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 the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “A Superinformative Post”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. The guy I live with had a pine needle on top of his head.Actually, maybe this is a more characteristic pose.I know I haven’t posted for a while, but the guy I live with says he’s been having trouble focusing. In this case, he does mean with the camera.

The other day, the guy I live with went with his friend to Chatfield Arboretum, and he took the wrong lens, so almost none of the pictures came out in focus. He said that even if he had taken the right lens (the zoom lens), none of the pictures would have been any good, because of the focusing problem. (It isn’t really a problem; he’s experimenting with exposures and stuff. The camera came with instructions, but ….)

Some of the pictures were okay. They have miniature horses there. I know what horses are, because they have them next door to where I go to the doctor, and to Day Care, but those are regular-sized horses, and miniature horses are, well, you know, miniature. And goats. I know that Slipper, one of the border collies who lived here before me, was raised with goats, and so was ultra-smelly when he was brought here as a little puppy. That’s the extent of my knowledge of goats. As I said a while ago, the guy I live with has been watering, some. The weather here has been the same now, every day, since about the last week in July. Cloudy every day, with a few hours of sun, and no rain. We don’t really get a lot of rain on the garden here after the middle of July, but the constant cloudiness has been annoying to one of us. The cooler weather, lately, has been pleasant for both of us, though.

Here I am enjoying the evening. The temperatures all nice all day long, now. There are things flowering. The guy I live with says that rain would be better, but that watering would have to do.

This is a California poppy called ‘Red Chief’. And some asters. (The guy I live with says life is too short to be typing “symphyo…” over and over again, just as with the botanical name for California poppies.)

Aster ericoides (maybe a hybrid of it), ‘Blue Star’. Aster cordifolius ‘White Chief’. Lots of cyclamen are flowering now. This is probably Cyclamen cilicium. It’s supposed to be fragrant, but the guy I live with said he couldn’t smell anything but whatever the strong chemical fragrance of the hour is, wafting from the neighbors’ house.This might be Colchicum ‘Lilac Wonder’. Colchicum cilicium.So, everything was going the way it goes around here, that is, hardly anything happening, which is the way we like it (though a raccoon tried to get into the yard late the other night, and I had to get all threatening and vicious and loud), except for the no rain part, which we could use some of, and the guy I live with said it was the autumnal equinox, and explained to me what that meant, like he was super-aware of the way the Earth moves around the sun (in truth, he had completely forgotten that autumn was coming, but he said that since every day here seems the same, with the clouds, and no rain, that that was his excuse), and he decided to remove the other little tree in the middle of the lawn, “because it looked stupid there”, and when he was done, he saw this.It’s Crocus laevigatus.

The guy I live with likes crocuses a lot and so he was pretty happy about this. Hopefully there will be a lot more crocuses in flower, until the end of the year.

I guess that’s really all I have for today. 

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 “You Know, Because Raccoon”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I think you might also like this picture of me, with the morning light streaming in the upstairs bedroom window. The guy I live with says I look “rather coy”, which I think is acceptable. Anyway, it’s been pretty dry here, though right now it smells like rain outside. That’s because it is raining, a little. The guy I live with says he would not mind living in a climate where it rains, and that rain is much, much nicer than snow (I might not agree), especially when it’s rain without hail and tornadoes (that part I can agree with).

So, as I mentioned last time, the guy I live with has been watering. No, the world isn’t coming to an end; he just decided to do some watering, to help coax the autumn-flowering bulbs, a bit. This is one result.

Colchicum byzantinum ‘Innocence’.

And here’s another. This is Cyclamen hederifolium. The guy I live with says we’ve never been much into watering, though back in the days when the Long Border and the Great Lawn were all lush and green there was a lot of watering to be done, but he says that that’s sort of weird, watering so you can have a different kind of garden. He also says that watering to make up for the “normal” rain that didn’t fall is something different, and so that’s why he’s doing that.

There are a lot more cyclamens to come, in the shade garden, by the way. Most of the Cyclamen hederifolium here have white flowers. You can see one of them in the background.

The guy I live with, who has a tendency to lose interest in things (like he buys plants and then wonders why he did), said a while back that he’d lost interest in having a “summer garden” when we get about zero inches of rain, and so everything here has been pretty much super-crispy for months now. There are plenty of watered gardens to look at, around town, if he feels like doing that.

On the other hand, and here I should assure you that the world, once again, is really not coming to an end, the guy I live with is talking about growing a whole bunch of vegetables and stuff in his friend’s yard. For a change of perspective, he says. I don’t really like vegetables. The guy I live with says that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, like to go into the vegetable garden (yes, there was one of those here, way back when), and pick his own Swiss chard, as well as strawberries and raspberries. I do like fruit, though.

So, the cyclamen and colchicums are flowering. And it’s sort of raining. Not really raining, the way it does in some places (so I hear). We did quite a bit of gardening today and I’m fairly exhausted because of it. Plants were planted, plants were moved, there was some weeding, and so on. Some things needed to be barked at. And it’s still raining. Not pouring, more like sprinkling.

I forgot to say that the weather has suddenly gotten much cooler, and, for a purebred border collie like me, that’s just completely excellent.

And now, I have a movie for you. I’m sorry that it doesn’t feature me, which would have made it totally superior, of course, but late last night, while the crickets were chirping, there were coyotes. If you were wondering about the title of today’s post, maybe this will explain it.

I guess that’s it for today. I hope I didn’t scare you too much.

Until next time, then.