By George! - A Blog!

The recent windstorms have torn up limbs of native mesquite trees, and its really no surprise because they are untidy trees. Their branch structure seems to be haphazard, lacking orderliness and resulting in congested growth with branches resting on top of one another or running side by side. Strong winds readily break off such branches. Recent spring growth has been vigorous and it comes as no surprise to see branches and even limbs lying on the ground.

To prevent this becoming a repetitive event it’s a good idea right now to examine the branch structure and where there is thick congestion do some thinning. Don’t cut back, but remove branches that run alongside another–or two. This pruning will allow future winds to pass through the foliage, not against it.

I took a look at my native mesquites—and wish that I had the Chilean kind that is more orderly in its growth habit–and although I didn’t have any broken branches i saw a number of ripe pods laying on the ground. This is a fortaste of what’s to come later in the season. Seed pods are abundant and they become a maintenance nuisance because they shatter when driven over or even walked over. If you rake them up before anyone breaks them you can use them as food. When they are really dry they will shatter into flour in a blender. It’s not the seeds that you’re interested in but the product off the dry pods, so sieve off the seeds. The flour makes a heavy bread or scones or pancakes, so use a small amount with the usual white flour. It gives a good flavor to oven stuff. If you don’t want to go to this trouble one of the neighborhood associations has a grinder that more easily and more quickly does the same thing. Watch the newspapers for a forthcoming announcement of when and where this service will be provided.

If you don’t want to go even to this amount of trouble, simply feed the unwashed pods to your goats and they’ll apprciate the sweetness of this seasonal treat. If you don’t have goats there’s another tactic you can employ to avoid the mess of broken pods laying in your driveway and walkways. Don’t let the pods fall off the trees!!

Any time now you can go around your mesquite tree and easily pick off bunches of pods thus preventing them falling off one by one, or being shaken off by the next storms. Of course you’re not likely to get the pods at the top of the tree, but you will reduce the later job of raking up bits and pieces. You’ll find a rigid bucket a better basket than a floppy plastic bag to put your “Harvest” in.

In the desert our beginning summer affects the way we garden and some people think of growing their flowers and vegetables in containers, rather than in the ground. You avoid digging when you use containers and this is a tempting thought but my feeling is that the work of digging is a good investment and makes for easier growing because a mass of soil has reserves of moisture and of temperature whereas soil in containers that “captures” plant roots, does get hot and certainly dries out faster.

Admittedly, containers can be moved out of the hot sun to a shadier and cooler place if they are not too large and heavy. A cardinal feature of container growing is that you should use as large a container as you can afford but obviously you should not limit its portability. It is hard work to move a large conatiner even if it is on a wheeled platform.

You can have either a plain or ornamental container and the choice will be determined by your aesthetic style. I avoid any of the “bulbous” shapes because it’s hard to replace plants whose roots are caught in the bulge. Straight tapering sides are much easier to handle when it comes to replacing plants and soil. Another choice is what kind of material you should buy. Clay is a heavy material but it allows breathing is if it is not glazed. The breathing cools the soil by evaporation, and this means you’ll need to water your plants more often than if they were in a plastic container. The very worst kind of container is the nursery black plastic kind which, though cheap, gets very hot when left out in the sun–to the point of cooking the roots of any plant. In between these extremes are all kinds of materials, including pressed cardboard, concrete,Tufflite, metal. In my opinion the best material is Italian clay pots because it looks clean and tidy as well as allowing evaporation. Mexican pottery often diintegrates in a year or two and seems to “fill-up” with salt residues even if a bitumen sealer is used on the insides.

A container for flowering plants needs to be full and overflowing for the best effect. Often you see a large container holding a few measly plants with a lot of bare soil in between. This is a pathetic attempt at providing beauty and is so easy to avoid.

Whichever kind you use it’s certain that you’ll need to water more often than plants in the ground. Depending on the size of the container, its material, its place in the sun, and the kind of plants it is holding you may need to water every day. Even if you put in a drip system to save you work, you’ll still need to take a look every day to se how things are going. There’s a danger of keeping the soil too wet in your battle with sunshine and high temperatures. If that happens your plants’ roots will be candidates for being cooked. Plant roots need to dry out between waterings and, with container growing, the risks are too great unless you are prepared to spend a lot of time watching things. This means that, when growing plants in containers during summer’s heat, you’ve defeated the purpose of saving effort and energy and avoiding going outside.

