Cat Chasing Dog

You always hear about dogs chasing cats.  Seldom do you hear about a chase where it's the other way around!  I witnessed a hilarious incident here on Sunday. I wish I would have had a video camera!

Milo, our ferocious protector

 I was going for a walk down the trail towards the beach with our dog, Spirit and 3 kitties following behind, (Harley, Lexy and Milo), which they often do.

 Harley and Lexy are both females about 5 years old and Milo is a one year old neutered male. (Got him last summer from friends who own a farm near here so he's a real outdoor boy.) Milo is friendly and loves to cuddle. He has loads of energy, and runs along keeping up with Spirit on our walks.  If fact he usually runs ahead and has to be first!

The 2 girls were lagging behind on the trail so I turned around to check if they were still coming. I saw Lexy suddenly run 20 feet up a tree on one side of the path and Harley went bolting up a tree on the other side. A large young blood hound called Hank came jogging around the corner at that moment, explaining the cats' behaviour.  Hank is young, dumb and relatively harmless, and has come to our house a number of times in the past to play with Spirit and bay at our cats.

Lexy up a tree

 















Milo was standing next to me on the path at that point.

Harley, our expert tree climber

 He suddenly puffed himself up and rushed down the path towards Hank, hissing and spitting. Hank took one look and turned and ran! Milo chased him down the path all the way back to our neighbor's place. Even Spirit quickly got out of Milo's way. I quickly walked to the top of the hill near our house and broke out laughing as I watched the chase.





Every time that Hank stopped and turned around, Milo ran after him again and they ran all around our acreage, around the neighbor's yard and through the environmental reserve, out of sight behind the trees. It was so hilarious to see this little ferocious cat chasing this huge dog 10 times his size!!!  

View from the top of the hill towards the house

Hank is nothing if not persistant and he finally caught up with Spirit and me at the top of the hill, but so did Milo. Hank was determined to walk with us, but Milo kept him at bay, and wouldn't let him come too close, until Hank finally gave up and left.

Spirit, our shepherd/husky cross

Milo at rest

Lexy

Harley

End of the Season

After several hard overnight frosts, I guess it's time to admit that the gardening growing season is over for 2011. I have continued to cover 4 of my deck pots at night, bringing them up close to the house in a little group.  My tuberous begonia was still blooming so beautifully and so were the gorgeous gazanias, that I didn't have the heart to let them go yet.  But since I will be away from home for 4 days this week, I doubt that my diligent husband will remember to cover them, so it's time to say goodbye.

I have been doing the last bit of fall gardening clean up in preparation for the deep freeze of winter.  I finished covering my rose bushes with garden clippings and peat moss to make a nice cosy covering. I think I will try and put a sack over my "Love" rose as well since it is only a zone 4 and will need extra protection from the uncaring elements. (I also realized that one should roll down their sleeves when working around rose bushes, and I have the scratches and gouges to prove it, LOL!)

Last flower bouquet/ tomato salsa/ a few plums

I also made a stealthy attack on my dandelion infested lawns in the hopes that this attack would work to get rid of many of them for next year. I had read online that in the fall the dandelions pull down nutrients into their deep ugly roots to give them the strength to over-winter. So, ideally, if you spray them with vinegar/ water at this time, they will pull it down into their root system and it will ultimately kill them. Hopefully this theory is true or I will just end up with the ugliest dead patchy lawn  imaginable! (Um, no, I didn't tell my husband my plan, I just went ahead and did it. Come spring, we'll just blame all the brown patches on winter kill....)

One last flower bed still needs to be clipped down and cleaned up and that's my new triangular shaped stack stone bed. The deer have been there helping themselves to the sunflower heads and they also tried to eat a bearded iris (which the deer proofing experts claim that deer don't like...) which resulted in the iris being unearthed. I had moved that one recently so the roots weren't established. I had to replant it so I hope that it makes it through the winter since it won't have time to set its roots.

Weird tomato

My greenhouse is still running but needs to have the heater on all night. The tomatoes in there are slowly coming to the end of their life and are starting to dry up even though we have been watering them well. I guess they know it's time to go back to nature, become ONE with the compost pile... lol!
 Next week we'll pick the last tomatoes which are still ripening on the vines and close the greenhouse down.  I have a lily, a hyacinth and an ameryllis growing in pots in the greenhouse, so they will have to come in the house and find a spot among the many geraniums that I 'rescued' from the garden.

