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 “Not Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. You might be able to guess what’s happening here. The guy I live with was unwrapping something for me.But then, he just had to play that biscuit-on-the-head thing.Of course I got my biscuit, but I think we could have shortened the time between unwrapping and me being able to crunch on something totally excellent.

Well, they say it’s supposed to snow at the end of this week, and I bet you can imagine the complaints I’ve been hearing about that. The guy I live with says that “April should not be colder than March”, but I think he thinks that the weather should do what he wants it to, and not what it just does.

Still, things are flowering, just like they always do. The rock garden, the one called “Mount Zot”, is full of flowers. Arabis and daphnes, mostly.The buffalo currants, Ribes aureum, have been scenting the garden for weeks now. They smell like cloves, according to the guy I live with. I don’t know anything about cloves. There are some things I don’t get in my food, and I guess cloves are one of them. The currants are said to make really good raisins (another thing I don’t get), but the birds get them first. There are lots of fritillaries flowering now. Or, if you want to sound really in the know, “frits”. Here are some of them. These pictures were taken with the “big camera”, in case you were interested.

Fritillaria orientalis

Fritillaria acmopetala

The guy I live with stepped on this one, so he had to hold it up with one hand, and take the picture with the other. Poor frit. I sometimes step on plants, and I don’t hear about it as much as you might think. Just this evening the guy I live with was fertilizing the daffodils out in the “way back”, with an organic tomato fertilizer, and I just lay down in some flowering daffodils, and he didn’t say anything. He was probably mad because he didn’t have his camera with him, to take a picture of me being all charming and bucolic, lying in the daffodils. I really wanted to try the tomato fertilizer, too, but the guy I live with said not to.

But back to the frits. These next two have flowers about the size of thimbles. I’m not sure what a thimble is, but it must be small, because these flowers certainly are.

Fritillaria kurdica

Fritillaria kurdica

Fritillaria thunbergii

So those are the frits. There are even more in flower, but they didn’t get their pictures taken.

The tomato seedlings have perked up. The guy I live with said he made a mistake transplanting them into mushroom compost; he should have used his own, which is in a trash can out on the patio. He’s made his own seed compost, or “soil-less mix” now, for decades. I guess the seedlings will be transplanted again, because the stems of some of them are rotting.That’s really all I had for today. There’s been an awful lot of weeding going on (“Worst year for bindweed I’ve ever seen”) and various other things, which I get to help doing. Mostly by just lying around, watching.

I got a cow ear later this evening. Cow ears are pretty good, if you didn’t know. It helps to make them all soft and juicy first. So that was my day. It was pretty good, all in all. After my cow ear, I got another biscuit, and then I got out one of my toys to celebrate.

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 tonight to bring you something quite unusual: a late-night post. You may remember me from such posts as “A Clean Sweep”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. A night-time pose, of course. You can see that there have been some changes, even in this dark picture. I’ll talk about them in another post, which will be coming soon. Lots of stuff has been happening here.

You can also see that we have solar lights in our garden. They make the garden seem cozier at night, but also a bit more mysterious at the same time. The four lights at the top of the picture are from houses on the other side of the field.

I got a good report card at Day Care, and the guy I live with got his hair cut, finally. And I have a new Lamb Chop toy. I’m not sure where these Lamb Chops come from, because every so often there’s a new one, but I like that a lot. My Lamb Chop is my favorite toy.There are a lot of others I like a lot, though.

In case you didn’t know, the guy I live with takes me to Day Care because I love it. He says it makes up for me not having two people here all day long, to care for me and play with me, like Slipper and Chess did, years ago. He also says I might like to have a companion. I’m not entirely sure about that, but he tells me stories about how much Slipper loved having Chess as a companion, so maybe it might be okay. I would have a lot of work to do, training a new puppy. Of course it would have to be a purebred border collie, just like me.

A couple of days ago the guy I live with and his friend (I really like her) and some other friends came over, and they all went to something called a plant sale. Everyone was very excited, except for me. He didn’t get very many plants. He said it was just being around all these friends that was the best part. I can relate to that, because I have friends at Day Care.

Then yesterday, he went back to the plant sale. I was left alone. I think I’m opposed to plant sales now. Though, on the other hand, he brought me back some cow ears, and I got to snack on one later that night. I ate a bug that was on the patio, after that. The guy I live with says not to eat bugs, but obviously he’s never tried them.

Today, the guy I live with transplanted some tomato seedlings into coir pots. He said it was funny that some people say to pronounce this word as though it were French, when it’s pronounced just like it looks. The seedlings looked unhappy later on. He felt bad about that. He said maybe they would perk up by tomorrow. His friend saved the seed from last year, from the tomato plant he planted in her garden. Not that anyone needs as many tomato plants as there are seedlings.

Nothing happened on either of my walks today. There weren’t any unleashed dogs, or people, or snakes, and even the big red-tailed hawk wasn’t around. It was kind of strange.

There was this dog, Daisy, whom I’ve seen before, who’s too shy to walk down to the fence and say Hi to me when I walk by. She walks so slowly that the guy I live with said we could walk all around the entire state before she got down to the fence. She’s really shy.

Well, so, anyway, we were both just sitting here tonight. The guy I live with was watching TV, “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries”, and I was lying in my fort thinking about things, when all of a sudden this happened. It’s kind of scary, and you need to have the sound turned up to get the full scariness. Or maybe eeriness would be a better word. You can hear the guy I live with breathing, and the traffic from the highway off in the distance, but also you can hear me barking, because that’s what we purebred border collies do, out by the back fence, late at night.

Until next time, then.