That’s why my containers, of all shapes and sizes and materials are holding dry soil and no plants at this time of year

Three leading lights of the Community Gardens of Tucson spent a day at a recent Farmer’s Market on the University of Arizona Mall. Actually there was only one true farmer there selling local produce, but other booths advertised good things to do with growing your own healthy food, herb plants, royal jelly and honey. The Community Food Bank had a strong booth and there was Organic Coffee (whatever that is!) and roasted corn for sale.  Altogether an interesting collection of ideas and information.  Students from the Nutrition Classes were cheerfully energetic.

We three passed out brochures, newsletters, a print-out on container gardening, and information on how to grow your own food by joining our organization.  One visitor greatly encouraged us by praising this blog, saying it was most helpful, informative and well-written (and easy to read, etc).  I hope you find it so, too. Anyway, the praise reminded me that I’d not written a weekly blog post for some time—so here it is.

A recent walk-through at a couple of our gardens made me realize how well the gardeners are doing this spring.  The weather has been kind to us and people have responded timely.  Onions that were planted in November are now fattening up and ready to eat with hamburgers.  Regular small doses of ammonium sulfate and nipping off the flower stalks, together with favorable weather made the fattening bulbs touch one another and encourage harvesting. They are not ripe enough to become storage onions, but that will take place in a month or so.

Adventurous gardeners have put in a variety of “new” plants for the desert and are most encouraged by the results so far.  We have rhubarb with leaves as large as umbrellas and stalks long enough to be put into a pie.  If you’re interested, the variety Victoria seems suited to our conditions and the gardeners sowed seed in November), sweet potatoes are spreading out now that the warm weather is with us, (Centennial is the kind we favor and you need to get slips to get started), Yacon is shooting up.  It’s a kind of sunflower–tall stalks and sweet roots like Jerusalem Artichoke; it’s a staple food in South American countries. Jerusalem Artichoke itself has become a favorite plant in our five gardens.  Besides being tasty and crunchy it’s a good food for diabetics.  Fava Beans are being harvested while the beans are soft, but it’s hard to keep up with their production and more than half the crops will be saved to give hard beans later for storage.

Then there’s the vegetable gardeners palette of traditional food, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, corn and bush beans coming on.  The winter plants, broccoli, cabbage, peas, lettuce are all fading out as spring progresses, but gardeners have had plenty to eat during the past five months.

All of this gave me a feeling of other peoples’ accomplishments and satisfactions in the name of “growing your own food” without the costs of trucks consuming diesel or gasoline and running up the basic price of production.  Look in today’s vegetable racks and note the higher prices than a month ago, and fear a trend’s about to take place.  And one trend that frightens me is the increasing political dominance of the mid-east oil-producing countries.

We can grow our own food, maybe not entirely but to a large extent and it will be better for us and more enjoyable.  One of our gardeners just came back from a visit to San Francisco and looking down from his high-rise hotel he saw a massive garden of green vegetables.  Going down and walking through this two-acre site of raised bed gardens he spoke with some gardeners, who were Oriental people growing a wide range of interesting Oriental vegetables and snipping off a handful of green leaves to take home.  He noted that there were very few Occidental people!  What an impression!!  Are we too tied to supermarket food planning?

Spring doesn’t simply appear on a Monday morning;  it creeps up on us in little steps.  The only reliable parts of the spring process are the lengthening days and the changing position of sunrise and sunset.  The vagaries are mainly temperature changes, dryness or rain, or even snow.  We get a few days of 80 degrees interspersed with night time freezes as our plants start to “wake up”.

 A few eager, younger than eighty years old, Community Gardeners, knowing that our seasons are short ones started planting and sowing with enthusiasm in the first days of March–taking a gamble with the weather.  Then came a frosty night half way through the month that nipped ,and in some gardens, killed newly planted tomatoes that weren’t protected by a Wall-o-Water covering. The worst-affected plants were those that had been planted in sunken beds, because cold air falls to the lowest point in the landscape.

Then a warm spell, followed by cold nights occured, but most of us feel now that the frosty nights are over.  This is what the olderore cautious gardeners have been telling us–wait for the soil to warm up according the needs of each particular plant.  For example, Tomatoes might be the first to “go in”, followed by peppers and lastly by eggplant, okra, squash and melons.

