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 this and that. You may remember me from such posts as “Nature Is Icky”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. You can see that the ramp has seen better days, as they say, though my days are pretty good, and that matters more. It’s just a ramp, in any case. Though it has gotten a bit springy. A ramp for aging purebred border collies, which I’m not. Aging, I mean. Well, maybe a little. But not aging like the guy I live with.

The garden looks slightly greener after the drizzle and then snow. 

The sphaeralceas are flowering again. They’re not hugely showy but still nice.There are asters, too. Aster oblongifolius, anyway. The New England asters and things like that are long gone, now. The garden is too dry for them.That picture doesn’t show them purple enough, according to the guy I live with.
This is the same aster as Claude Barr’s Aster kumleinii ‘Dream of Beauty’, which is pink, and which used to grow here, but someone, not saying who, transplanted it and it died.

Today the guy I live with talked on the phone with his best friend, who’s in the nursery business, and they compared notes about which native plants would be doing well right now, because he thought he was missing out on a whole bunch of plants which just might be in flower in September. Most of them have grown here before, but things happened, the way they do.
So later on, like in a few months, there will be orders to Plants of the Southwest and Western Native Seed.

Meanwhile, there are some very non-native plants flowering, too, namely colchicums. I guess there’s been talk on the blog before about colchicums, and how they’re named after Colchis, and the Golden Fleece and stuff, like Jason and the Argonauts, and how super-poisonous they are (and how totally against the name “meadow saffron” the guy I live with is, because of that; saffron comes from crocuses, which are in the iris family, where colchicums are in the lily family), but the guy I live with really likes them.

World Champion’s Cup.

Disraeli.

These came from Daffodils and More, if you wanted to know.

The other plant thing, like you might say the other Plant Topic, is the cyclamen. There are cyclamen flowering in the garden right now (Cyclamen hederifolium and C. cilicicum), but there are also a whole bunch in the upstairs bedroom.
(You can also see one of the desert willow seedlings on the left, by the fan.)
The cyclamen were going to be planted out in the garden this year, but they guy I live with had to put off having the honey locust cut down, and he hasn’t worked out a method to have the existing cyclamen protected when huge branches fall on the ground, so the cyclamen are still upstairs. The stems of the leaves are elongating, because there isn’t enough light in the bedroom, but the guy I live with said that was okay, since they’re growing indoors and won’t go outside until next year.
One tiny disappointment has been with the seedlings of Cyclamen × whiteae; several germinated, but only one survived.
Cyclamen are pretty easy to grow from seed, even old seed germinates, if you do it right. (You sow the seed in a pot, as usual, then put the pot in a freezer bag which is just folded over at the top, not sealed, and then the pot and the bag go into the closet until the seed germinates, in a couple of weeks, more or less.)

And that’s the gardening news. I also have some striped news. We encountered a slight obstacle on our walk the other night, and had to turn around, even though there wasn’t really any threat. The guy I live with just said it was better than possibly getting sprayed.

So that’s how things have been going, here. We go to bed pretty late, around midnight or sometimes even later. The guy I live with gets into bed with his clothes on, and watches TV for a while (mostly Q.I.), and then we get up for Tinkle Time, which is kind of a “last call” before real bedtime.
Today, Tinkle Time was at 3:15 in the morning. The guy I live with got up, let me out, and then realized that today was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Pooka, a purebred border collie who lived here before me. He started to cry, because that day, twenty years ago, was very, very bad, and he said how his wife was so shaken by this, but he promised me extra hugs and cuddles on this day, and that would make everything much better.
And it did. 

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 about the snow, and other stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “Colchicum Time”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m helping in the garden, as you can see. The guy I live with actually did some work in the garden today. It was a beautiful day, and he said why not, and so we did.
He’s been working on emptying out some of the troughs that are around the base of the honey locust. The tree needs to be cut down, but the troughs have to be moved first.
Most of the plants that were growing in the troughs died this summer. They needed almost daily watering and didn’t get anything like that.
Seeing all the dead plants made him kind of sad but they were holdovers from the time when there were two people working in the garden, and so he said “Whatever”, and scooped out the soil from a few of the troughs, so they could be moved. They’re really heavy. Heavier with the soil in them, too.

The owls have moved; we’re not sure where they went.  They must not have liked the snow. They were sitting on top of fences  near the end of the path. We got some pictures before they moved.
You can see both of them in the next picture. The other one is sitting on the next fence over. 

And, like I think it was on the news everywhere, it snowed here, last Tuesday. Here’s a picture of it, also at the end of the path (just to the right of where the fences are in the pictures above).It snowed, and then it melted. It didn’t even freeze.
There was still snow in the foothills a day later.It was mostly rain, believe it or not, in the form of drizzle, all Monday night and into Tuesday, and then it changed to snow.
The guy I live with left the tomato plants outside, because they’d only produced two tomatoes, which a squirrel ate, so it didn’t matter, but the plants weren’t harmed.

The first colchicums are up now, after the rain and snow. This is ‘Innocence’, which was just planted a week or so ago. There are other ‘Innocence’ which have been here for much longer, but the guy I live with wanted more, even though it’s kind of a dumb name.
Autumn-flowering bulbs especially seem to flower a bit earlier the first year they’re planted, by the way.  The older bulbs (really corms) aren’t quite this far advanced.They came from Daffodils and More, if you wanted to know.

Oh, and then there are the hummingbirds. They’re starting to leave now, so we see a lot more of them. The guy I live with makes new sugar syrup for them every day, because we don’t have very many flowers they like. (That’s sort of a sad story in itself, but it has a lot to do with needing to water much, much more for hummingbird plants that would flower now.  Back in the old days there were a lot more red-flowered plants at this time of year, but there was also more watering done.)
There’s a hummingbird in this picture, at the feeder.

So that’s really all I have. It snowed, it melted. And now we have autumn-flowering bulbs to look forward to. The guy I live with said it was nice to have something to look forward to this year.

Until next time, then.