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 the excitement around here. You may remember me from such posts as “Nature Is Icky”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Maybe you can see that I got my pantaloons trimmed. The guy I live with got a trimmer, like the one he uses to cut his hair, except this one is for dogs, which I’m, and while it was scary at first, he was able to remove a bunch of large mats, so I feel more comfortable.

It’s that time of year again, featuring things both good and bad.
The other day, on my morning walk, the guy I live with suddenly realized that tomorrow would have been his fortieth wedding anniversary. He started to cry, but I made everything all better in my way, which is something I do.
And then (the good part) there are the cyclamen. These are mostly Cyclamen coum, but there are some C. cilicium mixed in, too, and they’re flowering, along with C. mirabile, though there are no pictures of those.
The leaves really are the thing, though some of the pictures turned out not to be as in focus as the guy I live with thought they were.
There are a lot of cyclamen in the garden here, which I think rather cleverly brings me to my next topic, though you’ll have to read a bit more to find out why.

A few days ago there was someone at our front door. I of course started barking in my most deadly and vicious guard dog way, but the person turned out to be a telephone repair person, and so not only did the guy I live with let him into my back yard, he started talking to him, because he used to do that very job.
What had happened was when the boring was done, the borer had cut through the buried telephone cable.

The guy I live with, if you didn’t know (and probably don’t), is a “catastrophizer”, and though he was something of one anyway, when his wife died without warning in his arms, it got worse. Much worse. He envisioned having to have the part of the garden, where the cyclamen are, dug up, and everything ruined, but, after hours of trying to locate the problem (which the guy I live with knew was often not all that easy), not only was the fault located, but he learned that what he thought was a cable running through his yard on the south side wasn’t one, but a pipe carrying just a single wire.
He also let me out, from time to time, to greet the guys doing the work. It was a little disappointing that they didn’t find me all that terrifying.

The next day, a pretty big hole was dug in the southwest corner of our yard.
(The guy I live with put those boards over the hole, because it hasn’t been filled in yet.)

So, there’s a gigantic (well, fairly gigantic) hole in our yard.
This is, if you didn’t know, the Employees Only section of our yard, and, being sort of an employee, in the rabbit-chasing and guard-dog kind of way, I get to go back there, even in the dark of night, but the guy I live with rarely does. (It’s 125 feet from the patio.)

If you remember, the guy I live with cleared out the area on the northwest corner of our yard, where the electrical transformer is, but it turned out that no one needed to go there, for the electrical part anyway, but the telephone repair people did, so that made all that work worthwhile, and, additonally, now there’s a path cleared through the Employees Only section.
A bunch of broken branches and stuff like that. At the left are leaves of the Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus), which has been going downhill, this century, and so the guy I live with said he might saw it down, or at least prune the daylights out of it, since it’s nowhere near as “drought tolerant” as horticulture claims it is.

A lot of branches of New Mexican locust (Robinia neomexicana) and Siberian pea shrub (Caragana arborescens) had to be removed, or just plain broken, and I suppose most gardeners would totally freak out about this, but the guy I live with said that he’d always entertained the idea of having like a small woodland or shrubbery (not like in Monty Python), where there would be these shrubs, of course, and under them, a whole bunch of (you guessed it) cyclamen.
I could almost see the wheels turning in his mind. Imaginary wheels, turned by guinea pigs of course.
And now the guy I live with has yet another project. He’s going to clear out that whole area, leaving some of the New Mexican locusts of course, and order a bunch of cyclamen to plant there.

Well, whew. That’s our news for now. I’ll let you go, with a fancy portrait of me, doing something I do very well, after a long and strenuous day.

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 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.