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 today to bring you up to date on all the happenings around here. You may remember me from such posts as “The Yellow Pigs”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can probably see how super-green everything is.
It’s been raining here. In fact, in just the first two weeks of this month we’ve almost received the average amount of precipitation for the entire month of May.

The seakale, Crambe maritima, is kind of stealing the show here, despite it not growing by the seashore.
The other thing that’s been happening is, of course, more painting.
The guy I live with paints at night, which I think is odd, but he says he can paint, and then use a flashlight to find the “holidays”, which show up better that way.

And there was one more thing. The guy I live with has been talking for years about draining the waterbed downstairs, and even though he isn’t the sort of person who puts things off, he put this off, not knowing exactly where to drain the water.
Of course there were people who said the water would smell really bad, since the waterbed hadn’t been heated for fifteen years. So he had to think about that.

He bought a waterbed pump, cut a hole in the screen to run a hose out into the front garden, and pumped the water out over a period of three or four days. (They make a screen-repairing tape which is easy to use.)
The water smelled like water.

Then there was the business of dragging the mattress and frame upstairs, and cleaning up the carpet.

He then thought he needed something in that space. A chair, a sofa, a futon; something. He looked at things online and suddenly decided to do this instead.
He dusted the table after he took this picture.

That’s what’s been going on here, and why I haven’t posted lately.
I’ll leave you with a picture of my enjoying my walk through the tall green grass.

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 latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “A Bit Chilly”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is me gardening, if you didn’t know. The guy I live with was doing some gardening too, in between the endless painting, but he was having issues with arthritis, which he said was very frustrating.
I know we dogs, which I’m, can get arthritis too.

A couple of days ago we saw the cottonwoods in flower along the canal. These were flowers similar to the ones I walked on in my last post, but a different species.
There are quite a few plants in flower here, but I’ll just show you a couple.
This is Iris chrysopetala, with Iris bucharica behind it:
This is Fritillaria pallidiflora:
The guy I live with said this is grown for medicinal purposes in China, where it’s known as yi bei mu, used for coughs and things like that.

A few days ago, on my morning walk, I saw a turkey. I’ve seen turkeys before, as you know if you’ve been following my posts for a while, but it was still very exciting.
The guy I live with said this was a female turkey. We watched her fly up to the top of the fence there, and then fly into the yard behind the fence, and she strutted around the patio with the dogs in the house barking like crazy.
I of course remained calm and detached, because I’ve seen turkeys.

And then just today, on my evening walk, there was a fox running down the field. I didn’t see it, but the guy I live with did.
You can see it in the field by the shed on the left.
So that’s all I have for today.
Aside from watching the guy I live with paint things, which is extremely boring, you can tell I’ve had a pretty exciting time in the last few days, even if I didn’t actually see the fox.

Until next time, then.