There are natural indicators, such as the leafing out of desert trees, birds singing in the early morning, ants combing the ground for food, and so on, but the best measure is that taken by a soil thermometer.  Read the list of plant temperature needs in The Book.

Modesty and shyness, but more the Police, prevent us from carrying out a personal natural asessment used in olden days.  In the spring of the year farmers would find the best time to sow their barley fields by sitting on their bare bottoms to discover the soil’s temperature.  They could be seen all over the parish testing their soils’ temperature, which differed from field to field, before they hitched their horses to the harrows

Home gardening philosophy says it better to buy plants of tomatoes, peppers or eggplants from the nurseries instead of sowing seed . Germination takes too long and an immediate plant  that has been grown in a greenhouse while our soils were too cold, savies time and “steals a march” on our short growing season.

On the other hand, once the soil is warm enough seeds of cucumber, squash and melons will germinate quickly and be superior to  such plants that have been started in containers. in little pots they need more room than what the nurseries provide and daily watering washes out nutrients, leaving the plants undernourished and weak.

Whenever you buy plants, whether they be roses, vegetables or trees, always inspect the roots.  You want cream colored roots that are well spaced out and not crowded against the sides of the container.  Worse,they could be going round and round at the bottom of the container.  Roots that are black and soft are dead roots, usually killed by too much watering.

When planting it’s good to know the size of the mature plant and allow room for it to grow without competing for space.  Tomatoes, peppers and eggplant need four feet or more to grow properly. Melons need six feet from one another, though cucumbers can be sown closer and trained upwards to save garden space. Fruit trees, if they are planted less than fifteen or twenty feet apart will have to be severely pruned to prevent them being limited by space.

Now that Spring has arrived, says I, go ahead with your gardening, and Good Luck.

Here we are in the middle of March.  The statisticians tell us (or they used to tell us before Global Warming was a buzz-word) that we have two more days to March 15 which they said is the date of the last killing frost, so gardeners can safely go ahead with their summer gardens.

Of course, each year is different and besides there are pockets of cold and pockets of warm areas all within a mile of each other but many of us like to mark our calendars to tell us when to do things.  Some in our Commuinity Garden group have already planted tomatoes.  The unprotected ones diedof the cold, but those who surrounded their plants with a Wall-0-Water ( a clever tepee of water-filled tubes that imitates a miniature greenhouse) are getting established plants several days ahead of the “official” planting date of March 15.

Out in the open, in my back yard, the soil temperature is 80 degrees in the afternoon.  I’ve not been out at midnight to see how the soil cooled but at nine oclock the thermometer showed eighty degrees.  This tells us that soil retains heat well after sundown, especially if it is moist.  Daytime air temperatures on the other hand fluctuate hourly as well as daily. Citrus trees are flowering in March as are ornamental landscape plants such as Carolina Jessamine, Feathery-leaved Cassia and Iris.  Air temperatures are not much use as indicators for the beginning of a new season because they do vary greatly.  For example today’s news forecast tells us to expect a frost tonight with snow on the mounains to boot.

It’s a fact that seeds that have lying dormant in the soil begin to germinate when the temperature is right for them.  Furthermore such “Natures children” turn into good strong plants that fruit abundently, so if you have beans or tomatoes poking through, don’t eliminate them even if you have just bought  healthy plants from a nursery where you were astounded at the high cost.

Other life in the garden is waking up too.  Lizards are scudding around and ants are harvesting new leaves and birds are singing.  Collectively these natural happenings are  a sure sign that the seasons are changing but watch out!  A surprise cold spell will slow down the growth of tender seedlings.

A sure-fire natural sign that old-time gardeners relied on is the flowering of mesquite trees in our desert.  It’s not the leafing out but the actual production of those yellw catkin-like “worms” that give us good-flavored honey.  So the bees come into the picture too.  Air temperatures determine both activities and we need to ask how mesquites interact with bees –is it the chicken or the egg story again?  Mesquite flowering does vary from year to year and so should our gardening tasks.  It would be nice to have some doctoral student spend a few years recording the air temperatures and the flowering dates of mesquites and seeing how they coincide.  Not forgetting the effect of soil temperature I suppose the student would have throw in a new part of the equation — Global Warming. 

