the miserable gardener

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 tomato, and other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Shedding Light”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
There are still colchicums in flower. These are Colchicum cilicium. (Sometimes sold as C. tenorei, but there’s another colchicum, C. × ambiguum, sold under that name too.)
You may well ask why it’s Cyclamen cilicium but Colchicum cilicicum. Both Latin words refer to the ancient Roman province of Cilicia, now in southern Turkey. But having to check the spelling is annoying. (There’s also a snowdrop, Galanthus cilicicus, in the garden here.)
Colchicum speciosum ‘Album’ is almost open.
Both of these colchicums have been in the garden for about thirty years, but the white one has been very slow to increase.

Thanks to the rain, the first crocuses have appeared. This is Crocus kotschyanus ‘Reliance’.  (Yes, it should be ‘Reliant’, which makes more sense.)

The goldenrod, Solidago ‘Wichita Mountains’ is in fully flower now. This is one of the guy I live with’s favorite autumn-flowering plants.
You can smell it and hear it from quite a distance away. It’s usually covered with bees.

And…the tomato.
A few days ago a neighbor gave the guy I live with a homegrown heirloom tomato, maybe ‘Purple Calabash’.
It sat on the counter for a couple of days, and then he sliced it and ate it.
I could tell how good it was by what he said.
Then he wondered why he was spending all this time growing difficult or rare plants to post on social media when he could be growing tomatoes. Not to mention plants hummingbirds love.

I would quote Yeats’ poem “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”, but you can look that up online.

So this edifice, which was going to be a frame for growing difficult bulbs, is going to have tomatoes in it next year.
The guy I live with said he’s still not too old to learn valuable lessons.
It’s in the hottest part of the garden so the tomatoes will appreciate that.

So that’s our news for the day. I’m very used to having the guy I live with change his mind constantly so I was able to deal with this quite easily.

Until next time, then.

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 what happened last night and quite early this morning. You may remember me from such posts as “Next To Nothing”, and so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The area beyond me has been left unplanted so purebred border collies can stand at the back fence and bark at stuff. We’re not allowed to have anything but a chain link fence because that’s a flood plain beyond.
The galvanized tub is an old one and was going to be a planter but it just sits there. It does have holes drilled in the bottom.

There are still some colchicums in flower. People sometimes ask the guy I live with why there are so many colchicums here, in what’s mostly a native-plant garden.
His answer is that they were for sale.
This is Colchicum bivonae ‘Mount Giona’, named for a mountain in Greece. The phone camera does tend to make some of the petals look elongated.
And this is Colchicum speciosum ‘Atrorubens’, which means dark red.
The name probably refers to the stems.
There are cyclamen, too.
This is Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Tile Barn Helena’.
This is a terrible picture of Cyclamen cilicium which he discovered was flowering under a daphne.
And Cyclamen mirabile ‘Tile Barn Anne’. The pinkish leaves are the thing here, as they are with most cyclamen.

So about the ominously philosophical-sounding title of today’s post.

Today is the guy I live with’s wedding anniversary, the seventeenth without his wife.
People sometimes ask how he makes it from day to day (it doesn’t get any easier with time, no matter what some people say).
He has rituals, like pouring water into the coffee maker (it’s a Bunn so hot coffee just pours out right away; he fills the holder with coffee the night before, and the carafe with water, no earlier than 9:01 p.m.), then making my breakfast, and after a while, we go on my morning walk.

We go on my evening walk around sunset, at this time of year.
Around midnight, we go to bed and watch “Q.I.” for a while. Every night. Even though he’s seen all the episodes many times.

But last night, about 10 p.m., everything went dark. Really dark.
This was a bit much for me, having already encountered a Day of the Dead party balloon ealier that day.
The solar lamps in the garden were on, but everything else was engulfed in darkness.
There was a power outage, possibly due to all the rain. The utilities here are all underground, one of the first neighborhoods here with things buried, but a lot of rain can still cause problems.
I wondered how we were going to watch “Q.I.” at bedtime since the modem downstairs was off. This is an important ritual for the guy I live with.
He lit some candles and made sure the flashlights worked.

The guy I live with explained that the phone and the little tablet he bought would automatically switch to the 4G wireless platform when the modem was out, so his phone would work, and so would the tablet. We went to bed and watched “Q.I.” on the tablet.
It felt very high-tech.

At about two this morning there was a loud knock on the door. I didn’t like that at all. The guy I live with is a little apprehensive about noises early in the morning, because his wife died early in the morning, but this time he knew what it was.

He let the power guy in through the garage so he could look at the transformer. The power guy did some work and said the power was “good to here”, and the guy I live with said he knew exactly what that meant since he’d done similar work, often late at night, for the phone company.
The power guy left and drove down the street. The guy I live with told me stories about going into back yards at night.
The lights came on about half an hour after that.

Later, during the day, the guy I live with did a factory reset on my internet radio since it doesn’t like power outages, and we did have arguments about who gets to catch yellowjackets that fly into the kitchen. He caught a couple in the butterly net his wife made, and threw the yellowjackets back outside, and I ate one.
The lack of a sliding screen door is another one of those things that needs to be addressed, some day.

After telling that long story I had to spend some time in my Kitchen Fort, ever wary of yellowjackets though.

Until next time, then.