the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you up to date after a long absence. You may remember me from such posts as “Snowdrops And Sentiment”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see how dry it is now.
It wasn’t all that dry, really, at the first of the month, and we did get a dusting of snow a while back, but it’s been very warm here (anywhere from 65 degrees F to 70) and windy, so everything is kind of crispy.
We had a “fire weather” warning last Tuesday or Wednesday, then a high wind warning, and this week alone we had three “fire weather” warnings.
There are forecasts of rain and snow for next week, but the guy I live with says with things like that the rug has usually been pulled out from under them a day or two before they’re predicted to happen.
This is kind of awful, really. Some rain or snow would be very nice. The guy I live with has been watering the garden, something he never does in the winter, but this winter has been very different.

There are still some snowdrops flowering. Almost everything is a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, with the warm weather.
The guy I live with saw this one just today.
The cyclamen are flowering, as well as crocuses and other things, but we’ve shown pictures of those in the past.
I will show a picture of Iris ‘George’, though, since it’s such an attractive one, flowering in Sedum ‘Turquoise Tails’, which he likes a lot, and with some old yucca leaves on the right, as well as leaves blown in by the almost interminable wind.
Most of these reticulata-type irises fade away after a few years, but this one has been here for quite some time.

The other big deal here is this:
This is a directional boring machine.
The guy I live with was familiar with this stuff from when he worked for the phone company, but the technology is much more advanced now.
The machine bores a hole under the street and under front yards and then the new gas pipe is run through the hole.
A hole, or more correctly, a pit, is dug in the street where the large new gas line was bored a couple of weeks ago, the boring machine is placed next to the pit and does its work . It takes a bit of time.
The noise has been considerable here over the last few weeks.

Now we have a new gas line to our house, like most of our other neighbors do. There was a gas leak in our neighborhood a year or so ago which is why all of it is being replaced.
I’ve met most of the people doing the work and they were all super nice.  Maybe because they all know that the guy I live with knows what they’re doing and how they’re doing it so they don’t have to go into long explanations.
After they did the work at our gas meter, they even closed and latched the gate on the east side of the shade garden.

So that’s why we’ve been away. Enduring the wind, and the noise.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on what’s been happening in our gardening. You may remember me from such posts as “Below Seasonal Normals”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Once again, it may look dry here, because of the brown warm-season grasses, but it’s really not. The soil is very damp.
People keep saying how dry it is, but the average precipitation for January here is about 0.43 inches (11mm), which is pretty dry, regardless.
We got more snow about ten days ago, very dense snow, and so we received almost half again the average precipitation for January.
What’s weird is all the warm weather. We often get stretches of warm weather in winter, but not nearly as many days as we’ve had since the first of November.
It was 61F (16C) here today.
Just a few years ago we were “below seasonal normals” for weeks on end; this lasted for about four or five winters and was very tiresome, as I know from having to hear about it constantly.

I know it’s been a while since I posted but not much has been happening. The guy I live with has been painting.

It’s been so warm that some of the colchicums are sending up leaves. This is certainly not normal but the leaves went through the last snow and lows around 3F (-16.1C) with no problem.
The guy I live with said maybe this is normal in places with very mild winters.
It is normal, though weird, to see roses and clematis start leafing out at this time of year, but the guy I live with said he’s seen this many, many times, and nothing bad happens.

He’s seen Cyclamen coum in flower this early before, but usually it was only one or two flowers.
And there was a crocus in flower. This is Crocus korolkowii. Not a very good picture.
Most of the activity here has involved snowdrops. Of course.
There were more coming up in the shade garden path and these were dug up and potted today.
I helped, in my usual fashion.
The guy I live with said he got a nice picture of ‘Nothing Special’ in the shade garden.
This needs to be moved to a sunnier spot in the winter. Snowdrops like shade in summer and sun in winter.
And, while in the front yard, he made a movie.
There were a lot of bees.

And, finally, some seeds came in the mail.
These are mostly annuals because the guy I live with decided to stop growing a lot of plants from seeds, as I said in a previous post.
The lily is easy to grow from seed but will take a long time to grow to flowering size.
The guy I live with said it might be nice to try to grow a bunch of sunflowers out by the back fence. His wife’s favorite was ‘Italian White’ but Hudson didn’t offer that.

This is kind of a sad time of year for the guy I live with. Most times are, but the feeling that spring will be here eventually can be a hard thing. He used to get the Hudson catalog, give it to his wife to check things she wanted, and then he would look at it, and order their seeds. He’s been ordering from Hudson for over thirty-five years, every year.

They say we may get some rain later this week. Rain in February here is “just plain weird”, but since a cold wave isn’t expected–yet–the guy I live with said rain would be just fine.
I guess we’ll see.

Until next time, then.