the miserable gardener

gloomy weather

Greetings and salutations everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest and greatest news from our garden, which today is hardly anything at all. You may remember me from such great posts as “The Seed Whisperer” and “The Sand Man”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose, waiting for the guy I live with to notice me so that I can get a biscuit. I think he did eventually notice me, because he took my picture. I got a biscuit, too. The weather here has been “intolerably gloomy”, according to the guy I live with. He may be right, because it’s been chilly, if not cold, extremely windy, and overcast for a couple of days now. In most places this would mean rain, but here it just means wind. It makes the guy I live with really cranky.

To make things worse, for him anyway, I fell on my face on our afternoon walk, even getting dirt on my nose, and then when I tried to get up, my hind legs gave out, and the guy I live with said he thought this was the end, but I’ve stumbled like that before, and it wasn’t really any big deal, since I’m a senior dog now, though of course it’s going to occupy his mind until he finds something else to worry about. I know he worries about me a lot, and it’s probably good that he does, but sometimes he goes completely overboard with worry. He should learn a lesson or two from me.

Anyway, all the wind and gloom caused the guy I live with to cover the irises about to bloom, because the weather forecast even says it might go below freezing at night. He took this picture of Iris lycotis before it was tucked in for the night, using one of the special plant covers he made, which he keeps handy for times like this. Yesterday, all of a sudden, the guy I live with decided to put a bunch of flagstone in the front yard. It’s pretty ugly, and the guy I live with agrees with that, but he had to use “leftover flagstone”, and so the pieces aren’t all the same color.

I don’t much like it when he works out in the front yard, because I can’t go out and sit with him, which I like to do, just like I did when my mommy was here, and she would spend the day weeding, and I’d sit outside right next to her, which is where I always liked to be. Instead, I have to sit by the living room window, and just watch what’s happening in the front yard through the window.

What you see here is a muddy mess. The guy I live with dug holes for the flagstone, and then watered around them, so that the dirt would turn into mud and flow under and around the flagstone, which it sort of did. Then he says he’ll sow grass seed, blue grama seed that is, in between the flagstone so no one will notice anything with the color differences.

I always wonder when he says “no one will notice anything” and then talks about it constantly. The thing is, there’s this “horrible grass” in the front yard (some in the back yard, too), called “cheat grass” (Bromus tectorum), or “cheat”, or even–get this–“downy chess”. It wasn’t named after me because I’m not horrible at all. It’s an annual grass, and comes from the field behind us, but it makes the guy I live with slightly crazy. Or maybe I should say crazier.

His solution to deal with all the cheat grass was to cover it with flagstone.

He’s also been raving about “cool-season grasses” which he claims are spoiling the looks of the various “grassy areas”, but those are all in the back yard, and I can come out and sit with him, so I don’t mind cool-season grasses at all.

Well, that’s what’s been going on. Mostly a lot of complaining and worrying, and none of it by me. I just go with the flow, as they say. Here I am doing just that.

Until next time, then.

nest-building time

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Bunnies On The Grass, Alas” and “A Close Call”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Not hugely in focus or anything like that, but still characteristic. You may wonder what the green blanket is doing pushed up against the front door. The standard answer is “It’s just there”, which is, of course, extremely enlightening. In the winter, cold air comes in under the door, and so the blanket functions as what they call a “draft dodger”. At other times of the year, it prevents people from bashing in the front door and taking our manor house by storm. So the guy I live with says, anyway.

I was about to say something else, but now I’ve forgotten. Here I am about to say something else, but forgetting what it was.Oh, I know. It’s nest-building time around here. (I could have remembered just by looking at the title of this evening’s post.)

The guy I live with took pictures through the kitchen window, which is double-glazed. He says he hasn’t had a glazed doughnut in about twenty years, and so double-glazed sounds even better. I have no idea what he’s talking about, as usual, though if it’s food, I understand completely.

Anyway, the pictures.

The nest is going into the alpine fir, Abies lasiocarpa. I’m glad I don’t have to build a nest. I have my fort, and then my bed, upstairs, with the soft Pottery Barn sheets, and I let the guy I live with sleep on part of it too. He set up the box fan in the window a few nights ago, and it blows really nice chilly air onto my face, while my hindquarters are tucked warmly under the blanket. I like that a lot.

My mommy made a little platform years ago, to put nesting material on. Pieces of string, burlap, all kinds of stuff like that, which the birds could use for building their nests. The robin here is using last year’s blue grama grass for nest material, because the platform is gone now.

The guy I live with left me alone last night to go to the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society’s (whew) plant sale, and came back with a lot fewer plants than I thought he would. He forgot his camera and also forgot to take pictures of the plants he bought. He said he was going back to Denver Botanic Gardens, where the sale took place, today, and take some pictures, but his belt broke, and he didn’t know where his other belt was. He found it this afternoon, but said that DBG probably had a rule about pants, which I didn’t understand, since I don’t wear them. He also said something about using a piece of rope and maybe some red suspenders, but that didn’t happen. Fortunately, I think.

So today some gardening was done, after the robin finished collecting pieces of dried grass. I helped by watching.I think the metal pole that holds the solar lamp really is leaning. My mommy wouldn’t’ve stood for such a thing. For her, everything had to be level in all the ten directions. The guy I live with makes mental notes of such things, this leaning, that needing to be picked up or weeded out, or moved, but he claims his mind is going, slowly. I’m not sure what he means by “slowly”.

There are a few obligatory plant pictures to show you, too. Here’s Fritillaria pallidiflora, which the guy I live with grew from seed. He says in China it’s a medicinal crop.And if it’s blue you want, check out the buds on Penstemon arenicola. The guy I live with had a terrible time getting the camera to focus on the buds, for some reason.And finally, the lilac, ‘Annabel’. The guy I live with says that ‘Annabel’ is “the Sharon Stone of lilacs”. I don’t know what that means. Like so much other stuff he says. I suspect most of it is just babbling.My mommy loved lilacs. ‘Annabel’ is a “hyacinthiflora” type, a hybrid, and it blooms earlier than the regular lilacs. The whole way back garden is scented of lilacs right now, just by this one lilac, though it’s pretty big. He got this, and several others, from Heard Gardens in Iowa, years ago. They grew lilacs on their own roots, which sounds reasonable. I wouldn’t like being on someone else’s paws, that’s for sure.