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 “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.

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.