Anyway, don’t delay, time is already rning out.  Take a chance and get going on your gardening tasks. 

We already know that birds are doing strange things, quite out of the ordinary, regarding their migrating because of food (in other words, insects) availability.

There are many signs of spring awakening, lizards appear, groundsquirrels come out of their burrows, ants start foraging again, weeds flourish in the warm sunshine and,for us gardeners, leaf and flower buds start sprouting.

There are many things to do and since our seasons are of short duration it seems there’s no time to get them all done.

Pruning, Planting, Watering, Fertilizing, and Weed Control are the primary chores to attend to.

Pruning for appearance (of hedges for example) involves trimming with shears to keep the plants from growing wild. A formal hedge alongside of a walkway can be snipped back each spring fora number of years to get it to thicken up with new growth (so paradoxically shearing is actually a growth promotion) but eventually a thick outside keeps the sun off inside the plant and we finish with an empty shell.  Goodbye the screening effect of a hedge.  The remedy is to be a bit more heavy-handed  every three or four years and take six inches or more all round (especially the top) to let sunshine into the heart of the hedge

An informal hedge also grows out and when this becomes too much the remedy is to cut where the branch leaves the limb and remove the whole structure on which the now-extended growth protrudes.  This applies to trees also.  It’s not a good practice to snip off the ends (say to a tree that is rubbing on the wall) because pruning stimulates growth a the cut, which will become heavy and drooping again against the wall, or into a walkway.

A word to the wise concerning citrus trees, which are presently leafing out.  Look carefully and see the little flowers buds at the ends of the twigs.  Snipping back the ends will certainly reduce the tree’s size but it will also reduce fruit harvest, so it’s better to let the tree grow the way it wants to.

This brings up the common situation where trees that are planted too close to a house or wall don’t have enough room to grow.  When you plant, bear in mind the size of an adult and forget about the size of your tree in its five-gallon container.  Should your tree run out of space you’ll be forever trimming it back and it won’t be a thing of beauty.

Trees in a nursery that are responding to spring urges may look appelaing, but they’re a poor investment because flowering fruit trees need a lot of water and less sunshine than we’ll be getting soon.  It’s better to plant a dormant tree that has been growing in a container.  Bare root trees don’t do at all well in our desert climate.

Watering is critical for plants that are “waking up” out of winter dormancy.They don’t have much water reserves within their bodies and if the winter rains have been inadequate the soil is dry too.  Be liberal in your watering for a couple of months until the spring surge has quietened. The best way to nourish a tree through watering is to water out beyond the drip line instead of leaving a hose to run against a trunk. Let the water run until you can poke a stick three feet into the soil at a several places for a tree, and two feet for a bush.

Fertilizing is a task that goes with pruning and watering .  Scatter ammonium sulfate (the cheapest and most available source of nitrogen, instead of specialized mixtures) over the dampened area around a plant.  Do it halfway during the watering.  The first half softens the soil, the second half sends the fertilizer down to the roots.  Use about a pound to a hunded square feet.  The way to be sure of this is to peg out an area ten feet by ten and string it.  Weigh out a pound of ammonium sulfate and scatter it evenly to see what it looks like.  Memorize the sight of this and you’ll be able to properly treat any sized area of any shape for the rest of your life.

This is the season for a lot of creatures waking up out of a winter snooze. Lizards, ground squirrels, even snakes and certainly a lot of insects.

 Bees come out of hiding as soon as warm temperatures and rains set weed plants a-flowering. They want nectar for energy and pollen for food for their young.  In the process of collecting they pollinate flowers, probally without realizing it but the flowers turn into seeds and that keeps the plants from extinction.

There are thousands of species of bees, some are solitary, digging little nests in the ground or finding a hole in woodwork or creating a colony in trees’ branches or on our porches. We have Bumble Bees,Carpenter bees that excavate for a nest in house trim, Leafcutter Bees that neatly cut out semi-circles on rose leaves, and others, to carry to a little tube (sometimes a keyhole) that they fill with eggs and the leaves for food for their young.

The social bees and wasps actually build and care for communal nests.  Paper wasps attach their home to our home by glueing their papermade cluster to anything handy to them, but not for us.  Wasps have a fierce sting and they attack suddenly.  You don’t want a hanging basket near the front door where wasps will build, for example.  Using a long stick you need to poke off the nest before it gets large  and be sure to break off the attaching “pedestal” or stalk because they’ll come back and use it to build a replacement nest.  Dead, drooping palm fronds are a favorite place for these wasps to build nests.

