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 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.

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.