the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the fairly tiny purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our very wet garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Cabin Fever”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a rather uncharacteristically damp pose.See, what happened was, the guy I live with needed to water something that was transplanted out into the raised bed in the “way back”, and so he dragged the hose back there and watered, and then as he went back to turn off the hose, I discovered I could play with the hose. It was a lot of fun.

That was a couple of days ago. Then it started to rain. It rained and rained, and then it rained some more. I went out in it, as you can see. The guy I live with said I looked like a completely different breed of dog. I wasn’t, of course. It turns out that I really enjoy getting all soaking. The best thing to do after that is lie in some dirt, which there’s a lot of around here, and then track stuff onto the carpet, because I can be almost certain that it was shampooed the day before. The guy I live with does that constantly, like it’s his mission in life or something, and so when I track stuff onto the carpet, he doesn’t get as angry as you would think, because he’ll be shampooing the carpet again before you know it. The shampooing thing makes a lot of annoying noise.

The rain finally did stop, and so here are some pictures of what some of the garden looks like after it’s rained. 

Here’s how it would look if you went through the garden gate, and if I didn’t chomp you in my duty as dreaded and fierce guard dog (in which case you would run in terror). The lilacs ‘Asessippi’ and ‘Pocahontas’ are flowering on the right side of the path. The white dot past the arbor is my stuffed hippo, Nippo. Nippo was here when I got here. Well, Nippo was in the toy basket, not out in the yard. That’s what I mean. Part of the “way back”, with the leany fence showing partial repairs. There are two Wasatch maples, Acer grandidentatum and a “dwarf” apple tree. The top of the bird bath (the green thing) broke into several pieces over the winter, so the guy I live with says the column, or pedestal, or plinth, will just sit there, “looking all Grecian and stuff”.

He says, with a sigh, that the lawn needs some work. Some tulips. The guy I live with says these are ‘Prinses Irene’, which is a sport of ‘Couleur Cardinal’, and those are his two favorite tulips.Well, that’s it for today’s post. It rained, and I got soaking wet. Not much else has happened besides that. Back to my cozy chair, I guess, after being dried off with a towel. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the rather small 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 at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose. “Trying not to be seen”, according to the guy I live with.Pretty humorous, huh. We purebred border collies do have a light-hearted side. The guy I live with says I’m mostly very earnest about the things I do, so you’re lucky to see me in this delightfully impish pose.

If you looked closely, I mean like trying to find me, you may have noticed that there’s a new fence around the rock garden, which I hear is called “Mount Zot”, for reasons I don’t understand. He tried to explain it to me but I lost interest after the first fifteen minutes of listening to him talk.

Here’s the new fence again. The guy I live with says it’s “putrescently hideous” but I just find it annoying. I liked to sneak into the rock garden and then have the guy I live with come running out of the house waving his arms and shrieking in some “girly-type” voice (according to him) because he says it’s all I pay attention to, but, really, I don’t pay any attention to him at all. Well, here it is again. This time from farther away and with an ornament. You can also see that the native cool-season grasses have turned green and are growing, in what passes for a “lawn” here. The paths are dirt, because we can have dirt paths here, and so we do. So anyway, that’s the new fence. Hideous though it may be.

You see that gravel over to the right, there? That’s a pile of pea gravel, sandy loam, and then some “river rock” on top, and there’s nothing planted in it. It’s just there. Keep that in mind for a minute, will you?

In the mean time, it rained some. I lay out on the flagstone, because I had a plan, and getting soaking wet was part of it. I know it looks like I’m sad, but really I was planning. I got soaking wet. It was excellent. Then the rain stopped, and I took the opportunity to play in the pile of gravel I talked about earlier. The guy I live with yelled at me, in that high voice, which makes him look and sound completely ridiculous, but finally he just gave up, which makes me wonder why he yelled in the first place. 

Oh, by the way, he did fix my collar this evening. Looped the collar into the loop, I mean. 

Remember that I was already soaking wet. The guy I live with did try to dry me off with a towel, but I attacked the towel.

That whole business was totally excellent. I bet the guy I live with fills in the trench I dug tomorrow, and so I can re-dig it to my heart’s content.

I think that’s probably it for today. It was certainly more than enough for the guy I live with. I’ve been enjoying catching flies, which I know is an important part of my household duties, but the guy I live with completely freaked out today when I tried to catch a really big fly, which he said was a “bumblebee” and not a fly, and he got mad when I lunged at it after he told me not to, because I’m fairly sure he doesn’t know much of anything, but the huge fly flew away. He said I was exhausting to live with.

I was so dirty after all my adventures today that the guy I live with threatened to give me a bath and stuff like that. I knew that was an idle threat. I much prefer to be able to blend into things anyway, as maybe you can tell.

Until next time, then.