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 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.

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.