the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you about what’s been going on lately. You may remember me from such posts as “Late At Night”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s still really dry here. We get rain, but just in the form of sprinkles from time to time.
This isn’t normal for us, but the guy I live with said he would just water the garden, some.

Still, there are things in flower.
This is Sternbergia lutea. Bulbs of this have been here for about thirty years, but they don’t always flower. He divided some and planted them in another part of the garden, and they’re flowering. The older clumps aren’t.
He said that if it rained, there might be more flowers. He can be very profound.
There are some crocuses, too. This is Crocus puringii:
One flower appeared away from the main group, and it’s not open today because it’s too chilly. (It’s 46 degrees F, or 8 C.)
If you remember that one area of the “way back” I showed pictures of a while ago, in “Exciting Times”, the guy I live with dug out all the grass the other day. He wasn’t used to working that much, and it tired him out. The soil was dry as a bone, though. I know how dry that is because there are bones in the field; the kind of bones people buy for dogs, though I don’t care for such things. Why they’re out in the field is a mystery.

This is what it looks like now, if you were walking out in the field and looked into the garden.
This is a picture taken when it was darker, looking toward the house, when we were on my evening walk. You can see the Sedum ‘Matrona’ and the red leaves of Acer grandidentatum.
This was taken on another walk, later in the evening.  The guy I live with said it reminded him of “The Empire of Light”, a famous painting by Magritte.
That’s the light on our patio.

We often walk at night, now.
He took this picture one night when it had rained a little. Kind of scary if you ask me.
The guy I live with has a headlamp that he wears on his hat; it’s sometimes necessary because there are lots of fallen apples and crabapples in the field.
I can see better than he can, and usually guide him away from things he might trip over. He said that back in the last century there would have been raccoons all over those apples, but we haven’t seen any raccoons since I was little. Maybe they know I’m around, and avoid my deadly demeanor.

The nighttime walks are nice. Besides raccoons, I haven’t seen any striped kitties or owls in quite a while.

This is me, if you weren’t sure, walking toward the same spot, on a different evening. That line of bushes is where the creek is.

And here I am again, in the dark, at the end of the path. This is where we turn around and go home.
I think home is a good place to be.

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 tell you some possibly interesting stuff. You may remember me from such interesting posts as “It Almost Rained”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
That’s our fancy Austrian (or Australian) gear-driven sprinkler. The one I disassembled when I was little. It still works, but hasn’t been quite the same ever since.

The guy I live with said that autumn is “sort of” here. It’s really dry, so it doesn’t seem all that autumnal.
Except for the maple leaves turning. This is Acer grandidentatum.

The water in the canal is super clear; I suppose it will be shut off any time now. That’s kind of sad, because we like to see the water.
There was more excitement yesterday when someone came to take pictures of the place where the telephone cable was cut. Now it’s easy to get back there.

I was left alone for a while today, because the guy I live with went to see his friend, and they went out to lunch at their favorite ramen place. I’ve never had ramen.
This is the entrance (and also, obviously, the exit):
The guy I live with says this is very cool. They usually come from the street you can see there.
He said it was the kind of place you might run down if you were a spy and someone was chasing you. There’s an alley on the side where he was standing.

Then they went to a little nursery that I’ve shown pictures of before, because the guy I live with wanted to get a Rocky Ford cantaloupe, which he did, and also a whole bunch of mild Hatch chiles, which he also did.

He also bought three of these things:
These are the fruit of the Osage-orange, Maclura pomifera. They’re about the size of baseballs. I guess the Osage people used the very hard wood for bows, and so the French called the wood bois d’arc, which turned into “bodark”, the way words do.

Apparently people put these in the corners of their rooms to keep spiders from living there. The guy I live with isn’t against most spiders, but he says I do try to eat them, so maybe these bodark things will help. He’s kind of doubtful, but the fruit is pretty interesting. And not really edible.

So then he came home, finally, and there was a box of cyclamen on the driveway.
This is a bit late to be planting them, here, but the guy I live with is going to do it anyway.

After the cyclamen were put in the dishpan and watered, we had a visitor.
Not the greatest picture, but maybe you can see that it’s a hawk.

One of the guy I live with’s favorite plants is flowering now: Solidago ‘Wichita Mountains’ (he thinks it’s Solidago speciosa).
In the daytime, you can smell and hear this plant before you see it; it’s covered with bees and all sorts of other things. It has a very nice scent, too.
The Wichita Mountains are southwest of Oklahoma City and a very long drive from here.

Let’s see, what else? Oh. I’m supposed to say that we don’t always get emails telling us of comments on my posts; this is some weird thing that irks the guy I live with because he says technology is supposed to work. Sometimes it doesn’t, though.

It looked like rain on my evening walk.
About ten tiny drops fell, as we walked.

Anyway, that was my day. Me staying at home, listening to music on the internet radio the guy I live with bought especially for me, while he went out to lunch with his friend. I know how important that is, so I didn’t complain.

I guess we’re going to plant cyclamen tomorrow.

Until next time, then.