the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the fairly 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 “Naughty Noodle”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Rather raffish, don’t you think?“Just look at those feet!” said the guy I live with, who’d shampooed the carpet yesterday morning, and so I looked at my feet, and figured this was no big deal. It wasn’t, really.

The guy I live with also says that I look like an Egyptian; you know, the kind who had Pharaohs and pyramids and things like that. I’m not Egyptian, of course.

Anyway, the reason that I haven’t been posting much lately is because, and maybe you got an inkling by looking at my feet, it’s been raining here. Day after day.

There hasn’t been much gardening, though I have been able to chase rabbits when it wasn’t raining, and that’s a lot of fun. One got in through the part of the fence that the guy I live with thought didn’t need to be rewired, and I chased it all over the garden today. I figure the rabbit didn’t mind being chased because it came back later, and so I chased it again.

The other thing I’ve been doing, something I mentioned before, is catching flies. This is quite a sport. The guy I live with said the first purebred border collie who lived here was really into fly-catching, and wouldn’t go to sleep at night if there was a big buzzy fly in the room. I tried to tell the guy I live with that fly was truly excellent, but he said “No thank you.” He’s really finicky.

He also said that this wasn’t very funny. I like playing with the hose, like you can see in the movie, and it’s fun to tug on. I had it wrapped around this little tree more times than this, but he unwrapped the hose, which I thought spoiled all the fun. I wrapped it again, just the one time, as you see here. The guy I live with said this was a purple-leafed Prunus andersonii, and not to mess with it, but that didn’t mean anything to me. Well, it’s raining again. I just stand by the door pathetically and wait until it stops. That fancy gate was custom-made by the lady of the house, especially for purebred border collies. I can almost jump over it now. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll be able to.

I haven’t learned to use the bell yet. 

Until next time, then.

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.