Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on our news, as well as to talk about some arcane and esoteric things. You may remember me from such posts as “The Shapeless Ones”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’ve had a pretty good day, alternating gardening with napping, though I did get super in trouble and yelled at for trying to eat a bald-faced hornet.
The guy I live with said if I started swelling up like a balloon, we’d have to take a trip to the emergency vet. Or maybe the guy I live with has some Benadryl that’s not expired.
I eat bees and yellowjackets (and get yelled at), and nothing happens.
The guy I live with said Pooka, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, got totally swollen when he was stung by a bumblebee.
I didn’t swell up, so the guy I live with was just wrong. He often is.
So anyway, to keep talking about me, I’ve had this digestive issue, on and off, for a while, and the guy I live with was finally able to get a sample on my morning walk yesterday, and took it to the vet’s. I have clostridium and giardia. I’ve had this before, and Chess, another purebred border collie who lived here before me, got it all the time.
I have an antibiotic and this icky-looking gray prescription food that doesn’t taste bad at all.
There’s some yogurt with honey in the refrigerator, for my tummy, in case I need it.
Yesterday we had an invader.
Since I was sort of under the weather the guy I live with said it was okay if I didn’t chase the bunny away. I was asleep, actually.
Today, the guy I live with got a new spade in the mail. He already has spades, but this one if made by the same people who made the Garden Shark, and you can see it’s designed for very serious digging, just like the Shark is.
There are some things that even the Shark won’t dig up, but this spade will. He’s already tried it.
He has a couple of other spades, and he may give them away. He does things like that, a lot.
And now for some arcane and esoteric gardening stuff.
The guy I live with got a small box of autumn-flowering crocuses yesterday.
You can buy autumn-flowering crocuses, like the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, and C. speciosus and C. pulchellus, from bulb brokers or even at the local garden center, but these are different.
Well of course they’re different. The guy I live with is a bulb snob, if you didn’t know.
These were potted up today, so they can be watered, and planted out in August. (If they were planted out now, they might not form roots, unless they’re watered, and the guy I live with would probably forget to water them.)
He only ordered one of each, except for the next one, to make the order a small one, but also because he says you really only need one corm.
The corm pictured below is called a “mother” corm. Some autumn-flowering crocuses, like the saffron crocus, grow leaves right after flowering. The leaves overwinter and have to be protected from rabbits, who love crocus leaves.
With the two species below, leaves appear in spring.
When the leaves die back, and with either type it’s just about the same time in mid-spring, the mother corm begins to form little cormlets, or “daughter” corms, and the starch in the mother corm is transferred to the daughter corms.
If the daughter corms grow well, they’ll flower the following autumn, and the old mother corm will have withered away.
This is Crocus damascenus (C. cancellatus subsp. damascenus.) Look at the reticulated, or netted, tunic on the corm. (The tunic is the covering on the corm.) That’s one way to distinguish crocus species. Flowers are of course another way.
This is Crocus suworowianus. (C. kotschyanus subsp. suworowianus.) The smooth tunics are obvious, but there is one glaringly weird thing here.
I mean this is ultra super weird, if you ask me. The corms are on their sides. That’s because this particular crocus, and another one that also used to be subspecies of Crocus kotschyanus, C. cappadocicus, grow in the wild with their corms sideways like this. The flowering shoots emerge, and then turn at a right angle to the corm, and grow in the normal direction.
There must be some evolutionary reason for this, but it’s just plain weird.
The pots are sitting on the squirrel-proof shelves built by the guy I live with’s wife.
With some extra screening over the pots, just in case a squirrel can slither through a gap. I didn’t think squirrels slithered, but the guy I live with said squirrels can do almost anything.
Finally, we had a surprise last night. I began to hear thunder around 9:30 and headedup to my Upstairs Fort, for safety.
There was a lot of thunder and lightning, and then it rained.
We got about a quarter inch of rain, which the guy I live with said was excellent.
Well, that’s all the news from here.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
I hope you are already feeling better, Mani. As for eating hornets and the like, I had a Brittany who once ate a bee, and her face swelled up a lot. She didn’t try eating one again, as far as I know.
