the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you something a little different. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Our Modern Lifestyle”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Rather pensive, and a bit wistful, don’t you think? We purebred border collies can often be lost in thought.

Well. I was beginning to wonder if I hadn’t repeated myself an awful lot in the last year or so. That’s quite possible, considering the large number of posts made on this blog.
So this post, as I said, will be a little different.

There’s so much snow on the ground that there’s no gardening, and all you would hear on that front is a bunch of complaining, so I’ll just skip that part.
Maybe you can see how much snow we got, with this picture of me standing on the canal road looking south down the field.
It’s not very cold out, even though it looks like it might be. It was cold last night, and really cold the night before, but the guy I live with just said, “Whatever”.

Sometimes things around here can be puzzling, to say the least.
Like just the other day, out of nowhere, and I do mean absolutely out of nowhere, the guy I live with said to me, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but rather that it exists.”
I had to look that up. It’s Wittgenstein. Again. This is at least the third time the blog has mentioned Wittgenstein, so maybe that’s overdoing it.
I thought about it for a minute, since that’s the amount of time I’d devote to wondering why the world exists, then took a nap.
In truth, I’m more interested in breakfast and dinner.

Sometimes, strange things happen that make me wonder if the guy I live with is all there, if you know what I mean. Besides quoting Wittgenstein. He was vacuuming behind the door of our bedroom, and looked at this like he’d never seen it before.
He said, “Huh”.  It was pretty dusty, so he washed it off. He said it had something called “potpourri” in it, and that at one time, years ago, it must have had a scent.
The bedroom door is always propped open with this doorstop. The doorstop is heavy so maybe that’s why the door is rarely shut.
I guess he didn’t finish vacuuming entirely.
But still, how can you spend twenty years sleeping in a room and never notice something? We purebred border collies notice almost everything.

The mail came today. The guy I live with was irked that he still hasn’t received some tax documents, because he hates having to put things off, though, on the other hand, he got a box filled with bags of coffee in it, the day before he was going to run out.
He keeps saying he’s going to “transition to tea”, and I know there’s tea in the cabinet, near where my biscuits are. It seemed strange to me that he keeps talking about taking up tea-drinking when there are at least four teapots in the house.
I don’t understand this at all. Maybe there’s something in Wittgenstein about it.

And he hasn’t heard from the ear doctor yet. He said he was going to be very patient, which I thought was a bit heavy-handed when talking about waiting for a doctor.

The ear is much better, by the way, though it still needs to be checked out. He can hear perfectly well now. He said it was something to do with his inner ear, which I didn’t get at all, because my ears are on the outside.
This has happened to him before. But he’d lost quite a bit of hearing in his ear, which completely freaked him out.
This is why.Music is the guy I live with’s main interest, and has been since he was eight.
It wasn’t listening to headphones that caused this; more like a cold, though he said it was because he was allergic to snow and cold weather, and that if I wasn’t such a total wimp about hot weather we’d move to Tucson. (I know that’s not going to happen, for like ten thousand reasons.)

Something really interesting happened yesterday. This was utterly astonishing to me.
I was on my morning walk, and noticed a whole bunch of water running down the gutter, into the storm drain kitty-corner from our house. The sidewalk in front of our neighbors’ house was a sheet of ice.
There were a couple of guys down the street looking at something, so I dragged the guy I live with down there to see what was going on.
This is what we saw:
It was a broken water main. There was water just bubbling up from the street.

Our water wasn’t affected; the water guys said they didn’t know how this happened, because the water pipe is buried pretty deeply, so it couldn’t have frozen.
When we came back home, the guy I live with went back out and talked to the water guys, because he used to do work sort of like that. Things involving backhoes and going into holes in the ground, and sometimes staying out all night, working.
The water main break got fixed by evening. I didn’t like all the big machinery, the noise, and the flashing lights.
This morning, we walked by again, and the guy I live with took a picture of some frozen mud. He said maybe this is the only blog that shows pictures of frozen mud.
I wanted to walk through it but the guy I live with said not to. You can also see what the color of our soil is, deep down in the ground.
The guy I live with, who’s not a geologist, by the way, says it gets its color from the Fountain Formation, which is what Red Rocks Amphitheater, about five miles away, is made of.