Wasps may not do much pollinating but they are active predators, eating up aphids and mealy bugs and any pest that is soft and nutritious. They are a valuable non-chemical pest control  because of this and they won’t bother you while you are tending to your bedding plants or vegetables.  But don’t irritate them by swatting at them.

 This warning applies to bees and wasps  and flies that get into the house. Simply open a window or a door and they’ll go out on their own because they are reaching for the sunshine.

Everyone loves honey bees, or they should, until they read alarmist journalists writing about “Killer bees”.  However, it’s true that Africanized bees are a dangerous threat to our peace of mind. By this time practically all of our local bees are tainted with this condition, though it’s taken ten years or so for it to reach us from South America.

Any day now you may see a black cluster of bees hanging on a tree branch or even a porch rafter.  Simply stay away for a day or two and they’ll be gone.  Actually they are so full of stored food that they can’t bend to sting you (so the entomologists say) and they are simply waiting for their scouts to come back with a message that they have found a suitable place to build a permanent home.

Besides, Africanized bees only become aggressive after they have built a nest. They excercise their instincts by meeting any attack by defending it. They respond to a barking dog, lawn mowers, noisy leaf blowers, hammering, any unusual racket, and even the smell of horses and some people, by “going after them”.

After you’ve found out where their nest is, stay away and call a pest exterminator who takes the risk of being stung and knows what to do.  If you see bees going through a hole in the wall and into your structure, don’t try anything yourself. Call the pest exterminator.

While you are doing garden chores among the bees while they are collecting pollen or nectar there’s no need to get anxious.  They are too busy “doing their thing” to worry about you, unless you try to wave them away.  If you are more nervous than they are, simply go away and do something else.

If you like good honey and want to keep bees you’ll need to find a queen and a packet of bees from an area where there are no Africanized feral bees.  It can be done and its a rewarding hobby.

There is an argument that states that a parasite, living on its host, would be crazy to kill the host and deny itself a source of food.  I used to accept that argument in the case of parasitic mistletoe but now I don’t think its a good argument, especially after a series of dry years. when the trees are under a water stress

 I see more mistletoe these days and it’s hard to understand why it is so if the trees have lost their vigor.  There are still a number of birds that eat the berries and spread the seed and clean their sticky beaks on the rough bark of our native trees.  There are still plenty of native trees and it’s hard to find dead ones in spite of our dry years. Nevertheless, those surviving trees are looking more miserable than they need to be and the mistletoe looks so strong and vigorous.

The moisture that the parasite needs comes from the host tree and if that tree is not supplied with water, either by rain or by irrigation, it’s sure to suffer.  I’m joining the people who remove the pest.

Simply pulling off the great green gobs from a tree’s trunk helps the tree but it doesn’t kill the pest.  It will sprout out again because it roots are all through the trunk.  If you are able to do this on a reglar basis you will help to preserve the health of the tree.  If you break off clusters up in the branches you will be giving more help, especially if it’s a cluster that has just started–looking like a bird’s nest, for example.  If it’s a more robust growth coming out of a branch it’s better to cut out the parasite with a piece of the branch.  Try to do this without upsetting the balance of the tree’s appearance but even if this is not possible you’ll be doing more good than harm because you’ll be preventing the mistletoe’s growing through the branch system and into the trunk itself.

There’s no chemical that will kill mistletoe without affecting the host tree.  Any systemic chemical will also affect the host tree because the pest and the host conducting systems are so intertwined.  This means there is only one method of control–pulling off and cutting out.  You can suppress new growth on large branches and the trunk by wrapping black plastic to smother the shoots remaining in the wood of the tree.  When they start growing again they will be in the dark and unable to thrive without sunshine. A few people say this method will gather and hold heat from the sun so the trunk will suffer but if they stop to think they’ll discover that trees’ foliage usually shades the trunks.  Desert trees, such as mesquite, palo verde and acacias are untidy trees whose branches often weep down to the ground.

This time of  the year gives us a golden opportunity to help the trees.  At present the pest is obvious, whereas after the leaves come out we won’t be able to see the problem. All green things look alike up in the branches in mid-summer. 

