Happy Birthday Nola

I wanted to make a short post in honor of Nola's birthday. Nola blogs at Alamo North. We met on the interweb, probably through Brenda, but I really can't recall. Through our blogs we discovered we live in neighboring counties. I hope to meet her at the Scarecrow Festival in Kaufman next month. She is funny and bright and I am happy to know her. She is one of the funniest commentors around. Happy Birthday Nola. I hope you spent the day at the fair.

Dumb Dogs and Other Critters

Hugh at Rock Paper Lizard wrote a truly funny post comparing his cat to a possum. In the comments I mentioned that we have had a couple of retarded dogs. Hugh, in return, asked if they were clumsy. I decided to answer him here.

Here are Tisha and Trixie being nice. Normally, the little one chases the big one all over the house. Tisha was a birthday gift for Middle Monkey. She has spent the last five years paying us back by hunting Middle Monkey every chance she gets. Trixie, the calico, is Tisha's daughter. She barely tolerates us at all. We are just her food source.

Here is Abby. She is my dog or better said, I am her person. She has an obsession with me. I cannot go anywhere in the house without her right under my feet. She seems to be convinced that something is going to get me and it is her job to be my bodyguard. This causes a lot of tripping and yelling, "Abby outside." She has a very large bone, which she likes to drop on our feet. This hurts -BAD. Abby does not qualify as retarded, just a little touched.

Here is the bunny family. I paid for two female baby bunnies. I actually brought home a male and a female.

Here is Mario formerly known as Lucy. Mario is still in trouble for the unplanned bunny family.

Now for retarded dog stories.

When I was a teenager we had a grey hound named Missy. Missy loved donuts. My dad is a veterinarian and Missy was his clinic dog. One morning she put her head in an empty donut sack to lick the sugar. The sack got stuck on her head and she got scared. Now, grey hounds are fast. She went running all over the clinic through the waiting room, in the office, and through the exam rooms. Most of the staff, the ones who were not helpless with laughter, were trying unsuccessfully to corner her. She ran into almost every wall before someone managed to catch her and get the sack off her head.

Our last German shepherd was retarded. She ate the net off the trampoline so she could jump up on it and sleep.She would run down a monkey and pants them. That's right, she would get them down and pull off their pants. She would not stay in the yard and we could not bring her in the house. We tried to bring her in, but she would run around like something crazed knocking over furniture and monkeys. We put a shock collar on her to keep her in the yard. Now, I don't approve of shock collars as training tools, but this dog was going to get run over and we had to do something. I would rather put a shock collar on people who abandon animals on the side of the road. In the end, the shock collar was a complete failure as she was to dumb to remember that if she jumped the fence she got shocked. She just kept jumping the fence and being surprised when she got shocked. After a few times, I felt sorry for her and took it off. At that point we realized she was not a town dog and found her a home in the country. She was not any better for her new family and they sent her back. She ended up living out the rest of her life with my dad at the vet clinic where she couldn't get loose. You could see in her face that she wanted to be good, but she just was not smart enough to figure out how to behave. Poor Sammy was always in trouble.

Do you have a dumb dog or a smart dog?

Ten Bog Gardening NoNo's

At the risk of turning this into a bog blog, I am posting one more time about the bog garden.

The river rock arrived yesterday afternoon. We spent four hours spreading it as a rock mulch in between the plants of the bog. Most of these plants will get significantly larger. This will be a very full garden. Some pruning will be necessary.

The men thought I was crazy to want this big rock in the bog. Once they saw it sitting up on its end and showing all the pretty lichen, they were happy. Of course it turned into an engineering problem because they didn't want it to tip over when some child decided to climb on it. I left the men to their own devices with concrete, rebar, and math. That rock is going nowhere.

Here is a picture of the whole thing with my fellow master gardener Ann and Sharon from the extension office. Sharon does a lot of record keeping and general wrangling of our master gardener group.

Here is a view of the bog from the cactus garden.

Ten Bog Gardening NoNo's

1. Select all the plants out of season.

2. Go find good research based bog garden making instructions and ignore them.

3. Make sure there is absolutely no drainage and then wonder why it stinks so bad.

4. Hide from the health inspector who wants you to shut down the mosquito hatchery.

5. Put the flagstone down without putting sand underneath it, pull all the flagstone back out, put down sand, replace flagstone. Two extra steps are absolutely necessary.

6. Set a large rock up on it's side as a trap for climbing children.

7. Put containers with no drainage in the bog to control invasive plants and help with water usage, then be puzzled when the containers float after a rain.

8. Send out an email for a work schedule 12 hours before the actual work begins and then be surprised when nobody shows up to help you.

9. When the bog floods be amazed that you have created a perfect home for crawdads.

10. Answer the question, "Where are you going to put the waterfall?" 300 times.

PS..Ignore the bomb squad. They are not here for you.

YIKES TEENAGERS.

Teenage Monkey was checking out the Passion vine. He touched the flower and got pollen on his finger. I asked him if he knew what it was, meaning the plant. He answered plant sperm. Maybe he knows too much.

Humming Bird Shower

Something really cool just happened. I was out in the garden watering with the water hose because the rain barrel is dry. In order to get the water to a few plants a little out of the reach of the hose, I sprayed water through the air to the plants. A little green and grey humming bird flew up and just hovered. Then she began flying through the water drops. She must have taken a ten minute shower. I was too amazed to move, so the purple hull beans got over watered.

Planting the Bog Garden

I picked up the plants for the bog garden yesterday. This morning a couple of my master gardener friends and I planted them in the bog.

This side has maiden grass, zebra grass, hardy ageratum, giant day lily, and iris.

Here is my German friend watering the plants with water from one of our 3000 gallon rain barrels.

Here is another friend with my German friend looking at me and wondering why I am taking pictures instead of digging in the dirt.

This section of the bog is larger and is planted with black magic colocasia, horsetail reed, umbrella sedge, hardy ageratum, Morden pink loosestrife, giant day lily, and iris.

Tomorrow we will cover the surface of the bog with river rock.

Autumn Artemesia

In honor of Autumn, I made an artemesia wreath. I don't know what variety of artemesia I have in my yard. I was told that it was Sweet Annie, but no. I thought it might be artemesia vulgarise, nope, no red stem. It is tall, fragrant, and very invasive. My front porch smells wonderful right now.

Here is something funny. This Japanese Sohyu cucumber grew into the number six. Could this be a sign?