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 up to date on all our exciting and not-so-exciting news. You may remember me from such posts as “The Haunted Toaster”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This picture was taken some days ago, and is similar to the one the guy I live with posted on Facebook, with the grim news that we have voles in the garden.
The guy I live with rushed into action (sort of rushed, anyway), and sprinkled blood meal and Plantskydd (same thing, really), around all the vole tunnel entrances.
But he also mentioned that we purebred border collies loathe voles and like to hunt them, so without going into more detail I’ll just say that there’s one less vole now.

The other thing is that the guy I live with was thinking about doing some baking for the holidays, giving all the baked goods to his neighbors, when yesterday he turned on the lower over and the element was burning so brightly he thought he had hurt his eyes. The oven wouldn’t heat. The upper oven still works, but he’s going to have to call an oven expert to come and look at it. It probably just needs a new element, but the days of him doing his own repairs are long gone.
The oven, or range I guess, is a really expensive one that he got because his wife wanted it.

A few days ago a rabbit got into the garden and we looked all over to see where it might have gotten in. The rabbit had been eating the now-dormant buffalo grass in my Private Lawn. I think you can see the grazed area there. This doesn’t hurt the grass.

It turned out there were a bunch of missing fence pickets in the area we call the Employees Only section, because I’m the only one who goes in there. You can barely see the wooden fence, on the left.
This is the view from the north side, looking south. You can see the fence in the back of the picture. The fence is in pretty poor shape.
So the guy I live with went to the lumber store, bought some pickets, and screwed them into place. He originally thought he would need about thirty, but he only needed nine.

This was the spot where the telephone cable was cut, if you remember that.
The guy I live with said he was going to clean all of this up, remove a bunch of branches and so on, and maybe plant cyclamen there next year. It’s a pretty large area where nothing has ever been planted.

One really odd thing is what’s been going on with the canal. The water was shut off, then turned on again, then shut off, and now it’s flowing again. This is later than maybe ever before; usually it’s dry at this time of year.
You can see where the people who maintain the green belt filled in the abandoned muskrat den when they fixed the sinkhole. That was where the water was leaking into the sinkhole.

And speaking of water, guess what happened yesterday and today?
That’s right; it rained. Not a whole lot, but enough to make the guy I live with happy.

The moss–I think this is a native one–has turned green.

There were so many fallen leaves in the streets that the runoff water was brown.
This is where the little ditch for stormwater, on the left, meets the creek, and just before the creek goes into the culvert under the canal.

The creek on the north side of the canal looked like this:

So that’s our news. They say we may get some more rain or snow at the end of this week.

Until next time, then.

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.