the miserable gardener

another chilly day

Namaste, everyone. Yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to tell you all about the news from our garden, which today, again, is hardly anything. You may remember me from such enjoyable posts as “Still More Weather” and “Invasion Of The Pods”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose.

You can see it’s warming up a little bit. Almost balmy today. I don’t know why this picture is crooked, but it is.

You may wonder what the guy I live with does when he isn’t ordering seed or just moping around the house. Today he decided to make a biryani.

The chicken doesn’t need to be fully cooked. (The guy I live with says he’s a failed vegetarian.)

You wash some basmati rice and then soak it for half an hour, then drain it.

Then you make a sauce with ghee, tomato sauce, and dried fenugreek leaves. He got this recipe from Raghavan Ayer’s 660 Curries.

pure cow

the finished sauce

Then you boil some water, salt it, add the rice, and boil it for a couple of minutes. Turn down the heat, and cook it for only a few minutes.

Meanwhile, you heat some cream or half-and-half, and add some saffron threads. My mommy used to collect saffron threads every autumn.

The cream is blended into the drained rice, and then a layer of rice, half the total rice, is put in an oiled casserole, with the sauced chicken on top. This is covered with the rest of the rice and baked for about 45 minutes at 300 (149C).

The guy I live with said to mention all this in case you thought he didn’t do anything, and I was the only one who did.

I got to go on my walks, of course, even with all this biryani business. This was my afternoon walk. I like to think of it as my after-dinner walk. Most of the paw prints you can see are mine, but some aren’t. Some were left by coyotes.

If it looks cold, that’s because it is. I like this weather a lot, and the guy I live with doesn’t mind it very much, because he used to stand outside in weather like this back in the last century. I haven’t had problems with my paws icing up because the path has gotten pretty hard.

The guy I live with says this is looking in the direction of Tucson, where he says the weather is a little different from here.

Well, that was my day. Sorry if this was kind of boring. The guy I live with got to make a biryani, and I got to go on both of my walks, spend some time out in the garden, and do all the lying around at which I’m especially good.

Until next time, then.

snow, agaves, and rodents

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 on this delightfully chilly day. You may remember me from such excellent posts “Trouble In Paradise” and “A Futile Effort”, among so many others.

Here I am in a characteristically noble pose.

Suitable for framing, don’t you think? Actually I was wondering when the guy I live with was going to give me a biscuit. He did eventually.

It’s been somewhat cold here. This was before we went on our afternoon walk, and before the wind came up.

At least one of the agaves here didn’t much like the sudden drop in temperature in the several days. The guy I live with says this is cuticle damage, because the agave was spending all this time thinking it was nice and warm, instead of bundling up for the cold, or something like that. He says it’ll recover.

This one looks okay though.

These too. You can just see the pointy ends sticking up through the snow.

The big ones seem okay too. Agave havardiana. The one over on the right that doesn’t look okay actually is, according to the guy I live with, who said it had too much wet snow on it last winter, and so it got moved over here to a “safer” place. It just looks bad. And, I guess I should say, looking bad is pretty normal for almost everything here.

Here I am making sure everything is doing well. We still haven’t gotten the new screen door he keeps talking about getting.

Meanwhile, in the back yard, practically nothing is happening. Practically nothing happens here all the time, which might drive some people crazy, but we like it that way. Here’s a picture of the rock gardens taken from the upstairs window. He wrapped the Picea pungens ‘Fastigiata’ like he always does. Or really, he wrapped it with ugly brown twine and then re-wrapped it with Nutscene green twine, so it didn’t look so awful. Even I could tell the difference.

A typical winter scene in the back yard.

This is on the path to the way back. The new sand pile is just to the left of this. You can see how natural it looks now.

Funny, huh? The guy I live with says this will be funny for a while. I’m not so sure. But anyway, he put up the squirrel feeder and it seems to be working.