the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about bulbs. You may remember me from such posts as “Day Of The Scorpiris”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I was helping, as you can see.It’s kind of a melancholy time of year for the guy I live with, and no doubt for anyone who’s lost someone in their lives, and, to make things even less enjoyable, things are weird.

The guy I live with, being a gardener and all, often has to go out to the shed for stuff. I don’t go in there much at all, but I get the feeling it’s a melancholy place at this time of year, because the guy I live with and his wife built the shed, and she decorated it.
She built the windows and the shelf, and did all sorts of things to make the shed feel like a nice shed.
I know I’ve shown this before.
The curtains have been shredded by squirrels, and, if you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you may remember the time Earl (the squirrel) stole all the twine from the can of Nutscene twine you can see on the shelf.
You can also see the heart his wife carved into the shelf.
Anyway, one of the weirder things among all this weirdness has been the mail delivery. The guy I live with learned that one of his bulb orders was lost in the mail, and he was really fretting about another order from England, but today they arrived. He was very relieved.Most of the bulbs were in good shape, though the colchicums looked pretty pathetic. I know now, because the guy I live with talks about it all the time, that the colchicums needed to form roots, because that’s what they do at this time of year.
The guy I live with did a lot of thinking. This was the second time in the last two weeks that there’s been all this thinking.

There were three possible options. Plant the colchicums in pots and put them in the frame, or put the pots upstairs, or plant them in the garden. Eventually, after more thinking than even the faucet business took, the colchicums were planted in the garden, deeply, watered, then covered with soil, and mulched with pine needles.
They were planted in the “new slope”. It’s not really new, but the stuff growing there had been cleared away. I know it doesn’t look like much.
Those white stalks are Allium pskemense; they haven’t been cut down yet “because of maintenance issues”. (I’m not allowed near onions, so I couldn’t help.)

The next thing were the autumn-flowering crocuses. Some of these had flowering stalks, but no roots, which is just as typical as with colchicums.
About two months ago there was more of this thinking, which even involved digging up some crocuses to look at them “for scientific purposes”, and he concluded that crocuses already growing in the garden don’t need water in the soil to form roots.
If the newly-planted crocus corms don’t have roots, like the colchicums, they won’t form new corms for next year unless they get sufficient water.
So after all this investigation, he suddenly understood why so many autumn-flowering crocuses he’d planted in the last ten years (really expensive ones, too) never showed up the next year. They didn’t get enough water after they were planted. They didn’t form roots, and just withered away.
Crocuses, like colchicums, grow from annual corms. The starch in the corm begins to degrade at flowering time, and is transferred to the new corms, which then continue to grow, if they have roots. Last year’s corm withers away.
The crocuses couldn’t be planted in the garden, because it’s supposed to get down to ten degrees (-12C) on Friday night. Supposedly with snow.
They also couldn’t go into pots in the bulb frame, because when bulbs are planted there, they go into pots and are planted very deeply, almost at the bottom of the pot, which would be too deep for crocuses, and if they were planted at normal depth, and froze, that would be that. Bulbs are killed at low temperatures like that, which is why they grow in the ground, insulated by soil. Growing them in a pot doesn’t give them enough insulation; that only works for bulbs planted deeply. The guy I live with lost a bunch of crocuses that way; that was before he did all the thinking that he does now.
So the crocuses went into flower pots, planted at normal crocus depth, got watered, and are now upstairs.

This is the soil used for potting. Just old stuff that was in the troughs, with very little organic matter.
Then there were the irises. The guy I live with had already decided what to do with them, because ideally they need to be planted in August.
These are Regelia irises, which are like Oncocyclus irises but have more than one flowering stalk; also like Oncocyclus irises, they grow leaves in the autumn, which you would think is a very silly thing for them to do, but the irises do it anyway. (The leaves have a rough time during the winter, but new leaves grow in spring.)
Mostly forms of Iris stolonifera, from places like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. (Not hybrids; I know enough not to ask.)
The rhizomes don’t look anything at all like regular bearded irises.
These went into pots which were taken upstairs, and watered.
You can see that the rhizomes already had roots, but all the ones he grew in the past would have had leaves by now (he gave all the Oncocyclus irises, and most of the Regelias, to the botanic gardens some years ago), and planting the rhizomes, which aren’t planted very deeply at all, in the garden when it’s supposed to get so cold seemed excessively dumb. The guy I live with has done a lot of dumb stuff in the garden, but even this was too much for him.

