the miserable gardener

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.

This one was taken right at the end of the path. So that’s it. I hope you found this post unbelievably entertaining. 

Until next time, then. 

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today with some kind of interesting news. You may remember me from such equally interesting posts as “Muskrat Rambles”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose.
The guy I live with was doing some sort of work out in the garden, so I was guarding the path. Just in case.
There are actually quite a few paths here. The one on the right, the one I’m guarding, and one that goes off to the left by the rock in the middle of the picture. That path turns and heads in the direction of the Russian hawthorn, but also breaks off and goes farther to the left, by the rocks in the lower left of the picture.
I mostly stay on the paths because it’s fun to.

Not much is going on these days. It snowed yesterday, a little. The guy I live with got a couple of oaks delivered. I know these don’t look like oaks, but they are.
This is Quercus hypoleucoides, from southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and around Big Bend in Texas. There’s already one in the garden, and the guy I live with thought we needed more. These are going to stay in the upstairs bedroom, watered, until next spring, when they can go outside.

The name hypoleucoides means “whitish underneath”.
And, the guy I live with suddenly remembered that he had a bunch of packets of cactus seeds from Alplains. All echinocereus. So he sowed these a few days ago, and look what’s happened. The pots are in propagators with a heating mat underneath, like we were growing tomatoes or something. Just like that.
He didn’t have anything else to do so thought raising some cactus seedlings would be mildly amusing. They’ll probably all be given away, eventually.

That’s pretty much it. My after-dinner walk is now in the dark, which is kind of weird.
Even weirder is that after my evening walk, it’s like six hours of darkness before my midnight walk. Which isn’t really at midnight, more like eleven, but you have to admit that midnight walk sounds a whole lot cooler.

I guess that’s it for now. Not much, as you can see. I’ll leave you with a picture of me and my toys.

Until next time, then.