the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you a post with some highly unusual content. You may remember me from such posts as “The Long Lead”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It was a pretty nice day today. The weather website says it’s snowing here, but it really isn’t. It might later, though. It’s probably snowing somewhere, but not here.

Here’s our resident front-yard bunny in a characteristic pose, too.
The guy I live with has, so far, left the dried stems of Sphaeralcea parvifolia just so our resident bunny can have some cover. The bunny doesn’t do much damage, now that the guy I live with knows what it likes to nibble on.

While he was out in the front yard, the guy I live with checked up on some plants, and was surprised to see basal leaves on Salvia ‘Raspberry Delight’.
This is a really good sign. The guy I live with has tried this salvia several times, and it looks like it will make it through this winter, because, he said, plants native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico almost always grow basal leaves which overwinter. He said it was “some monsoon thing”. Agastaches and some penstemons do this too. If they don’t grow these basal leaves, the outlook is grim.
And this is Zauschneria ‘Sky Island Orange’.
The guy I live with said this was excellent.

I know there’s been something weighing on the guy I live with’s mind; something about “fifteen years”, and I have no doubt I’ll have to say more about this later, but he’s also been thinking about the snowdrops that aren’t up yet. They should all be up now.

Today, the guy I live with decided to check on the snowdrops, and pulled pots from the ground.
I wondered about this, but he said he’d been checking on plants by digging them up for over sixty years, and so not to worry.
He removed the soil from the pots very carefully, and found the bulbs sprouting at the bottom on the pots, so he even more carefully transferred the bulbs into his new pond baskets, being ultra super careful with the roots.

Galanthus cilicicus

You can see that the emerging foliage isn’t green, so this was covered with more soil, and then the pot was “plunged” back into the soil, with the bulbs at normal depth insteadof twice as deep, like they were before.
The pond baskets will make it even easier for the snowdrops to be removed, for sharing purposes, later.
I was glad to see the guy I live with so happy doing this, especially since he was afraid he had lost this particular snowdrop.

And now for the unusual content.

Yesterday afternoon the guy I live with got a text from his neighbor asking him if he had seen the emergency warning. He said he hadn’t, so his neighbor called him to say there was a “shelter in place” warning, and that law enforcement personnel were turning cars away from the major intersection near us.
The guy I live with then discovered there was that message on our landline. Yes, we still have a landline, because the guy I live with worked for the phone company.
We waited for four hours to go outside.

It turned out that new owners of a storage shed had found a landmine. I guess if people don’t pay the rent on a storage locker it and the contents get auctioned off, and that’s what was found. The guy I live with didn’t tell me what a landmine was, and I decided I didn’t want to know.
The sheriff was called, and then someone from the army, and eventually they determined that the landmine was inert, but let me tell you, that was a very long four hours for me. The guy I live with apologized over and over again, even though it wasn’t his fault.

Eventally the “all clear” was sounded, and I got to go on my evening walk.
So that’s our news of the last day and a half. We don’t lead very exciting lives, which is the way both of us prefer things to be, and maybe yesterday evening was a bit much, but for now, anyway, things are calm again.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all the thrilling events of the last week or so. You may remember me from such posts as “Chasing Hawks”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Maybe this isn’t so characteristic after all; you can see how muddy my paws are. We worked in the garden today.
The snow is melting, and the weather has been very nice. It may snow again later this week, but right now it’s nice, and, according to the guy I live with, that’s all that really matters.

I feel I ought to say that for someone who worries a lot this “staying in the moment” business is a bit hard to take, but in his defense he says that no one is perfect.
Speak for yourself, I would say. We purebred border collies set a standard for total excellence.

Basically what happened here is that it got cold, and it wasn’t very pleasant to deal with, and now it’s not cold, and nothing really happened to the plants in the garden.
But one very interesting thing happened to me, just the other night. (The guy I live with was there, too, but this really was about me.)

It was late at night, around midnight, which is Tinkle Time for me.
When the back door opened, there was this loud, very strange sound, kind of like a cat screaming really loudly. The guy I live with tried to make a movie of it but the sound didn’t come across at all.
Naturally I started barking, because defending the homestead with a lot of noise is one of my duties.
And then we saw glowing eyes out by the creek.
It was a fox. The guy I live with said there must have been two of them.
I think I’ve never seen a fox before and so this was very interesting, and I made the guy stay up even later so I could spend more time barking at the glowing eyes. By this time other dogs had been let outside so there was a big barkfest after midnight.

So that was the real excitement in the last week. We don’t do much of anything, so our threshold of excitement is fairly low.

Just today I got to do some exploring north of the canal. This was very interesting, too.
Those big piles of trash were dumped there illegally but no one seems to care. This isn’t part of the green belt behind our house.
I wanted to go all the way down into this gulch, which is where the creek is, but the guy I live with said there were too many branches in the way, for him. He’s a lot taller than I am, which is a problem for him but not for me.
I’ve been down here once or twice before.
This is way lower than, say, our back yard, because the creek bed descends quite a bit once the creek goes under the canal.
We often see glowing eyes here, on my evening walk, but those are raccoons.

And that’s essentially it, for now. It got cold, and now it’s warmer, with a lot of mud; I heard and saw a fox.
I’ll leave you with another atmospheric picture of me on my evening walk.

Until next time, then.