the miserable gardener

feeding the birds again

Today, staring out the kitchen window, the way I always do, I noticed a white-breasted nuthatch that wasn’t moving. I thought this was odd, because they’re almost always moving, flitting around as though caught in a freeze-frame, so I grabbed my camera, prepared for disappointment. They usually fly away the instant I point a camera at them, but not today.

Still not moving, I took another picture.

I wondered if the bird had died right there on the suet feeder, with its funny little feet caught in the wire, and a dewdrop of suet on the end of its beak.

But no; it did move eventually.

I can be slow at times. Here I thought the little nuthatch, after weeks of frustration, was finally posing for me, but then I realized that there weren’t any other birds moving in the garden either. There was quite a bit of commotion about halfway down the garden, though.

Oh.

red tailed hawk

And then this.

Cooper’s hawk

So my poor little nuthatch was frozen in fear because a Cooper’s hawk had crashed through the lilacs, and a red-tailed hawk was eyeing it from the cottonwood.

I wonder if my plants feel the same way when I walk up to them.

yet another crisis

I guess I’ve resigned myself to the dog’s insistence that we get up at 5:39 a.m. so he can have breakfast. I hoped this was just an aberration, but it’s happened every day for about a week now, and even though we got up at 5:40 this morning I can’t believe this indicates a trend to waking up at an hour I would consider acceptable.

“One or two people, though maybe not as many as that” (favorite line from Oliver’s Travels) ask me how I make it through every day. Though I know it’s not meant in this way, here is my answer. Back when I was working, and we had a house payment and a car payment and all that, grinding this wonderful substance from beans was one of the few luxuries we allowed ourselves. The border collies we had then even had a “bean dance” they would perform every time the coffee was ground.

I started by digressing, but here’s another thing that keeps me going: gardening.

I’m beginning to wonder what the plants in my garden really think of me. It’s true that I’m an extremely fickle gardener, and the plants are supposed to understand that when they come into the garden, but sometimes they don’t seem to care. I posted a picture of this hideous thing a week or so ago, and it didn’t faze the plant one bit.

Pinus uncinata

The sheer ugliness of it, the long sinuous branches that seem to have no intention of growing in anything resembling a direction, its refusal to grow up instead of out and backwards, have been bothering me for several years. I can see it out the kitchen window, which makes it worse.

The pine also gets a bud worm of some sort, which makes it even uglier, though you can snap off the dead buds and a wasp will collect the larvae burrowed in the stem. Then there are all these snapped-off buds that add to the beauty.

I made a decision a few weeks ago, aided by my owning some heavy duty and extremely sharp tools I got from Hida Tool a while back that would help do the job quickly and painlessly. Faster, in fact, than a power tool. (By the time you got your power tool started, I would be done.) I won’t show the actual operation, to spare any squeamish readers, but trust me, the whole thing was done in less than ten minutes.