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 our exciting times. You may remember me from such posts as “There And Back Again”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that the sky looks like rain. That might be true in a different climate, but here, those clouds are over the mountains, and even though the weather in summer usually moves from west to east, we probably won’t get any rain.
It rained here two days ago, a little.

The Sedum ‘Matrona’ flowers have changed color.
And there are colchicums flowering. These are mostly ones that he planted a week ago.
The guy I live with says newly-planted bulbs (colchicums have corms, but we still say “bulbs”) often flower before ones that have been in the ground for years.

On my walk yesterday, the guy I live with got a pretty good picture of the “new” ducks; the ones that were ducklings earlier this year.
He also got a picture of me standing by these weird plants that grow along the creek. The brown ones, there; they’ve been eaten a lot by grasshoppers.
The guy I live with doesn’t know what these are (and doesn’t care all that much), but he says they have a smell of cumin and fenugreek.
Anyway, now about the excitement.
We generally prefer no excitement at all, just having one day be like all the rest, but sometimes it doesn’t work that way.

It started a couple of days ago when they painted my Private Lawn.
The guy I live with spent a lot of time out there, talking to the person doing the locating, because he did that for a while. People often object to having someone come in their yard and paint stuff, so the guy I live with said it makes things easier if the people doing that know he used to do that, too.

On my evening walk, yesterday, I went up to a hole to look at it, and the guy I live with said I jumped backwards into the air when I saw how deep it was. It was a narrow hole, but really deep. The guy I live with said it was a “pilot hole” for the directional boring being done.

They run a pipe in the ground, with a sort of drill bit on the end; the bit is guided electronically by someone walking on the ground. The equipment used can “see” obstacles buried in the ground (including other cables and stuff).

There’s a lot of noise outside now, because of the boring. You can see the truck in the distance, on my morning walk. Our garden is on the left, on the other side of those trees. The guy I live with suggested we go take a look, but it seemed kind of scary to me.
Getting closer now. You can see a part of our yard where nothing has ever planted (where the green boards are), because it’s always been a place for purebred border collies (like me) to be able to look out into the field and check up on things.
You can also see the foothills, about five miles away.

Well, that’s it for today.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me near the creepy willow tree, taken yesterday evening. It’s less creepy now that the branch hanging over the path on the west side of the creek was broken by snow a while ago, but there’s still a little part that hangs over the path.

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 an abrupt change in our weather. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “How Things Change”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I was napping, and when I got up, I wondered where the guy I live with was, so I wandered out into the back yard, and there he was, with his phone, taking pictures.

The weather here has changed. Yesterday it was 98 degrees F (36.6C); today it was 60 (15.5C). It’s raining right now. Not a lot, but enough, I guess.
The cooler weather is a relief, of course, though there’s been some expressions of melancholy from the other sentient being in the house. I have this idea that autumn should be both delightful and full of melancholy, so I didn’t ask him what was going on. The weather is fine with me.

He went around the garden and took some pictures with his phone.
The cow-pen daisies again.
Four-wing saltbush (Atriplex canescens) in fruit:
Eriogonum jamesii:
Symphyotrichum oblongifolium:
And, since I was talking about sedums in my last post, here’s ‘Xenox’ in flower:
Foliage of the sedum ‘Jose Aubergine’:
I thought this could be more in focus, but the guy I live with struggled to get a picture that showed the real color.

That would be it for this post, even though we could have posted more pictures (except for the fact that the guy I live with just plain forgot to take more pictures), like of all the red-flowered plants in the garden which are for the hummingbirds, but he did have his camera turned on when he walked by the feeder, and saw this:
The hummingbird wasn’t frightened of him at all. I hear they need lots of sugar for their long flights down to Mexico; we’re seeing fewer and fewer of them every day. Sad for us, because we like seeing them, but good for the hummingbirds, who don’t like to be cold.

That’s all I have for today. It’s still raining, a little, and it might be time for the guy I live with to get out the wool blanket for tonight; I’d much rather be a little chilly than roasting hot, because we place a high value on being cozy here.

Until next time, then.