the miserable gardener

a turkey post

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk turkey. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Talking Turkey”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m surveying the field. You can tell that it snowed. Snow is kind of obvious.
The guy I live with says it always snows here, but I think he’s exaggerating. This was really slushy snow.

So we were walking along, the way we do, and suddenly the guy I live with spotted these very large birds walking slowly down into the field.
He said “Huh”, and told me we should investigate.
The guy I live with said “Those are turkeys”. He explained that they weren’t exactly quite like the turkey that goes on sandwiches, with mayonnaise, but they were pretty close to that. He didn’t want to talk about it, though.
I wanted to get closer.
Eventually, the turkeys hopped over the creek and walked over to our garden’s back fence.
I really wanted to see more of them, so we walked around the creek and along the coyote path behind our yard. The turkeys were looking into our yard. The guy I live with said maybe they smelled the seed in the bird feeders.
But when I got close, the turkeys must have sensed my deadly ferocity, and they walked away.
The guy I live with said that the fact that they walked away, and didn’t fly, meant that they didn’t think I was all that fierce.
So we went home.

But I got to see turkeys. It was an excellent day.

Until next time, then.

how things change

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here after another long and very chilly absence to bring you up to date on the latest news from our house and garden. You may remember me from such change-related posts as “Another Change”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see there’s still snow in the garden. It’s 69 degrees F (about 20.5 C) right now, but last week we had three very chilly nights, with snow again. I think it got down to about -5 F (-20.5 C) at least one night, in some parts of the city, anyway.
It was very unpleasant, even for me. I had to wear my boots on a couple of walks because it was so cold during the day.
The guy I live with was going to drive the car over to the car dealer’s, last Monday, before it got cold, but discovered that the cars available on the website weren’t there yet, so he put down a deposit on one. This is kind of exciting, even though he hardly goes anywhere, preferring to spend time with me at home. I can be delightful, if you didn’t know.

The ice on the paths is still quite thick, even though it’s so warm.
All of the snowdrops were totally exposed to the cold before the snow fell; it was about 5 F (-15C) when that happened.
The guy I live with felt sorry for the snowdrops, but they were all perfectly fine.

Here are some Galanthus elwesii that have escaped from the “main flock”.
The “main flock” itself looks okay, even after all that traumatic weather.
You can see that the snowdrops have seeded around a bit. There are some other species here, but Galanthus elwesii is the main one, and over the last quarter century or so they’ve started to go a little crazy.
We have a lot of ants in the garden; ants do the work of spreading the seeds around.

Except with this one.
This is Galanthus alpinus var. bortkewitschianus (really),only known from a tiny area in the western Caucasus. It’s sterile, and so doesn’t set any seeds.
It doesn’t grow very tall because it’s weighed down by its name.

With all the warm weather of the last few days, the crocuses are up. This is Crocus ancyrensis ‘Golden Bunch’.
And some of the spring-flowering colchicums, too. This is Colchicum bulbocodium (which you can buy as Bulbocodium vernum; DNA or something showed this was really a colchicum, but the name Colchicum vernum was already taken).
So that’s it. We hope there are no more deep freezes.