Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the completely soaking purebred border collie, here to show you pictures from today.
You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain”, among at least a few others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You may notice that I’m totally soaking wet.
It’s been raining. It’s been raining since about six o’clock yesterday evening.
I have two towels, just for me, that the guy I live with uses to dry me off.
The guy I live with tells me two thoughts occur to him every morning as he wakes up. The first is that he realizes it’s going to be another day without his wife here, and the second is that it’s going to be another day without rain.
But today was different, with the rain part. It was raining when we went to bed last night, and it was raining when we got up this morning.
The rain stopped for about a minute, and then it started again.
Some of the houseplants went outside this morning, to get nice rain water, and to be washed off, too.
You can’t see most of them in this picture, which I think is pretty funny. Three on the left, including the dwarf plumeria which has never flowered.
The creek is flooding.
On my evening walk, the water level was down a bit.
You can also see that the water in the canal has stopped flowing. This might be related to all the rain. Maybe they had to do something with the floodgates at the reservoir, where the water in the canal comes from.
There were huge crawdads crawling around.
On the other side of the canal, the creek is sort of flooding there, too.
This flows into Bear Creek, which flows into the South Platte River, which meets the North Platte River at North Platte, Nebraska, and then becomes the Platte River, which flows into the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
A lot of water.
There is a little bit of actual gardening news. The guy I live with was delighted to see seeds of erythroniums germinating. This is Erythronium idahoense.
It’s time for these to be potted up. The seeds were put in this plastic bag, with some very damp vermiculite, in January, and the cold in the refrigerator has done its work.
There are about six species to be potted up now, as well as some other things.
We have some erythroniums in the garden here, the commercially-available ‘Pagoda’, ‘White Beauty’, and ‘Kondo’ in the shade garden, as well as a couple of species. They’re not hard to grow, even here (with watering).
And that’s the news for today. The very damp and soggy news. I’ll leave you with a picture of me on the wet canal road.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
I had to Google “crawdad” and see there was even a film with that in the title! Did you eat them? Happy rainy day!
The guy I live with says some people call them crayfish or crawfish, and say they’re edible. Last year there was a guy and a bunch of kids catching them and putting them in a pail.
The guy I live with has tried them once. “Not like lobster”, he says.
We got almost three inches of rain, just yesterday. 7.62 cm. He went out with a flashlight around midnight, which is Tinkle Time, to see if the creek had seriously flooded, but it hdsn’t.
Goodness, 3 inches is a lot of rain; flooding rain levels! Stay high and dry.
Over four inches of rain. And it’s raining right now. That’s not unusual for this time of year; drought in spring is unusual. It’s like a return to “the old days”.
The guy I live with had something to say about the weeds, though. I won’t repeat it.
Oh, rain brings growth and that includes the weeds!
That is certainly true. The guy I live with did quite a bit of weeding today.
It rained a little, too.
Mani mee frend you ARE a ‘Soggy Doggy”…..wee hope you are all dry an cozy now.
An that creek lookss purrty full fore sure. Pleese bee carefull when you an Guy go fore walkss! Do not want youss’ swept out to THE mitey Mississippi!!!! 😉
***nose bopss*** BellaDharma an {{hugss}} BellaSita Mum
I did get soaking wet. And it’s raining again tonight (Thursday).
By the way, the guy I live with no longer gets email notifications from WordPress, for some weird reason, and so he has to look carefully at the post to see any new comments. Kind of annoying.
He worked with WordPress on another issue, a week or so ago, and so now maybe he might address this latest weirdness.
“There were huge crawdads crawling around.”
Do they make mudbug mounds?
” tried them once. “Not like lobster””
Vegetarians, avert your eyes:
Some say the best bite is sucking the fat from the head.
The guy I live with said that in New Orleans, where they eat these things, “suck head and pinch tail”.
Maybe his experience at one of those all-you-can-eat Asian buffets was not the ideal presentation. Just crawdads.
We didn’t see any mounds, but did see a few dead ones today, like someone had eaten them.
The guy I live with said the canal used to be visited by a great blue heron, back when Chess was here.
That 24+ hours of steady but gentle rain was heaven sent, wasn’t it? Everything will take on a nice vibrance (including the weeds which we’ll need to winnow as soon as the ground dries out). Having lived on the Front Range for ages, you gratefully accept the rain whenever it falls.
It’s very nice. The guy I live with tells people who haven’t lived here that long that this isn’t unusual, and what is unusual is drought in spring.
It’s raining right now, and supposed to rain more later this week.
For a short time I lived in the PNW; there have been times when I think I’ve been transported back there with the amount of rain we’ve received.
The guy I live with says this reminds him of “the old days”, as maybe I’ve said. And he used to have a friend who lived up in the mountains, near Evergreen. In the summer it would rain there every single afternoon. Sometimes a lot, sometimes not.
Oh rain. I am envious. We just got through 6 months of winter and now comes the 6 months of summer. Well, happy splashing, Mani. Are you allowed to plunge in? Do you want to?
It’s so nice, and there’s no thunder.
I’m not allowed to jump in the creek because the water isn’t clean. The guy I live with said that one time when the creek flooded, all the way up to the back fence after a terrific storm, the water reeked of weedkiller or something.
I am allowed to go into the canal, which I do when it gets really hot.
The guy I live with said he could deal with six months of no rain if winter had rain instead of snow. He grew up in Los Angeles where it was like that.
How nice to get a good soaking. This will certainly help the plants as summer approaches. Unfortunately, it’s uncomfortable for those walks through the meadow and along the creek. We would love some rain as we are in serious drought conditions with fires raging across the province. Need to update my rain dance as it’s not working.
We’re beyond soaking, here. It’s raining right now. And supposed to rain more later this week.
Sorry about the fires; we know about such things.
It’s strange for me to have rain with no thunder.
Germinating seed in baggies seems risky to me. I prefer to grow them in flats or pots. However, that procedure is about as risky. Dislodging them from their media is more disruptive than separating them from other germinating seed in a baggy. I just do not think about it because it is how I have always done it. If I expect almost all to germinate, I grow them directly in cells.
It’s not risky, really. The guy I live with says that these seeds, calochortus, fritillarias, erythroniums, etc., need a certain amount of time at 39F before the enzyme that degrades abscisic acid is activated. For fritillarias the time can be even longer (years) because the embryo only develops under such conditions. Even the species from California need that.
The plastic bag is opened, water poured in, and the entire contents gets poured into a pot filled with soil-less mix, when the seeds are ready to germinate.
Sometimes the seeds germinate in the refrigerator, as the picture shows.
Yes, that is what looks risky. Germinated seed are difficult to handle without breaking off their new roots, which can be a major problem for some newly germinated seed.
What the guy I live with does is pour some water into the plastic bag, shake it gently, and then pour the vermiculite, seeds, and water on top of a pot filled with soil-less mix. Then the top of the pot is sprinkled with fine gravel.