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 the weather, which has changed again. You may remember me from such posts as “Much More Springy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.It got up to 84 degrees today. That’s 28.8 Celsius. It was kind of cloudy, so not as hot as it sounds.
And tomorrow night, they say we have a one hundred percent chance of rain. Rain, not snow. With some thunder, which will probably be scary.

Not much has been happening here, though since it’s the first of May, there are some things in flower. Actually a lot of things are in flower. It would be weird if there weren’t.
The junos, especially. I mentioned them in my post “Day Of The Scorpiris”. There’s a whole garden, a little hill, devoted to them.
These aren’t on the little hill.
But these are.
The species tulips are flowering too, though some flowered last month. This is Tulipa tarda, which seeds all over the place. There are still some fritillarias, too.

Fritillaria oliveri

It’s been a pretty good spring for Fritillaria imperialis. This little colony has been in the garden for about thirty years.There isn’t much else to say, I guess. The guy I live with went to a nursery with his friend, and then they had tacos, which they both liked a lot. He said they were “street tacos”. That sounded pretty strange to me.
I’ve never seen a taco in the street, here, but now I’m going to be looking for them. 

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 tell you all about our endlessly horrible weather. You may remember me from such posts as “Up The Creek”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. It may be obvious what the weather here has been like.This has been going on almost constantly since my last post. Snow, and near-record cold temperatures at night. The guy I live with says he might lose interest in gardening.

It started out like this a couple of days ago. Mist and rain. (The snow was already there from time before last.)
Now, I understand that mist and rain are very nice. We rarely have mist. I guess they have lots of mist where my ancestors originated, along the border between England and Scotland.
I got all wet.

The guy I live with thought it might actually be spring when he saw the sap running in the maples (Acer grandidentatum).
But it wasn’t spring.

Then when some of the bulbs started to flower, he said that just maybe it might be spring. This is Fritillaria bucharica ‘Nurek Giant’.
But no, again, it wasn’t spring. Just a few warm days.

The first big snow broke a lot of branches, and so now we have this big gap in the hedge, or whatever it is, between the back garden and the “way back” garden.
To add to the guy I live with’s irritation, someone sprayed pesticides along the canal road, so he wouldn’t let me walk along there for a few days, and then when he said it was okay, I had to stay on the road and not venture off into the grass, which is the funnest part.
Thanks to the snow, though, we did have to walk in a grassy part, because there was a big willow branch that had broken and fallen onto the canal road.
Another big willow branch broke, and now it’s blocking the culvert, where the creek goes under the canal. The guy I live with called the park maintenance people but they never called him back. That didn’t surprise him.
You can see the big broken branch slanting down on the right, in this otherwise kind of bucolic picture.The creek makes a sharp turn to the right here, flowing north, and goes into the culvert just beyond the edge of the picture. The other, little creek, isn’t really a creek but sort of a channel where water from our street flows into the creek.

I really wanted to look at the water, so we walked along the creek to a place where they mowed down all the native willows, to give the place a nice, blank look, according to the guy I live with. (He isn’t often that sarcastic.)
The guy I live with said I couldn’t go in the water, because it would be cold, and possibly not all that clean.
It used to be a regular creek, with running water, but that stopped about twenty years ago. Now it’s dry except when it snows a lot, or rains.
The creek floods sometimes. The guy I live with said that the last time it really flooded, the water reeked of weedkiller. Then when the water receded, there were a bunch of cows in the field. No one could figure out how the cows escaped, but they were rounded up anyway, and sent back home. I’ve never seen a cow.

So that’s it for now. It’s snowing again, a little.

Until next time, then.