until next time, then.