the miserable gardener

the usual stuff

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 all the news from our garden, which really isn’t very much at all. You may remember me from such posts as “Forty Degrees”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I think you can see what happened here.Yes, it snowed. Weekend before last, actually, and almost none of it has melted, which is driving the guy I live with up the wall, though I rather like it.
It’s not very cold at night, but also not very warm during the day. The guy I live with said he was afraid this was going to be a winter like the last two, but maybe it won’t be. You never know.

There is some gardening news. Not outdoors, well except that Crocus niveus hasn’t given up on flowering just yet.
That cage you see, behind the crocus, goes over the leaves so that bunnies don’t nibble on them.

Almost all of the plant-related events are indoor ones.
The guy I live with’s friend brought him some seeds of Pancratium maritimum. These almost certainly won’t be hardy here but he says they’ll be fairly glorious in pots on the patio, during the summer. And anyway he likes growing things from seed.

And the little cactus seedlings have grown spines. I know that sounds like a moral judgment but they actually do get spines at a very early age. As you can see, there are a lot of cactus seedlings here. And there are half a dozen other pots, mostly filled with seedlings.

The guy I live with has been thinking about ordering some seeds (the cactus seeds were from last year’s order), but can’t make up his mind.
There are these to consider. Pretty old seeds of Arctostaphylos pungens. They can be germinated just by leaving them out for a couple of winters (though you only get one or two seedlings), but I guess the real way to do this is to soak the seeds in Liquid Smoke after doing all these other things. It simulates the chemicals leached into the soil after a fire, which is how the seeds germinate in the wild.
The bottle of Liquid Smoke in the pantry had expired, or something, so he had to get another bottle. His neighbors got it for him when they went to the store; he told them what he was going to use it for and they were a little weirded out. Like if he had asked for ketchup to feed the cyclamen.

Other than that, there’s not much to report.
Our neighbors have been pretty active. Lots of hooting on my evening walk, and at night.So that’s it. It’s supposed to warm up a bit, into the sixties, but the guy I live with says it probably won’t be enough to melt the snow.

Until next time, then.

some nose news

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 what’s been happening here, which really isn’t all that much, hence the delay in posting since last time. You may remember me from such posts as “My Walk At Dusk”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Almost nothing has happened here since my last post, except that the guy I live with discovered there were more dead conifers. That made him unhappy for a few minutes, and then he said “Whatever”, which is pretty advanced of him. We are both very advanced, if you didn’t know.
It’s still frightfully dry here.

And then he discovered fungus in one of the pots of cactus seedlings downstairs. He sprinkled some Bordeaux Mixture on the pot, but a lot of the seedlings died anyway. It was the pot I showed last time. It’s in back of this one and you can see that there are fewer seedlings. The guy I live with said he didn’t need all those seedlings anyway; just some.
The cyclamen are doing okay in the upstairs bedroom. They could be doing better, but the lights aren’t the greatest. I guess it doesn’t really matter that much so long as the cyclamen are alive. They’ll be planted outside next year. The news, though, the nose news, is about snowdrop noses. That’s what people call them, though of course they aren’t noses.
There are some snowdrops flowering in the frames, but these are outside, as you can tell. These are Galanthus elwesii ‘Theresa Stone’. It made the guy I live with pretty happy to see these.There isn’t much of any other real news. The alarm went off on the phone this morning, with a message of severe risk of Covid-19, but the guy I live with said we were staying home anyway, for the foreseeable future (which for us is like a day, at most, anyway), though he might make a whirlwind trip to the store pretty soon.

I still go on my walks. I get three of them a day, which is pretty nice. The late night one is my favorite, I think.
The other night the guy I live with took a picture of something he said was Orion.
The bright star in the upper left is Betelgeuse; the bright one in lower right is Rigel. The guy I live with said we could see Orion’s belt, too, which is really a nebula, which sounded scary. (I think really I was the only one who could see the belt.)

He said the belt points to Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, which is where the Pleiades are, too.
He always tells this funny story (funny to him) of when he and his wife went to buy the car we have now, the Subaru, and how he told the guy who sold them the car that Subaru was the Japanese name for the Pleiades. There wasn’t any response, so he said “The logo. The stars.”
So we drive around in a Pleiades. We don’t drive very often, these days.

I’m not sure how to top that fascinating story, but I can show you some pictures of my evening walk. It’s pretty atmospheric at that time, about an hour after my dinner. The owls are out, too.