So, I just took the dog out and heard what can only be described as the sound of a dog in pain and fear. Mrs. W. stood stock still in the yard and I strained in the dark to hear what I could hear, but it was obvious that some thing(s) were harrassing the dogs in the pen across the pike.
I called to my dog, but she was frozen. I clapped and she turned and ran in the house.
I hope everything is okay. I’m ready for the coyotes to move on, I think.
But I got bottles on the bottle tree (I only need four more!) and e. tennesseensis in the ground and yelled at the dog some about how she’d better stick close to me. I didn’t think she’d be that excited about going outside, since it’s raining quite heavily but when she saw that I was going to let her sniff around the garage without a leash on, well, then of course she had to run around outside.
Until it became apparent that I intended on standing in the rain and on digging holes. Then she was content to stand at the door to the garage and supervise where it was dry.
The thing that is still the hardest for me to get used to about Tennessee when it comes to gardening is how the dirt is simply the wrong color. The people before me have some good soil in the beds but you only have to go down about two inches before it switches from black to brown. In the midwest, you switch from black to light black. There’s nothing with even the slightest orange tinge. And the brown dirt holds together like wet clay. You’re trying to fill in around the plant and the black dirt is behaving like mud and the brown dirt is behaving like The Blob.
It’s a good thing that everything I have planned for that bed is basically like “Um, just stick us in some ground and we’ll do something, of some sort. It’s all good.” Hearty, slutty things are what I have planned for there.
Still, this means we aren’t going to get the garden tilled this weekend. I had half a mind to go ahead and plant that bed, since it’ll be mostly wildflowers, but I think I need to finish the bottle tree first, so that I’m not stepping on the bed after it’s planted.
Also, I’ve noticed that the clover and the creeping charlie are pretty much the only things covering our yard at this point. We need to encourage some grass growth. I mean, I’m of the opinion that, if it’s green, it’s grass, but this is a little ridiculous. Our yard is about 1/3 clover, 1/3 creeping charlie, 1/6 wild onions and 1/6 grass.
If you could eat wild onions, I’d have wild onion chili for days.
It’s just after midnight and I’m running the dog outside one last time before bed and there’s this noise. At first, it sounds kind of like a howling dog, off in the distance maybe in the pasture, but none of the dogs in the neighborhood respond to it, which is just physically impossible. So, that’s when I was like, what is that?
And then it made this noise like… almost like short horse whinies, but one right after the other.
So, it was like “AAAAAaaaaaaaaa whe whe whe whe whe whe aahhhrraaaaaaaaaaaaa.”
I’m trying to listen to coyote howls on YouTube to decide if that’s what it was, but someone who could not be bothered to bark last night at the noise has no problem sitting in my room and growling and barking low and warning at the noise from the computer, which is cracking me up.
Anyway, this is kind of what I heard and, if you play it, will make Mrs. Wigglebottom bark the loudest.
Tiny Cat Pants 