Now, I realize this has been kind of a different post. It seemed like a good idea. At least I didn’t have to hear about not seeing snowdrops until July, or tell you about it, either.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me doing something I’m not supposed to do, but I do it anyway. Head cool, hindquarters all toasty. Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, liked to do this, too, until the guy I live with’s wife made him close the back door because the heat was on.

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 yet another riveting update, even though there isn’t much about me. You may remember me from such snow- and snowdrop-related posts as “Manzanitas, Snow, And Snowdrops”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s almost sixty degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 Celsius), and the snow isn’t melting. If you think this drives the guy I live with right up the wall, you’d be right.
Not only that, it’s supposed to get down to about three below zero (-19.4 Celsius) later this week.
The guy I live with says he used to find winters here tolerable, but not so much any more.

There are some advantages to snow. Well, one or two, anyway. The seed frame definitely benefits from snow, by insulating it, and also by giving the seeds the required amount of cold they need to germinate.
The frame is nothing but 2×4s and chicken wire on top.
Hardware cloth would be better, to keep mice out. I know we have mice in the garden because I saw a couple on the patio last night. They were eating thistle seed that the guy I live with spilled when he was filling the feeders.

You can germinate seeds that need a cold treatment in other ways that bypass the need for cold (he talks about that a lot), but the guy I live with says this “lazy way” is excellent, and gets good results.

I should also mention the flat of seedpots sitting on the shelf on the patio. Careful attention needs to be paid to the pots having enough snow cover, which means the guy I live with will have to be more alert than he usually is.
For some reason, the snow falling on that flat isn’t meltproof. If the seeds dry out, it could take years for them to germinate, because they can become even more dormant.

There are also seeds in pots in the middle frame in this picture.
Those frames, even though they were just built a few years ago, are going to be removed and “repurposed”. This is kind of a big deal.
The guy I live with has decided they’re ugly, especially covered with plastic, and he’s going to transplant the snowdrops in the frames into the garden right there. (It’s actually called The North Border.) You can see there’s no snow, and the soil isn’t frozen because of the mulch, so it might be an ideal place for more snowdrops.
The main planting of snowdrops, which you can see in the blog’s “header”, are beyond the gate in the picture above.
In recent years there’s been snow on the ground for a long time there, which is frustrating to the guy I live with. He would rather see snowdrops.
So I guess there will be another garden, or border, devoted to flocks of snowdrops, especially ones that flower earlier. A couple might not like our hot winter sun, like the one with the sort of funny name, Galanthus ikariae var. snogerupii. (The leaves have these air pockets which cause the leaves to burn.)
These might have to go to the Botanic Gardens, for a better home.

There is some action in the snowdrop frame, but not much.
This is ‘Chequers’. Not a very focused picture, I know.
The main trouble with the frames is that because the low winter sun doesn’t shine on the soil as much as it should, the soil doesn’t get warm enough, and so the snowdrops planted closest to the front don’t do much.
And it would be easier to cover the snowdrops when it gets as cold as they say it might.
Not only that, but bees could get to the flowers, to do their pollinating.

The only other thing is to show the whole setup upstairs. The LED lights make the color look a little peculiar.
There used to be fluorescent lights, but the guy I live with said they were useless, and very annoying when they started to flicker or buzz. The new lights are much better.

The seed pots are in the propagators (fancy English ones), which the guy I live with got from Garden Talk.
The pots on the lower shelf are cyclamen that haven’t produced leaves yet, for some unknown reason.  He wonders about this a lot. The pots on the middle shelf are cyclamen that are just waiting to go out in the garden next year.

So that’s the snow, seeds, and snowdrops talk for today. There wasn’t enough about me in this post, but the guy I live with said that sometimes we do have to talk about gardening rather than just about me, even though I’m so fascinating.
I guess he’s right; he sometimes is.

I’ll say goodbye for now with an evening picture of me, outstanding in my field. (I had to say that.)

Until next time, then.