the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the slightly small purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest dismal news from our garden. You may remember me from such equally dismal posts as “The Blizzard”, among at least a couple of others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m extremely bored. There hasn’t been anything to do.The reason I’m bored and that there hasn’t been anything to do is because, once again, it snowed here. The guy I live with says it might snow here forever.

I’ve been able to go on all my walks, even in the snow, which is melting, but still snowing, and everything is super-wet. Things are so soaking that, well, they’re soaking. This is what it looked like yesterday, when it started to snow. Or was it the day before? The star thing there was leaning to the right after the last snow and it was straightened, but then it started to lean again. The guy I live with gave up.

The birch there, on the left, lost a couple of branches in the first, or second blizzard. He’s unhappy because a number of conifers were badly disfigured and he might just take them out. The tree on the right is a pine, but we don’t know which kind. It wasn’t what he thought he was planting, which was Pinus pumila, the dwarf Siberian pine. That isn’t what this is.

The snow started to stick in the afternoon, but then melted again. This is me, if you didn’t know, looking at something. This is what it looked like this morning. I’m not in this picture. I could have been, but for some reason I wasn’t. They predicted over ten inches of snow but fortunately we didn’t get that. I would have liked it, but I would have been the only one.

It isn’t like there’s nothing happening, but it’s so wet and cold it’s no fun to hang around outside, let alone do any gardening. There are some penstemons and stuff coming up in the little seed frame on the patio, though. If you look closely you can see seedlings in more pots than just the one at left center, which is full of penstemons. And there’s a penstemon flowering in a trough. Penstemon uintahensis. From the Uinta Mountains in Utah. (The only high-elevation east-west mountain range in North America.) It’s close to the Uintah Basin. Why the spelling changes, I don’t know. The guy I live with says for the range, they ran out of the letter H that day.

Anyway, like me, the penstemon is not very tall. I’m actually much taller than he says I am, pretty much normal-sized, but Slipper, who lived here before me, was an “incredibly huge” purebred border collie, and Chess, who also lived here before me, was “kind of a fatty, though quite squeezable”, so I guess I seem small.

Small, and very bored. We played some games indoors, though. And this afternoon we both took a nap on the bed with the Pottery Barn sheets. That was extremely excellent.The guy I live with says I might get to go to Day Care twice next week, which I really like, though it is exhausting. He also says it might stop snowing some time soon.

I’ll leave you with another picture of me being bored. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the not-incredibly-huge purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on news about me and our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Seed Whisperer”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in an increasingly-characteristic pose. Yes, the old biscuit-on-the-head ploy.Here I am looking a little bit more normal.I know about my collar. The one I had got too small for me, so I’m wearing Slipper’s old collar until I get a new one, which might take some time, because they have to be red, and they have to be exactly right. The collar still fits, it just has a part that hangs down sometimes.

Well, like I said a while ago, it was supposed to snow, and it did snow, and a lot, too. The guy I live with was fairly grumpy, because he said we had already had a blizzard, and two in one spring was a bit much, but then it all melted. I didn’t really get to go on my walks; we just sort of walked down the street and then turned around, and so the guy I live with promised me I could go to Day Care two days last week, which I got to do, and it was a lot of fun. I got two good report cards.

The guy I live with went to visit his friend while I was at Day Care, so it worked out really well for both of us. Then I was all super-exhausted yesterday, and so didn’t even mind that I was left alone because there was a plant sale that had to be gone to, and so, was. And then also today there was more plant sale, and so he left for a while. (I happen to know that his friend was there yesterday evening and today, as well, and so that’s why he was gone so long. And he got plants.)

Anyway, it’s spring again, and the garden doesn’t look awfully terrible, having been snowed on twice in the last month.

There are aubrietas in the rock garden.And Gentiana verna in a trough. It’s blue, as you can see. I can see blue, too. (Yes, there’s a dandelion. We have lots of those.)And, of course, now, I get to go on my walks again. There’s water in the canal now. The wild plums, Prunus americana, are flowering. The guy I live with says the plums make a very good jam, but the birds usually get them first. The flowers smell good. 

When we started back, to walk down the creek path, a crow flew away from the top of a tree. That was kind of interesting. Down the creek path, things are different. The guy I live with said that a “bunch of loons” decided to mow down the native willows (probably Salix exigua, the coyote willow) along the creek. Lots of birds lived in the willows along the creek. You can see what’s left of the willows, and you can also see thousands of poison hemlock plants (Conium maculatum)  springing up everywhere. “Cutting down native willows so that poison hemlock can move in”, he said.

The trees are also willows, but a different kind. The guy I live with, who doesn’t know willows, say they might be the native Salix amygdaloides. The really spooky one is just to left of center in the picture, but with all the willows by the creek mowed down, it’s not so spooky any more.After all that, I had to go wading.And then I needed to go again. I think someone was living in the bank, right where I was looking. I couldn’t be sure, though.

Well, that’s about it. Oh, wait. Late last night, there was this terrific noise outside, and the guy I live with had to check it out.

I didn’t get to go outside until a little later, when everything was quiet. I think I’ll leave you on that kind of eerie note.

Until next time, then.