the miserable gardener

hot, dry, and windy

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the tiny 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 “The Cone Of Silence”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I know I’ve been gone for a while, but that’s because stuff was happening, and so there wasn’t really time to post. We had a visitor last Saturday, and the guy I live with spent several days shampooing the carpet and vacuuming everything and cleaning the bathroom; things like that, you know, “just in case”. It turned out it was too hot to be out in the garden so we all stayed in the kitchen and talked. Well, the guy I live with talked.

Our visitor was quite young, and she knew all about plants, though not very much about tiny purebred border collies, but by the time she left, she did. I thought she was really great, and the guy I live with said I was pestering her so much that he filled the stock tank outside so that I could do something besides be a pest.

They went to Chatfield Arboretum without me, but then came back, and we went on my walk, and then the guy I live with drove her to where she was staying for the night, leaving me alone in the very hot house. But I was okay.

Then the next day, which I guess was Sunday, was “a day filled with naughtiness of an unparalleled degree”, and that might really be true judging from what the guy I live with said for quite some time afterwards. We won’t go into what it was that I did.

And then yesterday, since being naughty is so much fun (as maybe you know), I was naughty again, with the resulting language expressed fairly loudly, after which I tried to eat a snake, so the stock tank got filled up again, and when I emptied that, which is what you do, then I tried to empty the pot sitting on the patio, and various other things.

The guy I live with emptied the pots today because he said he wasn’t going to plant any annuals this year, and so now the pots are empty, and not a temptation.

Today it was hot, dry, and windy, and the guy I live with said that was excellent weather, and I must say that the wind was different. Most of the time in the last few months the air has been completely still here. It seems to have stopped raining, and in any case there hasn’t been any rain good for the garden in about a month. Just sprinkles.

This is what our extremely hot and dry garden looked like today.

Allium carinatum

The color on this last one is kind of weird, but, according to the guy I live with, that’s because it is. That’s all I have for today. The color on me isn’t weird, that’s for sure. I’ll leave you with that thought.

Until next time, then.

the upended breakfast

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the fairly small purebred border collie, a.k.a. The Noodle (as in “naughty noodle”), filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden, and a snippet of news about me. You may remember me from such posts as “Cone Free” among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristically sun-drenched pose.Here I am a little later, not so much in the sun.The day went pretty well, considering how it started. The guy I live with was making my breakfast, with the bowl on the counter, and I stood up to see how things were going, and accidentally knocked the bowl, and my breakfast, onto the floor. I suppose it would have been a lot more funny if it hadn’t been my breakfast, which as you may realize is extremely important, but I was able to take care of it, “much to the relief of everyone concerned”.

There’s been a grass sitting on the patio for a while now. It’s a ‘Mega Blue’ big bluestem, and the guy I live with says the autumn color on it is spectacular; purple, red, orange, yellow, and so forth. I can see the blue so I don’t know why anyone would want that to change. It doesn’t look so blue in this picture, though.After my morning walk, and my lunch, which passed uneventfully (but it was good), it rained. And then it stopped, and the sun sort of came out. This picture was taken from the table on the patio.The guy I live with said it didn’t rain enough for the little meadow to get much of a drink. That’s the meadow there on the left, with bluebunch wheatgrass in flower. You can see how quickly it dries out after a rain, these days. In the lower right there were a bunch of native grasses this spring, but I ate most of them. Some of the tansies in the “way back” looked all dead and stuff, so the guy I live with cut them down with a sickle. I think it looks much better. You can also see the mowing that the lawn needs badly. That’s pretty much all I have for today. I stole a dish cloth, which I’m not supposed to do, but it’s really fun to, so I did. I do look fairly guilty, don’t I? I’ll let you go with that.