the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on hardly any news. You may remember me from such posts as “The Long Darkness”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I forget what I was looking at, but it was something. The guy I live with doesn’t mind when I stare at things, except when I stare at things on our walks at night.
I’ve seen a raccoon twice, now, on our evening walks; a really big one, too.

Hardly anything has been happening in the last couple of weeks, except for some gardening, and lots of excitement about the new recycling container the guy I live with got. There’s going to be a lot less stuff in the house now, like all these papers and magazines and journals the guy I live with said he’d never read again.

The guy I live with said that when he worked in telephone repair, he would go into houses where there were magazines piled so high he had to kind of edge around them to get through the house; he said he didn’t want to be a person like that.

It rained all day a couple of days ago; not like pouring rain, but drizzle. Since the weather has gotten a lot cooler, the canal road is still damp.
The crocuses really liked the rain. These are Crocus speciosus, which the guy I live with says is one of the best for the autumn garden.
The pictures were taken in bright sunlight, so the flowers look paler than they are.
The guy I live with said he was going to make a note to order a lot more of these for next year.

Because it’s gotten cooler, mice have been walking into the house. The other day I was sure there was one in the kitchen, and so the guy I live with, who knows I’m always right about this, got out the live traps and put some peanut butter in them, but nothing happened.
Then he was sitting right here at this table, and looked down.
I knew I was right. The back door is open all day long, and into the night, only closed when we go to bed, so no wonder we have mice, looking for a warm place to stay.
The guy I live with said that shortly after this picture was taken, the mouse walked back out onto the patio, so, for once, the door was closed. The mouse kept trying to get back into the house, so the guy I live with put some pieces of bread on the garage floor, by the front garage door. There’s a gap between the floor and the door and so mice who are outside can come into the garage to get bread. The guy I live with feels sorry for them, in the winter, except when they’re in the house.

So that’s all our news. Not much of anything, but I didn’t want anyone to wonder where I had gone.

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 talk about the weather, and some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Under Construction”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with said maybe it’s time to replace the ramp. It kind of bounces when we walk on it now. You can see how narrow the concrete is, because a second sliding-glass door was added before the guy I live with and his wife moved into the house. The threshold is also worn, from purebred border collies going over it for so many years.

Speaking of work, guess what happened the other day?
The sinkhole was filled in. The guy I live with took me out there to meet everyone, and told them I was the one who first discovered the sinkhole.
He had called the people who manage the “green belt” (which I call the field), because we noticed kids had been playing in the sinkhole, so it got filled in without the extensive repairs that it really needs. This is just a temporary thing, for safety.
The guy I live with pointed out the abandoned muskrat den on the south side of the canal, and said that was where the water was entering the sinkhole, and so the crew filled in the old den, and the water stopped.

That fence belongs to one of our neighbors, who is older than the guy I live with, if such a thing is really possible. The fence was broken when a dead tree was blown over onto it. The guy I live with said he would fix it, with another neighbor’s help, but he keeps forgetting about it, since he has other things on his mind. Eventually it will get fixed.

There was a really big crawdad in the canal. It will go into its home in the mud along the canal when the weather gets colder. The guy I live with said he doesn’t know what happens to them when the water stops flowing in the canal, but likes to think good thoughts about them.
So….sometime tomorrow morning it’s supposed to snow. We could get a lot of snow. The guy I live with is of two minds about this. It will be cold, and all the crocus flowers will be gone, but on the other hand it will be water. It’s been very dry here, with almost no rain all month. It drizzled on our evening walk yesterday.

The guy I live with said it was time to sow some seeds. Ordinarily he would sow the seeds in pots in a dishpan filled with water, but this time he decided to sow the seeds dry, since it’s going to snow.
He had already filled a bunch of pots with soil-less mix he made himself, and put them on the shelf on the patio.
Filling the pots was most of the work, so a lot of time was saved today, and the sowing went pretty quickly.
This dishpan (there are three of them) has been out on the patio for thirty years.

One concern is running out of the “squeegee” used as a surface dressing for the pots, like on the top three pots in the picture. (I don’t know why they call it squeegee, but it’s the same kind of gravel they use on icy roads.)
You can’t just go to a squeegee store and buy some, these days. Garden centers no longer carry it.

The pots go out into the frames behind the shed.
On his way out there, he took some pictures. This is an out-of-focus picture of Crocus banaticus.
The view from inside the shed.
The enclosure, with some Crocus speciosus.
The rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ was flowering there. The Japanese beetles are long gone.
And here are the frames.
This one is just for bulbs. It isn’t any different from the first one, except that it’s just bulbs.
The frames were built using the wood from the bulb frames he made but decided not to keep them.

The frames are on the “trough patio” behind the shed. There are only two troughs with plants in them, now, because times change.
Though we may get a lot of snow this weekend, it’s supposed to warm up again later, with nighttime temperatures above freezing, so maybe most, if not all, of the snow will melt.
Later in the year, when more snow falls, it usually lies on the frames all winter, because the trough patio is in shade then. The guy I live with said that’s ideal for the seeds.

I think that’s all I have for today.

Until next time, then.