the miserable gardener

Greetings everyone; it is I, Chess the excellent purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, here to bring you the latest, most up-to-date news from our garden. You may remember me from such enlightening posts as “The Grape Bush” and “Various And Sundry Things”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose.I think another characteristically horticultural pose might add interest here.

Well, maybe you can see here how gloomy it was today. It was pretty gloomy. I had two good walks, though, and so that made the day okay.

And the guy I live with thinks he’s gotten rid of the mice, in a way. They’re still in the garage, because he put some peanut butter in one of the trash bags without thinking, and so they’re interested in it. But he bought some mouse repellent and cleaned out the garage and then did an experiment, which was moderately interesting.

What he did was to put the Tin cat, with fresh peanut butter, downstairs, and then closed the door and sealed it with tape. That way, he said, he could find out if the mice were still getting in through the crawl space. And the next morning, there were no mice in the Tin Cat.

The conclusion he now draws is that the mice are walking into the house through the open back door.

Besides that, there was a little gardening done today. He got rid of almost all of the green lawn in the “way back”, and ordered native grass seed to sow there. I know this isn’t a very good picture, but the guy I live with said it was gloomy, after all, and what else could he do? (Focus, maybe? He had focusing issues, as they say, today.)The green lawn was where the bare dirt is at the top of the picture. The green at the lower right is a different story. That’s the green path. If that makes a difference. It’s going to go, soon, he says.

I don’t know what’s going on here. It must be something. The guy I live with didn’t get very much done today, because he had to cook some chicken. He says he’s a “failed vegetarian” and buys chickens because he feels sorry for them. (It’s probably too late, really.) He thought he had put this chicken in the freezer, but hadn’t, and when he noticed it had expired (in the sense of “best before” type expired, since it was already expired in the other sense), checked it, decided it was okay, and cooked it, even though he thought he had frozen it and wasn’t going to have chicken “so many nights in a row”, because he had already cooked a chicken and was eating the leftovers and, oh, I could go on with this for quite a while.

He made Indian coconut chicken. The first time he made it he said it was so good he cried, because my mommy loved the Indian food he cooked.

The sauce is coconut, cilantro, green chiles (he uses the kind they sell at Indian groceries), and tamarind concentrate. The guy I live with had to use aluminum foil as a cover because when he was mouseproofing in the laundry room a few days ago he had to climb over the washing machine and accidentally grabbed hold of the shelf that held “panzilla” (a large, heavy, French carbon steel sauté pan), and the glass cover fell and shattered all over the laundry room floor, as well as the contents of two large bags of rice, both basmati and Thai, which poured out, and so the laundry room floor was ankle-deep in broken glass and rice, not to mention the fact that both shelves collapsed and had to be reattached to the wall.

I didn’t get any chicken because I don’t like hot food, unlike my grandpa Flurry.

An iris bloomed today. I know, this kind of seems like an anticlimax now. (The picture’s not really in focus either.)

Iris reticulata ‘Halkis’

Here’s a much better picture, from a couple of days ago, and taken with the DSLR.

So that was our day.

I don’t have anything else to say here, and really, all of this wasn’t very interesting, if you ask me.

Until next time, then.