There are still leaves on the trees which is so unusual for mid October. I like it, though! Maybe it's because we had so much rain this year... The ducks and geese are still here on the ponds in the area, but likely not for very much longer. I will miss them when they go. Then you know for certain that winter is just around the corner.

Fall Clean up

This is such a sad time of the year for a gardener. It's clean up time. Most of my flowers are done. The annuals in most of the deck pots are touched by frost or worse and I have stopped watering them. I still have 4 pots that I can't part with just yet, though. My red tuberous begonias are still looking so wonderful and I have brought the pot up close to the house. My 3 pots of gazanias have also avoided the frost and are still blooming.  They are in the same location as the begonia pot and I have been throwing a sheet over all of them to cover them at every night. Oh, and one pot of pink geraniums with a tall stately spike in the centre....  It's hard to go down to nothing!  :)

As I may have mentioned, I dug up a half dozen geraniums to put in pots and bring into the house for the winter. They often bloom in the dreary winter months and provide a welcome burst of color.  My dahlias have made it back into the paper bags of peat moss and stashed in the Rubbermaid container in the laundry room.   Still have some glad bulbs to dig up and my canna lily as well.  My canna did not bloom this year. I'm hoping that next year I can give it more of a head start in my greenhouse and maybe I will plant it in a pot on the deck instead of at the side of the house.

I'm still clipping perennials as well, and making pretty good head way there, but I am so reluctant to yank up or cut off anything that's still growing. Just seems to go against the grain somehow. I have used some of the plant clippings to mulch 3 of my rose bushes and I hauled a pail of peat over to my stack stone bed to mound around them, too. Amazingly my Love rose bush had another gorgeous blossom on it which I cut off to bring into the house, along with a blooming Hansa rose stem from the shrub at the side of the house.  Hate to let Jack Frost have his way with them...  3 more rose bushes still need winterizing. I have watered all six of them as well as my clematises. We have had next to no precipitation since early August.  Got a bit of rain this evening, but I'm not sure how much. Will have to check the levels in my rain barrels tomorrow.

 A few days ago I dug out some of the grass infested maltese cross plants in my long bed  and replaced them with 2 columbines which I had received from Janet R, a friend of mine, quite some time ago. They bloom a beautiful burgundy color and I am looking forward to seeing them flourish next spring. There are still a number of other Maltese crosses and a whole wack of daisies that will have to be removed next spring from the Long bed and the Angel bed as well. And I don't even want to think about the grass.... :(

My new stack stone bed has had nothing trimmed off yet either. If I don't get around to doing that I won't worry about it. There's always next spring. :)

Last Flowers

The last flowers of the season before Jack Frost's sneaky visit:

Milbert's Tortoiseshell Butterfly visiting the echinacea (purple cone flowers)

Purple cone flowers, sweet peas and blue sage's second blooms

My favourite gazanias, "Yellow Flame Big Kiss"

Huge Firebird cactus dahlias- I love this beauty!

Lavatara

We left for Thompson on Sept 23 and the 14 day forecast indicated that we would not get any frost until Oct 2.  Why, in heaven's name, did I believe that!?  We arrived home on Oct 1 to see that Jack Frost had indeed visited us at some point during our absence.  Luckily we had put all the potted tomato plants in the greenhouse before we left.  I had also dug up one of my regal geraniums and a lace leaf geranium and transplanted them into pots in the greenhouse. My hyacinth had started to come back to life in its pot and my amerylis was growing leaves. I moved them off the deck into the greenhouse as well .

Some of the tomato plants in the garden were fine and parts of others were wilted from the erratic, patchy frost that had come.  Most of the flowers in my deck pots were wilted, as well as the geraniums in the flower boxes on the stairs. The roots are still okay, though, so I am going to dig out a choice few to pot up and bring into the house to over-winter in my sunny bay window.  

It's a rather sad time of year when everything  that was so beautiful is dying. and there is so much work ahead to winterize my rose bushes, pull out spent annuals and clip off finished perennials. They say that you should leave some of your perennials alone and clip them in the spring instead. They look rather beautiful in the winter covered with snow. And it gives small wild creatures a place to shelter from the harsh weather... if you care about that kind of thing.... which I do. :)