the miserable gardener

Hello everyone; yes, once again, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, another year older and very much wiser, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such notable posts as “Guarding The Fort” and “Nothing Gets Done”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. “Too close”, again. Hardly anything happened today. It started to rain this morning, and then turned to slushy snow, and so I got to walk in slush for both of my walks. It was fun. It’s still snowing slushy snow. See?Anyway, the guy I live with spent an awful lot of time doing mouse-related activities today. As you may know, he’s been searching all over the house, trying to figure out where the mice are getting into the house (he knows where they’re getting into the crawl space, because he plugs the hole every day, and a new hole is chewed right next to that one), and finally, finally, saw this hole in the corner of the downstairs closet. He moved everything that was piled on top of the chest of drawers, and the drawers, and the chest itself, and stuck a pink coat hanger into the hole, to see where the hole went. He doesn’t know why he had a pink coat hanger.

(The guy I live with runs the vacuum cleaner all the time, but this corner hadn’t been vacuumed in years, which is why it’s so gross looking. Note all the little pieces of styrofoam.)“Aha”, he said. And more styrofoam. So the guy I live with plugged the hole, and vacuumed up the mess in the closet, and has now declared himself to be smarter than a mouse.

Now, if you’re one of the two or three people who has been reading this blog since it started, you may recall that he made that declaration at least once before.

We’ll see.

I do have one bit of gardening-related news. Remember the cactus seeds he sowed on the first of March?He didn’t get this quite in focus, and the pencil isn’t really as close to the germinating seed as he hoped (the seed is off to the right, about the pencil lead’s length away, and there’s once the same distance away, just below the tip).

The guy I live with says gardening is really easy. A lot of people try to make it look harder than it is, but it’s really easy. Words of wisdom for today.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, on this, my twelfth birthday, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. Which today is not much. You may remember me from such superior and enlightening posts as “The Awful Smell” and “A Day Without Antlers”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically fortified pose. I don’t know why the guy I live with insists on taking pictures of me when I’m tucked cozily into my fort, but he does. Yes, today is my birthday, and it’s been excellent, thank you. The walks were good, though not nearly as muddy as I thought they might be. And if you want to know what it’s like being twelve, well, it’s rather like being eleven, but older.

It snowed last night. Not much. At this time of year the snow is wet, and heavy, and the guy I live with worries about branches breaking, which did happen, but mostly because he has to figure out what to do with them. The snow is mostly gone, and not much of anything happened today, but yesterday evening the guy I live with decided to build “the mother of all seed frames”, and he did. It’s made out of redwood 2×6s, with heavy duty hardware cloth on top. The person at the place where he bought the wood didn’t know what hardware cloth was, but the guy I live with showed him, when they walked over to the chicken wire and stuff, and so now he knows. “Not everyone knows everything”, according to the guy I live with. Except one person, of course.

Anyway, so he got the frame built, and the redwood was soaking wet and incredibly heavy. The guy I live with said the finished frame weighed “at least 500 pounds” (he still thinks my mommy is here, to be impressed and all….she never was), but he carried it to its new location with one hand.

It’s hard to believe there was actually some empty space in the garden, especially right by the garden gate, but there was. It’s a long story why. It was only after he set it in place that he realized he’d have to lift it up every time he put something in the frame, or took something out. He did get all the seed pots that were on the shelves moved out to this frame, a little bit later, and then he spread snow on top, so the pots could get some water.

He said he might build an even bigger one that this, to go out in the Employees Only section of the garden. I can hardly wait.

Well, that’s all there is for today. It was an excellent birthday. We did some other gardening today, but I forget what we did.

Until next time, then.