the miserable gardener

the pine cone chronicles

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the increasingly large, yet still tiny, purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news about me. You may remember me from such posts as “Passing The Time”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. The guy I live with was being “really clever” in trying to get me to stand still for a millisecond, and so he had one of my toys on top of his head. Guess which one of us looked dumbest?Notice the green tinge on the patio concrete behind me? It’s been raining pretty much constantly. The rug is soaking wet. It isn’t raining in the picture there, but you can see that it did rain. You can also see all the fences. They remind me of pictures of the Western Front in World War One, and I asked the guy I live with if that’s what it was like. He didn’t think that was all that hilarious. He’s old, but I guess not that old.

So no gardening has been done for a while now. It’s really wet out there, and of course muddy, and so when I grabbed Ambrose, the lady of the house’s teddy bear, and raced outside with him and tore around the back yard and got him all muddy, the guy I live with said I shouldn’t do that, and put Ambrose in the washing machine.

It was pretty boring today, and yesterday too, but I do have stuff to do, and one thing that’s really fun, besides grabbing illegal teddy bears, is to get an old pine cone, kind of tear it to shreds,and strew it all over the carpet.Pine cones are really excellent and the guy I live with did admit, with a sigh, that all the border collies who have lived here have enjoyed them from time to time, even if they do roll, and disappear under stuff.

The chest did get pushed away and I was able to retrieve my pine cone, even though I’m not a retriever.

I think by now you can tell what simple lives the two of us lead. The guy I live with says the weeds are growing so fast I might get lost out in the garden, but that eventually the sun might shine again. That would be nice.

Until next time, then.

mostly about me

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the getting-huger-every-day purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here, this time, mostly to talk about me. You may remember me from such posts as “The Ugly Garden”, among an increasingly large number of others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I do know that my nose is slightly dirty. There’s a lot of dirt out in back, and I like to stick my nose in it. Since we don’t have a bunch of garden pictures, how about another one of me? This is me trying to hide from the camera.This one is pretty good too.Anyway, remember that it was raining pretty much constantly for over a week here? Well, last Saturday it rained, and then it started to snow. Everyone in Denver was like, “It’s the end of the world”, but it snows in May here all the time, and when I woke up on Sunday, it was a winter wonderland. I thought it was really excellent. Much, much better than rain. For one thing, it’s fun to eat.

The snow was gone by the end of the day and things were more or less back to normal by Monday morning. That didn’t mean that the guy I live with raced out and started gardening; just the opposite. He mostly sits around and drinks coffee and water, and plays with me when he thinks I need playing with, which is most of the time.

Speaking of that, yesterday I got to go to Puppy Day Care, which is at the same place as the Bad Place, though it turned out this time instead of getting stuck with needles and poked and prodded, I got to play with a bunch of other puppies all day long. I played and played. There was this one puppy, with really short legs, which I was told was called a basset hound (the guy I live with said it probably came from the French meaning “low”) and I really liked playing with the basset hound. When the guy I live with came to get me, I said goodbye to the basset hound, and I got my report card, with pretty good grades, or so I hear.

The guy I live with said he was able to move a bunch of seed pots while I was away. He said that he had this freedom to do all this stuff, without my “help”, but then at some time in the afternoon he got all teary and started to miss me a lot, but that’s the kind of person he is, I guess. I was really tired when I got home.

Here are the seed pots in shade, and none of these has any germinated seeds in them. He says that’s okay. Oh, and if you’re wondering, that’s Nedgehog, my toy hedgehog there. It’s not like some weird giant bug or anything. The seed pots in sun all have seedlings in them, and I think you can see some of them.Right across the path from the patio where these seed frames are, the evening primrose, Oenothera caespitosa, is blooming. It started night before last, I think. It blooms at night and smells like lemons.So that’s pretty much it. It snowed, we didn’t do much, and then I went to Puppy Day Care, and now I’m home. The guy I live with says I can go next week if I want to, and I think I do.