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 “Mister Fabulous”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Just back from my evening walk.Some things have been happening which make me think that the serious gardening season is upon us. I really enjoy gardening. The guy I live with said that Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, enjoyed gardening, too. It’s more of a spectator activity, you understand.

I mentioned the post “Mister Fabulous” because it’s at this time of year when I get my shots, which I did, while I’m at Day Care, and I hear I was completely excellent when I got the shots. I also got a good report card from Day Care.

The next day, on our morning walk, there was this loud noise in the sky, which the guy I live with said was from a helicopter, and sure enough there it was, moving across the sky.

They fly over all the time, but not big ones like this.

The guy I live with said that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, would rush out into the back yard and look up into the sky when someone said “Helicopter”, so I guess I need to brush up on helicopters.

There was this creature, on the canal road.Also, there was some work done on a bird house. The bird house had been sitting in the workbench in the garage for about eight years. It got painted yesterday.It’s pretty deluxe, with caged windows for safety, and holes at the bottom for extra cleanliness.The guy I live with said that the bird house sat on the work bench because it did. I think I get that. He glanced at it from time to time, and then yesterday decided it might make a good actual bird house. At first he thought it was a purchased bird house, but when he looked at is closely he realized that it had been made right at the work bench, and only needed to be painted. So it’s going to go somewhere in the garden.

That was yesterday.

Today started out pretty scary, because there was a thing in the road. I don’t much care for things in the road.I did get a closer look. I learned that this was a bag of bagels. Someone must have dropped it. The guy I live with said he would leave it in the road, in case someone missed it and came looking for it. The bag wasn’t damaged, so the bagels might still be good.

He said it might be fun to see how long the bag stays there.

Things have begun arriving in the mail. That’s a sure sign that it really is the gardening season. The guy I live with said he wasn’t going to order too much this year, except for bulbs of course, but one item that had to be ordered was a bag of grass seed. There are empty spaces in the lawn which need to be fixed. He said he was going to get ‘Sundancer’, which is the latest buffalo grass, but the lawn right now is ‘Cody’, so that was the obvious choice. It was also slightly cheaper.

And a small order of hens and chicks came, from Shadow Mountain Succulents. The guy I live with said that there were too many cactus in the garden, many of which never flowered because the summers here are so dark, and that, after thinking about it for at least six months, he decided he liked hens and chicks better. So they were planted in the glazed pots you see in a lot of pictures of our garden, with some hardware cloth tents on top, because squirrels will eat the hens and chicks to pieces if they’re not protected before they root into the soil.

He said he might get more.

I think that’s all. The last couple of days here have been pretty interesting, as I’m sure you’ll agree. 

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 yet another weather-related post. You may remember me from other such weather-related posts as “This Is More Like It”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. This was taken this evening. I’d just finished a biscuit, on the couch. I know I’ve already talked about the couch, but I like it a lot. The guy I live with takes naps on it, sometimes, in the afternoon, like he used to a lot, when Chess was here, getting old; they’d listen to an opera and fall asleep. He said that was called “Opera Day” and they both liked it a lot. We haven’t had an afternoon like that, yet, but we have taken naps in the living room, and that was pretty great.

Well, it snowed. The guy I live with wasn’t able to control the weather, like he was last time, and so this is what it looked like this morning.That rolled-up “rabbit fence” was to put one of the patio rugs on, to dry it out after it rained the other day, and now I guess it’ll need to be dried out again.

It wasn’t very cold this morning; just snowy. The snow stopped later in the morning. There was water in the creek, a lot of it. And also in the canal. This is the time of year when the water in the canal starts flowing; it flows until October or November. There are fairly big fish in the canal, and also crawdads, some of which are not small. I’ve seen crawdads; they have big pinching claws.

You can see the creek in the upper right hand corner of this picture. It makes a turn to the left (north), and then goes under the canal, in a culvert.

The willows are always interesting.

In this picture, you can see our back yard. It’s the chain link fence in the middle of the picture. The pine tree is in the neighbor’s yard. There were raccoons in it the other night.Nothing really happened for the rest of the day. The guy I live with went to the store, and came back.

Then we went on our evening walk. We followed the coyote trail which is pretty close to the back fences of all the houses.

In fact, there had been coyotes there not too long before we walked down the path. Some of those paw prints were not mine.When we got back home, it snowed again, and now the garden is covered with snow.

That’s pretty much it for today. I just wanted to bring you up to date on our weather, which, as they say, is changeable. The guy I live with says that tonight will be the coldest night in about five weeks, and he’s not hugely thrilled about that, but there isn’t anything I can do about it. I like the snow, anyway. 

Until next time, then.