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 talk about the heat. You may remember me from such posts as “The Heat Is On’, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m hot. This picture was taken yesterday and now I’m even hotter.

It’s 88 degrees F (31.1C), which the guy I live with says is totally insane for the first full day of spring. The humidity is six percent. There’s a cold front moving in, with wind, so we’re under yet another “fire danger” warning today.
Earlier this week the forecast was that this “cold front” (not very cold, really) would bring rain, but “they” took that away a couple of days ago.

This is no fun at all. It’s true that we’ve received 1.93 inches (49 mm) since the first of the year; the average is 2.16 inches (54.8mm) up to the end of March. But the guy I live with says that since October, November, and December were so dry that that’s factored ins, since the beginning of the water year starts on the first of October.

There’s no precipitation in the forecast and the guy I live with said he’d like three weeks of rain. He says that used to happen here in March, sometimes.

A couple of days ago the guy I live with noticed what looked like drops of water on the patio. He even saw a drop fall. He looked around and couldn’t find anything that would cause this.
He even looked under the sink to see if something was leaking. That was an unlikely place for water to get into the patio without getting the outside wall wet, but he looked anyway.
He decided to ignore it, and then yesterday he saw this.
He looked and looked again, and felt another drop.
It was from this:
A cut end of the grapevine next to the kitchen window.
The grapevine is dripping grape juice. This probably isn’t good for the grapevine.

The guy I live with posted this picture of a very-late flowering Galanthus woronowii.
There have been snowdrops in flower in our garden for 202 straight days now.
That says something about snowdrops, but more about what passed for a winter here.

Some years ago the guy I live with got various color forms of Corydalis solida, and they’ve seeded around, producing other colors.
Here are a couple of them.
And that’s our first full day of spring. Roastingly hot. No talk of gigantic blizzards, thunderstorms, gentle rain, anything resembling spring.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me showing what I do on a day like today.

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 today to complain about the weather, like gardeners do. You may remember me from such posts as “Winter Drags On”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see what happened last night. The snow just stopped a couple of hours ago.
This is a good thing. I like snow.

We had three days of “fire weather” warnings; it was really windy yesterday, but not like totally scary. (The fire business is definitely scary. There’s a huge fire in Nebraska, which the guy I live with assured me was a long way from here.)
This was in flower yesterday but now all the flowers are frozen. He forgot to cover this last night but it was so windy the cover would have blown away. The guy I live with is disappointed, but the snow is better. (Note the mention of fire, above.)
Iris popovii from Tovil Dara in Tajikistan.
It was 75 degrees F (23.9C) yesterday, and tonight it’s going to get down to 16F (-8.9C).

This crocus was in flower too. The guy I live with thinks it might be a form of Crocus korolkowii.
So far, so good, since we’re used to this sort of thing, even though it isn’t ideal of course.
But later this week it’s supposed to be about 84F (28.9C) which is completely ridiculous and may undo all the effects of this snow, so naturally the week after that will feature yet more “fire danger” warnings. The weather people said so, according to the guy I live with, who is very, very tired of this.
He says more seasonal temperatures with some rain would be nice.

Anyway, that’s all I have for today. I had a nice walk this evening.

Until next time, then.