the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the no-longer-so-incredibly-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 “Naughty Noodle”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m not really asleep, just pondering the cosmos. I find this chair to be rather comfortable, if a bit creaky. The guy I live with said I was the first purebred border collie to sleep in this chair. I’m kind of boldly going where no purebred border collie has gone before. It’s been pretty chilly and cool, the way it can be, or so I hear, with a little snow, and some rain. The guy I live with said it was too cold to work in the garden, which I think is just an excuse, though he is suffering from sciatica, so he has a good excuse. I guess. You can see how chilly it is by looking at this picture of the foothills.The slope there is Highway 285, which goes up into the mountains. The guy I live with says that the summit of Guanella Pass (11,669 feet, which is 3557 meters, if you didn’t know) is just an hour’s drive from our driveway, and that maybe, if I’m good, we’ll go up there this summer.

I was left at home, sitting in my fort, while the guy I live with went to a plant sale Friday evening. He came back with some plants, but not nearly as many as he usually gets. That’s because there are so many seedlings in the seed pots, he says. He also got a shipment of daphnes from Arrowhead Alpines, and they’re in this picture, along with the plants that haven’t been planted yet. I think it’s odd that you say “plant” when you plant a plant, because you don’t say “biscuit” when you eat a biscuit. Or “TV” when we watch TV. But I’m just learning, as you can tell. And, yes, the plants (not planted, but still plants) are in what is called a “cat carrier”. I’ve chased a cat or two out of the garden, and I can’t imagine why you would want to carry one, instead of chase the heck out of it, but I don’t know everything. The guy I live with says that when he takes the carrying case to a plant sale, people ask him if he has a cat in there, which he thinks is pretty dumb, since this is obviously really a plant-carrying case, and who would bring a cat in a case to a plant sale anyway. They used to sell the cases at plant sales, just for this purpose.

You get some newspaper or something to pack the plants in tight if you don’t buy enough to fill the case. “Important safety tip”, according to the guy I live with.

Well, so, anyway, the guy I live with says I’ve been fairly naughty, getting into the gardens when I’ve been asked not to, but I saw a snake there, and I keep wanting to see it again, because even though it was scary and smelled terrible I’d like to see it again. You know how that is.

Fences got put up, to keep me off the troughs, and off a couple of the raised beds, and the guy I live with says that it’s “all my fault” that the garden looks so ugly now. I don’t really agree. You can barely see the fence. Here’s a better view of it. I’m not sure how he’s going to get in there. Maybe this one, around the troughs which I was certain were there for me to climb on, is a little obvious. By now I think you can see that things aren’t really as ugly as he says they are. After all, he does have a “portable garden ornament”. That’s a “legal” shoe, by the way. Practically new; they were too big to wear, I guess. I don’t wear shoes, so I’m not sure what that means.

Back to the ornament stuff, though.

So that was something that I thought needed to be said. The garden isn’t so ugly. The guy I live with is teaching me to consider the effect of what I say, before I say it, which isn’t as easy as you might think, since so many people say something first and then think later. The guy I live with does admit that when he said the garden was ugly now he overlooked the one thing that brightens it up, like a tiny sun had landed in the back yard, and so he said he was sorry for saying that. I forgive him.

He says he’s going to put up another fence, anyway. No matter. I have my new Lamb Chop to play with.

Until next time, then.