That is a super nice spade the guy you live with got. And very interesting corm photos.
Thanks; I think I’m feeling better, though I had issues with my appetite the last time I took an antibiotic, so the guy I live with is going to get more yogurt for the refrigerator. And Brie, for my pills.
The guy I live with said he would be super annoyed if we had to make a trip to the emergency vet, and so much for the supposed intelligence of purebred border collies, but I was okay.
The spade is called a “Sampson”, and was kind of expensive ($75), though not as much as the other spades he got a long time ago. It came from Way Cool Tools.
Much less jarring on the body to dig things up.
Thank you for sharing the spade source!
You’re welcome. They have some pretty interesting stuff.
May tummy trouble pass quickly and I hope the bunny moves along and that Pooka (Púca) does not haunt the garden and house
Thanks. The guy I live with said Pooka’s name was really spelled Pwcca, which I guess is Welsh or something. His wife got the spelling from the Gaelic dictionary upstairs. Or just felt like spelling it that way.
I think the guy I live with said it should be Pooka, after the Pooka MacPhellimy in At Swim-Two-Birds.
His nose was all pink when he was a puppy, but the pink went away, so the guy I live with called him Pinkless. There’s even a Pinkless Song, which the guy I live with tried unsuccessfully to upload onto the blog. Fortunately, in my opinion.
Flurry and Slipper were named for characters in The Irish R.M.
Chess was black and white, too, and named after the game; the guy I live with wanted his name to be Neutrino the Wonder Dog, but his wife said no.She didn’t have that advanced sense of humor, I guess.
I’m named after the Sanskrit word for “jewel”.
To us, a púca is a ghost. It was generally one that took the shape of an animal but as children we most spoke of it on hearing an unusual sound, especially at night.
We heard an unusual sound last night. I thought it was scary, but there was a mundane explanation.
The guy I live with said, and this is probably a very unusual sound to most people, these days, that it was ice defrosting in the refrigerator in the garage, and falling onto the tray below.
That spade seems to be Klingon in origin. Postage from Kronos must have been very expensive.
https://waycooltools.com/products/sampson-small-spade-no-serrations-one-side-or-two-side-serrations-handle-length-and-style-choices/
What kind of handle is on that Sampson spade? T, D, Ball, Other? Shaft length and material? Is the top of the blade “turned”?
T-handle, 36 inch shaft.
https://waycooltools.com/products/sampson-small-spade-no-serrations-one-side-or-two-side-serrations-handle-length-and-style-choices/
Hi Mani!
Good to hear you are doing better. My departed fur friend got stung by a bee on his nose once and it completely puffed up, but he recoverd very quickly. I told him he looked like one of those models with the overly puffy collagen injected lips. I don’t think he appreciated the comparison.
A question for the bulb snob, if I may? My plain common colchicum has spread itself all over my garden beds. I now have too much and the dying-back leaves flop all over and look yuck. I’ve discovered they’re very firmly dug in. Does he have any tips on removing and/ or thinning them? Would this new spade or.trowel be a good choice? (my un-amended soil a few inches down is a clay-ish glacial till embedded with numerous tightly wedged rocks.)
thanks!
Thanks; I’m feeling much better, and I like the icky gray prescription food.
The guy I live with said the Sampson spade (the one pictured) would probably slice right through all the colchicum corms. A better tool might be a spading fork. A heavy-duty one, that is. There should be lots of daughter corms that can be transplanted.
The reticulated tunic is perhaps the best part of C. damascenus. I find that sort of pattern very pleasing. So far, I’ve enjoyed my first foray into the bulb exchange as part of the Pacific Bulb Society. Not sure I will ever achieve bulb snob status, but I do appreciate seeing what people put up for adoption.
The guy I live with said that’s not a bad place to start. A bulb addiction can be expensive, though. I guess like any other addiction.
He also says crocus tunics can be kind of interesting. Sometimes they fall off when they’re mailed, or planted, but that’s okay.