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 “My First Halloween” (it’s about to be my second), among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I avoid the cactus, if you didn’t know, and the guy I live with says there might be fewer cactus here at this time next year. You know I mentioned that he goes through these phases, well, cactus represents one of them. “They get bugs”, he said, and that’s usually enough for him. These big, cactus-sucking bugs.

I know it’s been a while since I posted last, and that’s because kind of a lot has been going on here. There was the Rat Incident, for one thing. I saw a rat. Not in our yard, of course, but in a neighbor’s. It was eating bird seed that had dropped from the feeder. The neighbor knew about the rat and wasn’t happy about it, at all. I saw an expired rat on my walk, once, and that was pretty interesting.

And now the rat is gone. The guy I live with told me why, probably. He said he thought they came from the apartment complex to the north of us, and then when they tried to cross over the field more than once or twice, the owls would get them. Kind of scary and gross, if you ask me.

Leaves are still turning here. This is the cottonwood out in the field.And there are things still flowering. This is Salvia greggii ‘Wild Thing’. And Aster praealtus. (With a touch of powdery mildew. It was watered, as was the salvia.)And, of course, crocuses. This is Crocus speciosus. Crocus hadriaticus ‘Annabelle’, which he got just a few months ago.Here you can see a couple of crocuses (Crocus niveus, the white in left center), “going over”, in the rock garden, with the green leaves of Sternbergia lutea. All of these had to be watered to get them to flower. It’s been so dry here (well, zero inches of rain for October, I think) that watering was necessary. Usually with the watering can.

And there has been a lot of work going on. It’s been so exhausting to watch him work that I have had to lie down in between all the work going on here. And, yes, those are the same Pottery Barn sheets that Chess, the border collie who lived here before me, used to like to lie on. They are pretty soft. I need to point out that they’re not the softest ones you can get, so it isn’t like I’m spoiled or anything. About the work, though. There’s this kind of work,raking up the “ten billion” honey locust pods (in the bucket on the park bench), and saying stuff about them. The honey locust was here when the house was purchased. (It was the only thing here, believe it or not.)

And then there’s this.That’s the new bulb frame. It’s not finished yet. The guy I live with says he’ll be able to monitor “iffy” bulbs more closely this way, and maybe get them to increase so that some can go out into the garden. There’s screen at the bottom to keep rodents out, and the top will be screened, too. And covered with plastic when it gets cold.

A low fence was also built in the front yard, on the south side of the driveway, but I don’t have any pictures of that.

I guess that’s all for 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 to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden and environs. (I always wanted to say that.) You may remember me from such posts as “The Hair Cut”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I like lying on the bed, on an autumn afternoon, a lot. You may indeed wonder about the title of today’s post. Pretty funny, huh. Well, yesterday, the guy I live with and I went on our evening walk, and I saw something in the field that I thought was very interesting. (Needless to say, the guy I live with forgot to bring his camera, so you’ll just have to envision it.) He said it was called a “crawdad” and it had really large claws (about three inches, or seven and a half centimeters, long, beautiful blue-green things), pretty much pointed right at my nose. He said I would have looked extremely stupid being dragged off to the vet’s with a gigantic crawdad pinching my nose, so he picked it up and put it back in the canal, where it came from. I guess some kids had caught it a couple of days before and it was just sitting there waiting for someone to put it back into water, or to pinch my nose if I got too close. Whew, huh.

Quite a bit has been happening here, mostly to the leaves which were on the trees a while ago, but have since been blown down onto the ground. The guy I live with says that’s why some people call this time of year “fall”. I didn’t know that. He says that most people also associate this time of year with rain and things like that, but it’s been super dry here, and sunny, too, which is different.

You might be able to see the changes in these garden pictures. Oh, some of the fences are gone, too. 

some of the crocuses and cyclamen

That’s me, there, if you weren’t sure. We can crop the picture and zoom in, some, just to show it really is me. You can also see the calibrachoas flowering in the pot behind me. He forgot to take a picture of them so this will have to do.

the sumac

the path by the shed. the hose is going into “the enclosure”. a little farther down, the path forks, one going right (north), to the “way back”, and the other goes past the trough patio, and then left (south) to the “employees only” section.

this is one of the shortcuts Slipper made, a long time ago.

Okay, so those were garden pictures. I hope you enjoyed them. I do like being out in the garden when the guy I live with is working out there. Or even when he’s just standing there, pretending to work.

But the giant crawdad wasn’t the only scary thing that happened this week. Not by any means. And since scary seems to be kind of a seasonal thing, you know, I have two movies for you. These were filmed late at night, and I must admit that the barking in the first one is me. What you don’t get to see, because it was too hard to take pictures, are the glowing eyes we saw a little before the movies were made. That’s right, eyes glowing in the dark. (Those aren’t the eyes in the movies; those are just lights.)

Pretty scary, huh.

I’ll leave you with that, and another picture of me in one of my favorite places.

Until next time, then.