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 equally large-numbered posts as “One Hundred Snowdrops”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Of course, the guy I live with put something on top of his head, so I would pay attention. It was my stuffed hedgehog toy. I’d left it outside and it really needed to go into the washing machine, to get all clean again. Well, the first thing that happened today, and it was a pretty big deal since almost nothing has been happening here lately (well, nothing hyper-interesting), is that this morning we had a large visitor perch in the honey locust tree. That was very interesting. Can you see it? How about now? We noticed this because there were a couple of crows making a terrific racket in the tree. The owl ignored them.

It moved up the tree and after a while it went to sleep. It got very, very quiet in the back yard, after the crows left.

Maybe I should back up a few days and make this post even more fascinating, and to explain the title. The guy I live with went out for a while, a few days ago, to take his mom somewhere, and on the way home he stopped at a nursery (believe it or not), and found a small bag of tulips which were on sale. ‘Prinses Irene’, which he says is one of the best. It was featured on a blog post a few years ago but I thought I’d show it again. 

And so, while I was at Day Care, he went over to his friend’s house and planted the tulips. He felt all excellent for getting these tulips at a discount.

Then today, a big box came, and guess what was inside?One hundred bulbs of the tulip, ‘Prinses Irene’, which he had ordered for his friend, and forgot that he did. They came from Van Engelen, if you needed to know. They were, of course, cheaper than the ones in the bag.

He felt kind of stupid, but said that his mind has been going, lately, and not terribly slowly, either.

Not to mention a hundred ‘Valerie Finnis’ grape hyacinths. He says that’s a nice one. And, naturally, there were other bulbs in the box.

I did forget to mention that it rained here the other night. Tuesday night. We went out, at Tinkle Time, and it was raining. We got less than a quarter of an inch of rain. About six millimeters. But it smelled good the next day. The guy I live with said it could rain more. It probably won’t, though. There’s no rain in the forecast for the next week.

We did have a couple of freeze warnings here, two nights in a row, in fact, but nothing froze. It froze in other places. The guy I live with says that it probably won’t freeze here until next month, and then the temperature will drop “horribly”, but at least there’s been enough cold to start the woody plants on their journey into winter. This is the Wasatch maple, Acer grandidentatum. It’s very similar to the eastern sugar maple, but, you know, western. The owl was still in the locust tree, asleep, when the sun began to go down.(The guy I live with tried to explain to me that the sun doesn’t really “go down”, but I began to get dizzy thinking that we were moving instead of the sun.)

I guess that’s it. I know I kind of rambled, but that’s what we purebred border collies do, when we’re not super focused on something very important. Here I am, with the sun not actually going down, just looking like it is.

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 the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Another New Toy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. (This is a slightly different picture from the one of me on Facebook.)

Well, the last several days have been interesting. The guy I live with hurt his back, and so there was a lot, and I mean a lot, of moaning and groaning, including at least one cry of pain in the middle of the night when he moved in a way he shouldn’t have, but everything seems better now. He said he was very good at hurting his back, but hadn’t done it in years. It doesn’t sound like much fun.

I still did get to go on my walks, with even more moaning and groaning at the other end of the leash, and yet more when the guy I live with picked me up in his arms to protect me from an unleashed dog. Like I need protection. He reminded me that I did get attacked once before and it was only his lightning-fast reflexes, picking me up so I couldn’t be chomped, that saved the day.

If you want to talk about moaning and groaning, not to mention an awful lot of colorful language, you should have heard the guy I live with when he took a couple of small boxes downstairs to put on the shelves in the laundry room. He had to move the almost full bag of jasmine rice, and when he did, a couple of mice ran out of the bag, and guess how much rice went all over the laundry room floor?

We don’t have any jasmine rice now.

So, anyway, it’s been dry here, and some watering has been done. It doesn’t seem to be having much effect. Things aren’t dead, but there’s a lot of drooping foliage and unhappy-looking plants. The garden is still here, though. There are crocuses and colchicums and cyclamen flowering, and a lot of other things, but not hugely showily, just flowering, if you know what I mean.

As I said, I still get to go on my walks. The guy I live with took his camera this time. (Well, obviously, I guess, huh.)

At first, we headed into the sunset, like a couple of cowpokes. Then we turned, the way we always do, and walked down the canal road. There is still water in the canal. The Virginia creeper is turning colors now.Quite a bit farther east, the canal makes a small turn, and then straightens out again, and the banks aren’t so steep, and so I got to go in the water the other day. The water was not exactly what I would call warm. The guy I live with said it’s because it comes from the mountains.

We didn’t go that way this evening, because of another unleashed dog, so we turned and walked along the creek, on the north side of the canal. And then turned back to the canal road. The guy I live with says the dead tree was an elm, maybe. The ashes seeded there, the way they have all over the place. The rip-rap isn’t very attractive, is it?

Then we headed home. The field still looks fairly green. The guy I live with says it’s the smooth brome. The field was mowed so many times this year, for unknown reasons, that we couldn’t find the old path we used to go on. It was covered with dead grass. The guy I live with says we’ll work on that later in the way; maybe make a new path. You might be able to see that pile of dirt. The guy I live with thinks flowers, and other things, are interesting, but we purebred border collies find things like this even more interesting. It wasn’t there a week or so ago.

There was a hole dug to make a new sewer connection for the house you can’t see on the right; I got to go up and look at the huge hole, and meet the guys who were digging the hole. That was very interesting.

And for some reason, there was more dirt left over after they dug the hole and filled it back in.

You can see how pinkish it is. It might look awful, but it’s really gritty, decomposed sandstone, and makes good garden soil. Minus the big rocks, of course. 

Oh. I was almost going to sign off, but I forgot about the movies. We had an invasion of blackbirds this evening.

Then they flew away.

I guess that’s it for today. 

Until next time, then.