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 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.

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 today to talk to you about our weather. You may remember me from such weather-related posts as “A Misty Day”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I am of course rather damp. It’s been misting, drizzling, then raining, all day long, which is why I’m damp, and also why I spent time lying in the bed. It’s what you do on a misty, drizzly day, if you didn’t know.

You can see that it’s raining in this picture. You can also see the water running down the dirt path. The soil here is so dense that water just runs off it. When you get back to about where the shed is, and the fence you can see which marks the eastern side of “the enclosure”, the soil is the native soil (instead of the “trucked-in clay gunk” that the developer spread around the house). The native soil is creek-bottom soil, made of decomposed sandstone. View from the patio. I already talked about the wrought-iron furniture. That ashtray has been there for years. It was broken in half, so it just sits there. It matches the color of the frog on the table, though.But not this one.It turns out that there are a lot of frogs in the garden. They were here when I first came here. They’re not real, so I don’t have to worry.

This one lost its nose, somehow.

There are more. But back to the table for a minute. You may have wondered about that glass box, or case, that you see in every shot of the table. It has things in it. That thing on the left is a “really stinky candle”, according to the guy I live with. And an antique bottle, a dish filled with sand with a coin in it, and two weird pieces of wood. He doesn’t know why these are in this glass case. But they are.Anyway, we worked in the garden while it was misty. I liked that a lot. He sowed a lot of annual seed, just by scattering it on the ground. That sometimes works, he said.

He also transplanted a few things, the way he does every year. That explains why there are fewer plants in the garden every year. But he said all the rain will eventually get down to the roots of the transplants. You can see the water running down the path. And the “portable greenhouse” at the left. It’s just sitting there, for now. The shade garden is so packed with plants people can barely get through it. Lots of hellebores in flower at the far end. This garden will look totally different when the bulb foliage (mostly snowdrops) has withered.Daphne arbuscula (there are several in the garden) is flowering now. The color in this picture is “all wrong”, and the guy I live with doesn’t know why the point-and-shoot messes up the color, but it does, and always has. (Doesn’t happen with the DSLR.) He tried about a zillion settings on the camera but all the pictures came out like this. Maybe because the red from the fallen hawthorn leaves throws off the camera, the way the red in the soil does. The flower color is really pink. There’s something about “white balance” in the camera instructions, but …..There’s a tuberous geranium flowering too. The guy I live with thought he needed to sort of point to the flower. This is Geranium linearilobum subsp. transversale. He says it’s okay to think this is funny. On the other side of the garden, there’s a mysterious tiny narcissus flowering. He doesn’t know what this is, or how it got there. The rock garden is getting greener by the day. (The fence on the left really is leaning that much. The posts were not put in very deeply.)A pink cyclamen (Cyclamen coum), but it looks whitish with the point-and-shoot.The “enclosure”, with the medium-sized big metal chicken. It’s leaning because the yellow jacket nest was removed. Well, that’s not why it’s leaning, it’s because it wasn’t put back in its place, properly. This little garden gets regularly watered, as maybe you can tell. Vinca minor has taken over almost completely. This area hasn’t been cleaned up yet. And here’s the “trough patio”. The guy I live with says it’s going to remain unfinished. The area on the left does need a low fence around it, but probably nothing else will be done here, except some sweeping, which it obviously needs. I don’t think the ants are all that scary, either. It’s supposed to snow early tomorrow morning. You can imagine what’s been said about that, already. Hopefully not too much so that trees aren’t snapped in half and other horrible things like that.

So that’s why these pictures were taken. Kind of to prove that it does rain here in the spring, like last time, even though the rain will turn to snow tomorrow.

It’s almost time for me to let you go. The guy I live with got out something called an umbrella, which I’d never seen before, to walk around and take these pictures (even though they were too red). I didn’t much like the looks of the umbrella, and it was raining quite a bit, so I did the sensible thing.

Until next time, then.