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, well, not really any news, but just a post, I guess. You may remember me from such posts as “Bunnies And Flies”, among, so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I was just standing there, and there weren’t any biscuits on anyone’s head, if you wanted to know.

It’s been pretty cold here in the last couple of days, not so much temperature-wise, but humidity-wise. We’re not used to the combination of cold and humidity, and the wind can cut right through a purebred border collie’s coat and make him feel all totally freezing, like temperatures much colder but with less humidity can’t.

The guy I live with and I have been having a serious disagreement over my insistence on barking at a squirrel who has taken up residence in the nesting box in the corner of the house, by the patio. The guy I live with claims there is no squirrel there, after repeatedly poking the box with a long stick, but I say there still is a squirrel there. Or there might be, later.

Yesterday, we went on our walk; it was cold. The guy I live with saw a hawk; for once, he had his camera (obviously), and wanted to take hawk pictures, but I kept pulling him in some other direction. Eventually he did get some pictures of the hawk, after I scared it.

And then it was gone.

The guy I live with said it landed in a tree farther south, so we went to look for it. I dragged him down into the dry creek bed, through a bunch of burdock plants. He got burrs in his woolen gloves, the kind open at the fingertips, like he wore when he worked outside. He started saying things, so we turned around and went back the way we came.

Eventually we got to the place behind our house; the guy I live with turned around and took this picture. Not much happened today. I did eventually acknowledge that the squirrel wasn’t where I thought it was. The guy I live with can be right sometimes.

There was some seed sowing. A few old packets of seed from Southwestern Native Seeds were sown. The guy I live with used to order from that place, but they’re gone now.

He finally got his labels for importing seed, and bought a color cartridge for the printer (you get a PDF and print out the labels), but for some reason the printer didn’t want to print in color. More language ensued. He said it was a bit late to order seeds, and so he said he would wait until next winter to order seeds. Technically, he could order now, get the seeds within a month (maybe), and still have time either to stratify them or sow them outdoors.

Some seeds were stratified today. He decided to try a different method, so he called a friend in the nursery industry to see how she did it, and she puts the seeds in a plastic bag with some water, swirls the water around, pours the seed into a tea-strainer, and puts the moistened seed back into the plastic bag. Which is how he did it today. The seeds are in freezer bags in a box in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator.That’s a picture of the box. Maybe this is the dumbest picture I’ve ever posted. (You’ll also notice that the box is the only thing in the drawer. He does eat vegetables, but they don’t sit in the crisper drawer.)

We also went on our evening walk. It’s really an afternoon walk, but “evening walk” sounds more evocative, doesn’t it?

This is what we saw.I guess that’s it. I know this has been an extremely rambling post, but sometimes we purebred border collies get distracted, you know. The guy I live with says I have a hard time focusing on much of anything, at times, except where imaginary squirrels are concerned.

I’ll let you go now.

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 about our garden again. You may remember me from such posts as “Our Winter, Thus Far”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I know I just posted yesterday, but the guy I live with has been getting very antsy about winter, which he claims will never end, and so he thought another post might be in order. He suggested the title. He said using the word “diverse” when “divers” is meant makes him slightly crazy. That’s the sort of thing he thinks about.

You can see there’s still snow in the back yard. This drives the guy I live with right up the wall. So that’s another thing that gets to him. He says it’s unnatural and that the snow “should” be gone. And when it doesn’t go away and then snows again, he gets even antsier. (I’ve had ants crawl on me so I know what that’s like.) The sun was out for a while, and then it got all gray and dismal. This is the garden all gray and dismal. 

This is me licking the snow. I’m not supposed to be standing in the rock garden. But it has the best-tasting snow. He took some pictures of plants, too, even though he said the light was awful.

A dwarf Cercocarpus ledifolius. The guy I live with said to say it really is a dwarf, and not a small regular-sized one. Not hugely photogenic, I think. Yucca rupicola is behind it. So then he went into the front yard to see if there was anything interesting there. This oak also isn’t very photogenic, but it gives a good idea of what the oaks here look like in winter. Its acorns are the size of a pea. That’s a wavy-leaf oak, Quercus undulata. It’s not very tall. There is a taller one behind. Here’s the taller one. Its acorns are much bigger. The big Arizona cypress, Cupressus arizonica. It has cones at the top. This Mahonia (or Berberis) aquifolium was self-sown. There’s a old plant up the street so that may have been where it came from. Some leaves stay green, some turn chocolate brown in the winter. The guy I live with did notice the creature in the last picture, if you were wondering. It wasn’t very cold today, and so the guy I live with did some raking. I like it when he works out in the garden, which he doesn’t do much of during the winter. The path by the shed is extremely icy. His friend gave him some YakTrax which he can wear on his shoes so he doesn’t slip on the ice, but there wasn’t much work to do in the garden besides raking, and none that involved walking on ice.

There was a lot of mud in the garden today, too, and I got to run around in it.Which was fun for me, but the guy I live with shampooed the living room carpet last week, and, well….It was fun, though.

The guy I live with spent some time downstairs, in the studio, to admire his work, and he brought this thing back to the kitchen. It’s a sieve for separating chaff from very fine seed. Custom-made, too. The square of duct tape is where it was torn and repaired. He thought this had been thrown away. You can see the care with which this was made.There are other sieves here, in the shed, made of steel. But this one is special. It will be put to good use again, I’m sure.

After all of this, there was still an evening walk that needed to be gone on. The guy I live with says that’s not the way to say it, but it sounds good to me. There was a walk that needed to be gone on. Pretty desperately needed, in fact. And so we went on it. Coyotes sometimes sneak down the creek bed at night, but mostly they use the paths. There’s a path on the right side of the creek, which I’ve shown before, the one that Chess used to go on, before I came here, but the other one goes behind the houses on the east side of the creek, including ours.We walked behind our house so you could see the squirrel-feeder wheel thing. The corn is mostly eaten now, as you can tell. There’s more corn in the garage. About this time of the evening, ducks begin to fly from the west to the southeast. There are some larger lakes there, I guess.You can see them here, too. You might have to squint. The guy I live with says that this is a melancholy view. He says he’ll explain that to me later. He also said not to tell readers to squint, when they can just click on an image and enlarge it, which they already know. This seems like a good place to stop, for now. A last picture of me, heading toward the setting sun.

Until next time, then.