the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today with some fairly interesting news. You may remember me from such other newsworthy posts as “Some Nose News”,among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.  I bet you can tell that the weather has changed here. It’s been pretty nice. They say it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, which the guy I live with says is just fine. It rained for about four hours the other day; that was different.

I’d like to make a little prologue about the news I’m going to report. For some reason this is important to the guy I live with. We purebred border collies don’t have to deal with much of this, which leads me to believe that we’re just superior. I only worry about my breakfast and dinner, though I always get them right on time.

He says, “You know how when you do something, some people will always react with something negative, no matter what it is?”
We have a new metal friend.
The garage is filled with something called “new car smell”. And now we have a car that starts, reliably, in case we have to go anywhere in a hurry.
The guy I live with didn’t want to say what that meant, though I know if I had to go to the doctor, late at night, like if I ate something the guy I live with said not to but I did anyway, we would just go, even in three feet of snow, without fretting about a fifteen-year-old car.

“What if the economy collapses? What if gas prices go to ten dollars a gallon? What if there’s World War III? What if you can’t get gas any more?”
The guy I live with said he bets most people reading this post know people who say things like that.

He says he has two parrots; one on each shoulder.  (I’ve never seen them.)
The parrot on the right shoulder babbles stuff like those questions. It chatters constantly, loudly, about all sorts of things that drive him crazy.
When it gets to be almost too much, the parrot on his left shoulder (closer to the heart), leans in to him and whispers, “She died“.
And then he sees things for what they are.

Well, so, anyway, that’s our big news, at least in the reliable transportation department. I have some other news, as well.
The bulb frames are gone.
The bases of two of the frames are still there, though eventually they’ll be removed.
There’s a whole new planting space which you can sort of see on the right.
You can also see that we have a lot of puschkinias.

They’ve seeded all over the place.
There are even more in the beds to the left of the picture. These are Puschkinia scilloides, which used to be called P. libanotica. Very common in the bulb trade.

All kinds of bulbs are in flower now. This is Fritillaria pudica.
This is Tulipa kaufmanniana ‘Ugam’. Named, I think, for a mountain range in Uzbekistan.
Tulips, if you didn’t know, are mostly native to regions of the world that have a climate pretty much exactly like ours. The guy I live with has always wondered why the Front Range of the Rockies doesn’t have more species of bulbs, but it doesn’t, for some reason. No doubt a weird evolutionary reason.

I guess this tulip is also marketed as ‘Ice Stick’.

There are “regular” tulips here, too, and though they’re perennial, they do tend to disappear in what the guy I live with says are “annoying ways”, like he would plant a few dozen, and only ten of them would come back year after year. He says it’s because they’re “bred plants”, of which there are very few in the garden. But the species tulips, like the one pictured above, always come back.

So that’s it for the news. I hope you didn’t find the guy I live with’s pontificating, which I did because he said to, excessively tiresome. I do have to live with him, after all, so I know what it’s like.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me after a long day of gardening.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all the latest news from us. You may remember me from such posts as “Radar Ears, Rabbit Feet”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I think you can see the fairly dramatic change that’s taken place here. It was 61 degrees F here today. If you remembered my talk on converting Fahrenheit to Celsius, you’ll know that 61 F is 16 C. (The other one like that is 82F is 28C, or vice versa, of course.)

We have a new “ornament” in the garden. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s unbelievably attractive.
Yes, it’s a trash can. A trash can with a purpose, though.
The guy I live with spent some time cutting down all the grasses in the last couple of days. These are mostly native warm-season grasses, which is why this all looks so brown. The remains of the grasses went into that handsome trash can, and will eventually be transferred to one of the fancy compost piles that are in a part of the garden you don’t often see in pictures on this blog.
It takes forever to make compost here, because it hardly ever rains, but the guy I live with just says “Whatever”, and piles stuff into the compost–well, they’re not really bins, just these things made of rabbit wire that you pile stuff into.
The compost does attract various rodents, but I guess that’s okay, too.