Maybe you can tell by now that the guy I live with mostly ignores all the bulb advice in books and online, because our climate is so different from most normal gardening climates, and because our climate is also very similar to the ones the bulbs grow in. That’s why he says “ignorance is bliss”.

Well, this has been one of those didactic posts, which, fortunately for everyone, we don’t do very often. There wasn’t enough about me, for one thing.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, glowing in the dark.

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 some things around our house and garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Haunted Toaster”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I was looking at something. Probably a squirrel.
That’s Dasylirion berlandieri in the pot, if you wanted to know. It will have to come inside if it ever gets cold.

I might as well get right to the title of today’s post. I think this is an object lesson for everyone.
A few weeks ago, maybe even more weeks ago than that, the faucet started dripping.
Now if you know your faucets, you will know that this is by no means an inexpensive faucet. It’s a commercial one, with handles that can be turned on and off using wrists, if necessary. The guy I live with says it’s part of the batterie de cuisine here.
At first it was just dripping a little. Then suddenly it started dripping a bit faster.
The guy I live with put a gallon plastic milk jug under the faucet, with a big funnel stuck in it to catch the dripping water. He thought that was pretty genius-y.
I wondered if the faucet was ever going to get fixed, because I could hear the dripping at night. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Like that.

He explained that yes he knew how to fix the faucet. You unscrew the faucet handle, then spend a bit of time trying to get the handle off, then you remove the handle hub (the thing right below the handle), and pull out the cartridge.
He even had a replacement cartridge. More than one, actually. There are “hot” and “cold” cartridges. The one pictured above is a “cold”.

He held his arm under the dripping water, wrist upward, and said it was cold water.
But then he did some additional thinking, which he said was always a good idea, and ordered new handle hub kits, because the last time he replaced the cartridge he had a very difficult time replacing the handle hub.

But he still put this off. He’s not really the sort of person to do that, because he hates having things weighing on his mind like that, but what if the turn off valves under the sink didn’t work, or started to leak, and what if a plumber had to be called, or what if he had to go into the crawlspace to shut off the water and what if the yellowjackets in the crawlspace weren’t really gone but just waiting for him to crawl over to the main shutoff valve?

Well, last week he reached under the sink to test the shutoff valve for the cold water pipe, and everything was fine.
So yesterday, he shut off the cold water, spent about half an hour removing the faucet handle and hub, pulling out the cartridge, which of course didn’t just come out when he pulled on it with a pair of heavy-duty pliers, replaced the cold water cartridge, put everything back the way it was, and turned on the cold water.

The faucet still dripped.

You may be able to imagine what sort of language I heard.

Then he explained that the water coming from the hot side was only hot when it was coming from the hot water heater. It cools off just sitting in the pipe.
Fortunately he also had a hot water cartridge, and also fortunately, the shutoff below the sink worked (he installed it years ago). There were a lot of deposits on everything because we have what they call “hard” water. Having a wire brush helped.

So everything is fine. For now.

Aside from that (whew, huh), let’s talk about some things more related to actual gardening, or at least the outdoors.

The goldfinches are back.
The guy I live with moved one of the steel feeder stands and put up the other “thistle” feeder, and so now the goldfinches have two feeder choices.
You can see them here, on the other feeder.
All those dry warm-season grasses, which are mostly native ones, are kind of echoed by the yellow grass in the field, which isn’t native, and is a cool-season grass, but hasn’t had any water for months, so it looks like that.

This is what the soil in the “way back” garden looks like. Bone-dry.
Lilium candidum looks pretty good right now. There are only two bulbs left; the guy I live with isn’t really certain what happened to the others, but I’d bet he sliced through them with a trowel, because he does that all the time.
He went into the shade garden just to check on things, and when he moved some of the leaves, this is what he saw.
Lots of snowdrops. There are zillions of them in this little garden. The soil here isn’t dry. Mostly Galanthus elwesii ‘Theresa Stone’ and offspring (crossed with regular G. elwesii), but also some G. plicatus, G. rizehensis, G. nivalis, and G. gracilis. A lot. You can see them in the header for the blog.

Well, that’s all I have for today. I thought the faucet story was pretty funny, but that’s because, as the guy I live with said, I didn’t have to do the work.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me wearing my fancy new lighted collar. The guy I live with got it for me so that people would be able to see me at night, on my walks. Or maybe he just got it because he thought it might be cool.

Until next time, then.