the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you about something new that’s going on here. You may remember me from such posts as “Not Quite Like Me”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You can see that I’m busy guarding stuff, even with this kind of blurry picture. You wouldn’t believe all the things that need to be guarded against here. I might not be able to name them all, but there are a lot, believe me.

There are things that don’t need guarding, like all the snowdrops which are up in the shade garden. They aren’t open because it hasn’t been warm enough. Snowdrops, if you didn’t know, contain an alkaloid, called galantamine, which acts as a sort of antifreeze to prevent the leaves from being killed during cold weather. Lots of hardy plants have their own sort of antifreeze to be able to withstand winter dormancy, but snowdrops have it because they grow during the coldest parts of the year.
The guy I live with says that he read that the tips of the leaves are slightly hardened to enable them to push through the soil.

In an early translation into English of the story by the brothers Grimm, Snow White was called Snowdrop. The guy I live with said he saw the movie when he was little, and he thought the evil queen was scary. I don’t like things that are scary.

It got up to almost seventy degrees (F) a few days ago, but mostly it’s been chilly every day, and the guy I live with says it will be cold all next week. Not incredibly cold, but not very nice, either. He’s really not used to having week after week of all this awfulness, though I don’t mind it at all.
The guy I live with says that’s because I’ve gained weight, but I maintain it’s just a heavy winter coat.

A pile of seeds, from Plants of the Southwest, came in the mail the other day, so there’s something to do. And there was a lot of raking and sweeping today, even though it wasn’t all that pleasant for people who don’t have heavy winter coats like I do.

Well, anyway, a few days ago, when the guy I live with was in “noticing mode”, which he isn’t, always, he noticed that the groundcover manzanita, which doesn’t have a name, was hanging over the sidewalk a little, and so, after quite a bit of thinking, he decided to try his hand at growing some manzanitas from cuttings.
Believe it or not, the guy I live with has never grown anything from cuttings, so this was a pretty big step for him.
The container of rooting powder, which his wife used, because she grew plants from cuttings, wasn’t where he thought it was, probably because it was long gone. You know the way you imagine things being on, like, a shelf, seeing them every day, sometimes out of the corner of your eye, and then one day it turns out that the thing hasn’t been there for years, that’s a bit weird.
A new container of rooting powder came in the mail, and so cuttings were taken, dipped in water and then in the rooting powder, and I guess we’ll see what happens next. If this is successful, I can see the whole house being filled with cuttings. Maybe even if it isn’t successful.

So that’s something new that’s going on here. Not hugely exciting, if you’re me, but I understand that if it’s an activity that involves mostly a lot of waiting, the guy I live with is very good at that.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me doing something else I’m good at, besides guarding stuff.

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 some news from our garden and its environs. You may remember me from such posts as “Our Winter, This Far”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.As you can see, the sun was out today, but it wasn’t hugely toasty. In fact, it’s supposed to snow again for the next three days. You can imagine the complaining.  But then it’s supposed to warm up again, to almost sixty degrees (F) by Thursday.

Just like always, not much has been happening, but in keeping with what the guy I live with called “an excessively sibilant title” to my post, a few evenings ago we had a nice sunset, and here are the pictures to prove it.
This next one is the owls’ favorite tree. It’s kind of creepy with the big broken branches, and holes drilled into it by woodpeckers. The sun went down all the way after that, the way it does around here.

And, finally, we did some gardening. I’d been waiting for this for quite a long time. There was a little bit of gardening yesterday, with some grasses being cut down, and stuff like that, but today, some seeds were sown.
These were mostly penstemons from Alplains, which were purchased last year. The seeds are still viable, and some people say germination is even better with older seeds, and, anyway, the guy I live with has been doing hardly anything (trust me, here) for such a long time, it was a relief to see he could function at all.
I’ll show the method, even though it’s been shown before.

The seed pots (the same B.E.F. Grower’s Pots as always; they’re about thirty years old) are filled with a soil-less mix, which in this case is leftover stuff from last year and the year before. Some peat moss, coarse sand, perlite, and so forth.
Then they go into almost-as-old dish pans, to soak up water. The water is poured into the bottom of the dish pan; hot water, which cools off rapidly.I watched all of this, which is why I know.
When the soil-less mix has become damp, labels with names written on them go in first (always), then the seeds are sprinkled on top of the soil-less mix. Then the surface of the soil-less mix is covered with fine gravel (called “squeegee” here, for some reason), and the pots are placed in trays on the shelves on the patio.I guess with some seeds, once they have imbibed and it freezes, the seeds can be killed, but it doesn’t seem to bother penstemons.
An alternative method would be to stratify them in the refrigerator for a few months, but this method, being the lazy one, is the method the guy I live with likes the best.

Ideally, the pots would go into an open frame, made of two-by-fours, but there weren’t any around, and the guy I live with couldn’t figure out a place to put a frame even if he did have the lumber handy. The theory is that snow helps insulate the pots, and when it melts, it’s like the way it happens in real life.
But putting the pots on shelves is the way it was done for about twenty years, so it’s kind of like revisiting the past, or something.

And now the owls. We still see them on my evening walk. Not every evening, but most evenings. If we don’t see them, we still hear them.
These were taken on two different evening walks, but the owls were always in that same tree.
The pair of them, on a gloomy and chilly evening. Here, the lower one is about to hoot. You can see how they raise their tail feathers; next they thrust their heads out and hoot away.
A couple more pictures.
We both like the owls a lot; I guess I’ve given up trying to catch them, but I still growl at them from time to time. The guy I live with says the owls aren’t afraid of me.

So that’s it for today’s post. I hope you found it incredibly fascinating.

Until next time, then.