When you were gardening in the East and Mid-West you probably were told to save the ashes from the fireplace and put them in the soil at spring digging.  This was good advice, but for us in the desert regions it’s actually bad advice.

The reasons for this are that soils in the eastern states are most often acidic and need to be neutralised.  That’s why lime is often applied to them.  Soils in the desert are invariably alkaline and putting lime on them, and gypsum too, simply makes bad things worse.  We want to make our soils less alkaline by putting on acid and we do this by digging in sulfur which ,with moisture, turns into sulfuric acid and the alkali soil is thereby neutralised.

In either case the operation has to be repeated because the neutralising lasts only a short time and we can’t put enough material on the ground to have a lasting effect. The enemy, as it were, is too numerous and has lots of reserves.

As an aside (almost) you may get advice at nurseries to use gypsum but you shouldn’t buy any unless you have a special problem.  That problem is having too much sodium in your soil. Calcium excess (the alkalinity we mentioned ealier) is bad enough but sodium is far worse and in alkaline soils it has to be got rid of. The way to do this is to dig in calcium (in the form of calcium sulfate, or gypsum) and use plenty of water to wash out the now-soluble sodium.You are left with the problem of too much calcium and this must be treated by repeatedly digging in sulfur, as we mentioned earlier.

Wood ashes won’t usually add sodium, but they do add its cousin, potassium, which is a plant food as well as being an alkali.  It so happens that most of our desert soils contain adequate amounts of potassium for good plant growth, so there’s no need to add it to make up any supposed deficiency.  Back to a nursery.  There’s usually little need to buy a fertiliser that contains a lot of potassium, besides which its the expensive part of any “balanced” fertilizer.

So, what to do with our wood ashes? When they are cool ,put them in a paper or plastic bag and put them in the trash.  Don’t put them in the compost pile, as you did in the east, because the compost pile is only one step away from putting the ashes into the soil.

Got Weeds?  After our gentle winter rains a lof of weed seedlings have come up. Try this easy way to kill them off before they get bigger, begin to flower and produce more seeds for next time around.

For sure you’ll get good results from strong weedkiller chemicals, but you may not like most of them.  Spray the little plants with vinegar on a calm bright sunny day.  They’ll die and the vinegar, what’s left of it, will gently acidify the soil.  You might even call the operation an Organic one.

The other day I got a reminder of some hard work carried out a couple of years ago when I had to replace a rusty water line.

My yard is basically “empty desert” though there are mature citrus trees on the edges, and they are doing fine. This “empty desert” has a straight green line of weeds that germinated after last fortnight’s gentle rain. The line runs all the way down to the street where the water meter is.

You may have seen this effect of deep digging but if you haven’t, take a look wherever some construction work and pipe-laying took place.  Even though the returned soil was tamped down a few showers of rain settled it a little further and left a sort of slight ditch. But it will be the loosened soil that gives rise to germinating seed because the soil welcomes the rain and nearby, where there was no digging, the rain didn’t penetrate so easily.

 The lesson to learn from such an observation is to dig as deeply as is reasonable to allow water to get down the roots of a shrub or tree and even beyond the roots of flower and vegtable plants  Rain carries down nutrients so a deep digging is helpful for plant establishment and, later, for good growth and fruit production.  A loose soil allows of good drainage and this enables salts to to be carried away.

 It’s a wonder that some magazine and newspaper articles extol the virtues of planting in a shallow soil.  The only good feature of this practice is that not much work is called for, but it’s a short-sighted economy.

Deep digging has been fully accepted by some Community Gardeners. At the Chaverim Garden soil has been dug down to two feet and amendments added right down to the bottom of the “pit” as the soil was returned.  At a nearby Iron Horse Garden the same extent of preparation was pick-axed through three feet of caliche.  At the Presidio Garden a new gardener dug down eighteen inches and was so impressed with the results that he dug down three feet through compacted soil for his next plot before he stopped to add steer manure, amonium phosphate and soil sulfur.  The extra effort did not discourage him because he got such good results with his first plot.

I have a friend who turned his front yard into a citrus orchard of ten trees and he’s very pleased with the results.He got carried away in his digging a five foot deep planting hole and he had to call for help after he had thrown out the ladder he used to get down there. Only a neighbor’s dog came to see what was going on but the dog’s barking alerted the neighbors to his predicament, and out he came, none the worse for wear.