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 pumpkins. You may remember me from such posts as “Missing The Muskrat”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I should probably clarify what I said about it not being “super dry” here. The month of October wasn’t super dry, despite us receiving only about half the average precipitation for that month, but in the last four weeks we’ve only received one-tenth of an inch (2.54mm) of rain.
The guy I live with is not thrilled with this at all, let me tell you.
We do have a possibility of rain or snow this next weekend, but most of those forecast possibilities since June evaporated just a few days before rain was predicted.
Meanwhile, some gardening has been going on. The guy I live with is “driven nuts” by the sight of people raking up leaves and throwing them in the trash, but that’s what some people do.
The fallen leaves in our garden get raked into beds, and especially the little garden on the north side of the house.
This little garden has almost forty years of leaf mold in the soil.
There are still some crocuses in flower. This is Crocus pulchellus; the corms have been here for a very long time.
And there’s another snowdrop in flower.
The guy I live with separated this bulb from the main group, and planted it in a small pond basket, thinking he might give it away, but he decided against that.
Galanthus elwesii ‘Potter’s Prelude’.
The main group of ‘Potter’s Prelude’ is planted much more deeply so the bulbs are barely up.
As you can see, they’re growing in a pond basket, too.
The guy I live with said next year he’s going to lift the bulbs in this basket and plant them at a “normal” depth.
A few days ago the guy I live with was out in the front garden and thought about removing all the dried stalks of Aster bigelovii, without shaking the seeds all over, because then there might be too many plants.
Later that day he noticed there was help removing the seeds.
The mouse, which is what that is, spent quite a bit of time eating seeds.
That green squiggly thing is a stand to hold a spray hozzle; you wind the hose through the squiggles.
Speaking of help removing things, this is what I encountered on my morning walk yesterday.
Someone, kids probably, had smashed a bunch of pumpkins.
The guy I live with said the pumpkins would be gone in a couple of weeks, but I didn’t understand that.
Until today, when we came back from walking farther down the canal road than we did yesterday.
Maybe you can’t see them, but there were four or five squirrels snacking on the pumpkins.
The guy I live with said pretty soon every squirrel in the neighborhood would be here, snacking on pumpkins.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Ah yes, squirrels and pumpkins. The annual autumn battle to repel the buggers if, like me, one enjoys real, intact pumpkins as porch decorations. This year I tried smearing Vick’s VapoRub over them (the pumpkins) and for a few weeks, it worked. Then it didn’t. I am amazed the squirrels could stand the smell.
The guy I live with said he looked at pumpkins for sale, with the idea of creating some autumnal cheer, but he said squirrels would chew them to pieces in no time.
Of course, if he’d bought a bunch and like smashed a few around the yard, maybe the decorative ones would have escaped chewing.
But then I might eat some of the pumpkin too, because I like pumpkin a lot.
That ‘Potter’s Prelude’ always strikes me as a good strong-growing and reliable snowdrop. It is uncommon on this side of the Atlantic but some have it. By comparison I was raking leaves today – taking them off paths and grass and stacking them in a compost area. Those on beds are left there and do add to the soil. I have found that leaving plants standing, without cutting down those fading herbaceous plants, helps trap the leaves and hold them in place on the beds – nature’s way, I suppose, Oh, the comparison: the wheelbarrow left deep ruts in the soft, saturated soil when full with leaves, hardly a heavy load but the ground is so soft.
The guy I live with says Potter’s is a very nice one. He first planted it in the shade garden where it usually wouldn’t flower in autumn (too dark there), so he moved the bulbs to a sunnier spot. Likewise with ‘Peter Gatehouse’; he would have to do some serious looking to find that one, even though it has a label.
Here, the guy I live with says if you have a compost pile, it has to be watered a lot to make compost, which seems kind of pointless.
Raking leaves into beds is very satisfying; I can tell.
As you can imagine, there is no shortage of moisture in our compost heaps here. I combine grass cuttings with everything else from the garden making heaps 1.5 metres x 1.5 by 2 high and they get very hot.
The guy I live with says rain is now so rare here that raking leaves into the beds, a la Graham Stuart Thomas, is the best way to go.
Snow can be a big help in matting down the leaves.
A couple of years ago there were two large tubs, inserts for half-whiskey barrels for a “water feature”, complete with pump, which were foisted upon the guy I live with, and he filled them with pine needles. After one winter the tubs were also full of water, and they stank, but after draining the tubs there was a nice amount of rotted pine needles to spread on the “cyclamen path”.
This year there are two trash cans filled with pine needles, which will be left open to the elements for the same purpose.
“Raking leaves into beds is very satisfying;” We used to rake them into long windrows and run them over with a lawnmower a few times and then spread them in and around the garden. That way they did not blow about. In my dotage on the farm we just mow them into the lawn where they fall and leave the rest to their fate.
The guy I live with only has a Green Mountain push mower, so that wouldn’t work.
There are something like two dozen trash bags filled with leaves at a neighboring house, no doubt to be thrown away, despite the fact that there’s a city greenhouse that takes leaves, less than five minutes’ drive from here.