Things are happening here. Can you see all the bees on Crocus ancyrensis ‘Golden Bunch’?
Ancyra was the ancient Roman name for Ankara in Turkey, if you needed to know that. We usually see these crocuses in February, but a lot of things are late, this year.

Cyclamen coum is flowering. In some years there would be flowers forming in December, but not after the winter we just had.
There’s even a white one.
Some people say the one with white flowers isn’t as hardy, but the guy I live with says that doesn’t make any sense at all.

This is Crocus sieberi ‘Firefly’; it was planted a very long time ago.
And Crocus tommasinianus. This is a self-sown (really, ant-sown) seedling.
Then there’s this. The guy I live with isn’t sure what this is.
Maybe it’s some kind of hybrid.

There are still a lot of snowdrops. I hear it’s pretty weird to have them in flower this late in the season.
So that’s the flowers part. I have to show flowers, because there is the word “gardener” in the blog’s title.

Some interesting things have happened lately. Even interesting to me. Because of course I had to hear about them.

First, the car. The car the guy I live with bought for his wife, and that’s an important thing.
I should back up a little and explain that ever since his wife died, right in front of him with no warning at all, he’s had this low-level fear, which he lives with (two therapists couldn’t really help with that), but sometimes it comes to the surface, and I can certainly tell when that happens. It happened with the car.
The car not wanting to start, at times (though eventually it always did start) freaked him out, so a couple of weeks ago he called a car dealer and ordered a new car. (He thought he could just drive over to a car dealer and buy a car, but no; the cars were “in transit”. And by “car” he means Subaru Outback.)

In the mean time, he thought and thought and thought (you should have been there, to see all this thinking) that maybe the problem was with the battery. He doesn’t drive much, and that has a bad effect on the battery.
So his friend drove down, really to take him to the ear doctor (I’ll get to that in a minute), but he came home with a new battery.
The next day, he tried to get the battery out, but the connection to the positive side wouldn’t budge, so he asked a couple of neighbors if they had a special 10 mm socket wrench. Neither of his neighbors did, but one, whom I like a lot, came over, and took a look at the battery cable. He’s eighty years old, but in a couple of minutes he got the connector off, which kind of irritated the guy I live with, but also made him happy. He gave our neighbor a bottle of wine and some other stuff.
After the guy I live with installed the new battery, the car didn’t start the first time, but did the second time.
Now he’s still not certain that the car will start every time. It makes less difference than before, because at least he replaced the five-year-old battery. Covering all the bases, like they say. (That’s a baseball metaphor, even though the guy I live with hates sports.)

But there was an even bigger deal: the visit to the ear doctor. I could tell that the guy I live with was nervous, and that’s pretty unusual, since he goes to the doctor all the time, which is what I guess you do when you’ve had cancer, and going to the doctor doesn’t bother him normally, but this time it did, because it was about his hearing.
He had a hearing test. He thought he was going to fail it, trying to hear all these tones.
They did all sorts of other ear-related things, too. Weird sounds vibrating in his head. The nurse said she had to check this frequency and that frequency.

Then he went into a waiting room.
The doctor, who was half the guy I live with’s age, came in, and said the tests didn’t find anything “scary”, like tumors and such. The guy I live with said that he’d already had the fright of his life, watching his wife die; he does tend to talk like that.
The doctor explained that tinnitus was a fact of life, and the guy I live with said he could live with that. (He pronounces “tinnitus” correctly, with the accent on the first syllable. I don’t know if the doctor was impressed or not.)
But the doctor also said that the guy I live with’s hearing was better than his. He has like the hearing of a twenty-year-old.

Imagine his relief. And the subsequent talk about having radar ears, just like me. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I can hear.
Music is a very important part of our life; I know that tomorrow is the 195th anniversary of Beethoven’s death. Another big deal. We purebred border collies can be very sophisticated, if you didn’t know.

Well, so, anyway, that’s the news from around here. I would say “from around hear”, but that might be too much.

Until next time, then.