the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the not-really-miniature 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 “Helping In The Garden”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Well. The guy I live with is, I guess you might say, exasperated. He says this is “the worst winter in living memory”, with snow on the ground for fifty-five days now. The snow was almost gone a few days ago, and then this happened.Of course I think it’s beyond excellent, but the guy I live with, who, you may not know, is not hugely coordinated like I am, slips on the ice all the time, and moans and groans on my walks, and says that there are supposed to be snowdrops and crocuses in flower now, and that the world is obviously coming to an end, and all of that kind of stuff.

There are some agaves germinating in the laundry room downstairs. These were sown just a few days ago. The guy I live with goes down and looks at them, and says things to them, and then comes back upstairs and says he doesn’t know why he even bothers, because this is such a horrible climate, and nothing ever grows, and things are just completely awful.Things are not so awful for me. A little while ago, the guy I live with gave me a slice of a thing which I understand is called a napple, and I really super like them. This is what they look like.

napple. honeycrisp.

I had one called a piñata which was unbelievably good, but this one was good too.

There are also these weird things on the kitchen table. They’re kind of scary, actually. I don’t know the name of this one. Definitely not a napple. So, that’s pretty much it. “Nothing again nothing”, the guy I live with said today. The guy I live with majored in English literature in college, for a while, which he said was “extremely useful in later life”.

Since there’s almost nothing going on here, except a great deal of complaining, and some shoveling, and then more complaining, how about some more pictures of me?

me

me again

me once more

“one more, and that’s the last”

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the not-so-totally miniature purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden, and about me, too. You may remember me from such posts as “Day Of The Scorpiris”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.There wasn’t even a biscuit on top of the guy I live with’s head, for that picture. I was just being my usual excellent self.

Well, what a day. The first thing that happened, after my walk of course, was that the guy I live with spent a great deal of time making this gravy for the biryani he was going to cook later this evening. It has something like eighteen different ingredients and I didn’t get to try it. He said it was really good.

Hyderabadi mirch ka salan

If you’re wondering if the gravy looks hot, well, he said it was, sort of. Those are fried serrano peppers.

Then he decided to work on the troughs, or boxes, as he now calls them. The boxes needed hardware cloth tacked on to the bottoms, and the drawer where the hammers are wouldn’t open, because one of the hammers was sticking up, and so made the drawer stick, and the guy I live with said a whole bunch of stuff about that, and then finally had to take a crowbar and pull up the top of the work bench to get at the hammer that was sticking up, and he said a bunch of stuff about that, too. He got a hammer, though, in the end.

Then the hardware cloth was tacked to the bottom of the boxes, and, believe it or not, nothing happened when he did that, except a bunch of tacking. Like there wasn’t any yelling or cursing inanimate objects, or bleeding. None of that.

Then some of the ice was chipped away from the paths. It was really nice and warm today. The guy I live with says that’s because it’s going to snow next week; it gets really warm here and you think spring might be around the corner, and then it snows, and it does this over and over again until the end of May.Then the guy I live with decided to paint the one box made out of pine, with Cuprinol, to keep it from whatever Cuprinol keeps it from, since it never is wet enough here for wood to warp or rot. The stuff isn’t toxic to plants, and can be painted, if desired. Otherwise the green more or less ages away, he said. You can see the hardware cloth here.The green stuff has a smell to it, “like a canvas tent”, but the guy I live with got some on his fingers, and he hates getting stuff on his fingers, and so he washed his hands about fifty times, and made all these squealy noises until the smell went away.

The other day he had to replace the battery in the car and you should have heard him when he got grease on his fingers.

To sort of cancel all that out, I, according to the trainer at Day Care, had “another fantastic week”, and I have the report card to prove it. “Grt”, if you didn’t know, means “great”. The guy I live with said, once again, that they must be talking about a different purebred border collie.

Then, well, let’s see, later there was something said about the carpet. I don’t know who could have done that. Maybe you can figure it out. I’ll let you go now, so you can do the detective work. 

Until next time, then.