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

Here I am in a characteristic pose.The guy I live with said I looked awfully nonchalant, which of course was true. “Look more alert”, he said, and so I did.Possibly overdoing the alertness.

I guess it’s time to complain, now. It’s been a bit too hot for me. And I haven’t been able to do all the things I’ve wanted to, because the guy I live with wouldn’t let me. The other day, the guy I live with’s friend came over, and I thought she might want to play with a dead sparrow I found in the yard, but she didn’t. It was taken away from me and buried.

And then yesterday all I wanted to do was catch snakes and eat pine cones, but the guy I live with said no. I suppose he had his reasons.

The water in the canal is flowing again, and there are ducks in it, as usual. I wanted to jump in the water and chase the ducks, but I think you know what the response to that was.The snow last weekend made everything pretty green. Some leaves did get frozen, and a few branches were broken, like on the chokecherry in the “way back”. They’re just chokecherries, so no big deal, I guess, but the branches will have to be removed, and there was a lot of complaining about that.

You can see how green everything suddenly is.

This is a dwarf limber pine the guy I live with got from Jerry Morris some years ago when he visited his nursery. The label said “Taos”. The guy I live with said that he and his friend drove past the highway that led to Taos week before last. There are snowdrops in the snowdrop frame now.Last week the guy I live with gave all the tomato seedlings, and squash seedlings, to his friend, and they also delivered a flat of agave seedlings to a friend who has a greenhouse and can take better care of them. He said he was trying to “downsize” on plants, which sounded suspicious to me. There are a lot fewer seedlings in the flats upstairs, that’s for sure.

The last of the tulips are flowering; these are probably Tulipa batalinii. And Clematis hirsutissima, too. This plant has been here “almost forever” and grows very slowly. I guess it doesn’t get as much water as it would like. 

And there’s this little onion in one of the rock gardens. The guy I live with doesn’t know what it is. It just appeared here. Or, it was from seed he forgot he sowed.  Or something. And then, something kind of funny happened. He had moved a big plant of the sea-kale, Crambe maritima, out to the border behind the enclosure, because he thought the plant might do better out there, rather than in the middle of the lawn. You may recall that when I was little I ate one of the plants. It was good. And then when the berm was re-made, there was a flat space, where the sea-kale was, and so it got moved. But look what he found in the same flat space, just today. I guess the sea-kale is going to be happy there, after all. So he moved the big plant back, next to these, to keep them company.

That’s really all I have for today. It’s supposed to be hot all this next week, and thundery. I don’t like either of those weather features. The guy I live with said this is the time of year for really bad weather, but I hope we don’t have any.

I’m sure I’ll get plenty of biscuits to make up for it. 

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 the news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Not Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. This isn’t the old biscuit-on-the-head ploy; I was just thinking about things, the way I do.

I spent almost three days at Day Care this week. It wasn’t technically Day Care, though I did get to participate in that. I spent two nights there, because the guy I live with and his friend went to a place called Santa Fe, where he talked. I’m not sure why they had to go there to talk, because he can certainly talk here. Oh, can he talk.

I guess they had a good time. The guy I live with said he saw something called a roadrunner. He’d never seen one before. There wasn’t a coyote and an anvil, either. (I didn’t get that part.) They went to Agua Fria Nursery (he didn’t get any pictures there), and also Plants of the Southwest. The guy I live with would like our back yard to look like this.He said he really liked both nurseries.

The place at which they stayed was surrounded by junipers and there was mistletoe growing in them.

He said it had the texture of hard rubber. It’s hard to imagine.

They saw pronghorns, which are a kind of antelope, on the way back. They’re there, you just have to look. (This picture was taken with the point-and-shoot set at bursts, while they were driving along at about eighty miles per hour. That’s a hundred and twenty-eight kilometers per hour.)

So they came home. Not much has happened since then. It was a lovely spring day, yesterday.

Today, and I know this will seem an awful lot like a metaphor, I was worried that the guy I live with had given up on me. I was all ready to go on my walk, wearing my harness, and nothing was happening. You can see how pathetic I look.I did get to go on my walk (he’d just forgotten something he needed to bring with him on my walk), so this sad look was entirely wasted. I bet I can use it again, some time in the future.

But no one here is hugely happy right now. This is what the back yard looked like about an hour ago.They say we’re supposed to get about a foot of snow (that’s thirty centimeters) and maybe the coldest temperatures in almost two months. The guy I live with really loathes snow at this time of year.

Of course there isn’t much he can do about it. My approach is to have a biscuit on the couch, very close to my Lamb Chop, and take things as they come.

Until next time, then.