the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here after rather a long absence just to say that we’re still around. You may remember me from such posts as “Selling Insurance”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Hardly anything has been happening here, which should explain the title of my post. It hasn’t been terribly cold, but not terribly warm, either. There was some wind, which the guy I live with said was weird, but also nice, and “Like the old days”, which I guess means way before I was born.

We mostly do just sit here. I go on walks, and the guy I live with cooks stuff, and activities like that, but mostly it’s nothing, which really is not bad at all.
In the evening we listen to music (at least he does); he sits on the couch with me. I usually drift off. We do go outside sometimes, though there isn’t much going on. The ice and snow is still here. Some of it was from the last week in October. This is not anywhere near like our “normal” winter weather, but it’s what we have now.
This is me surveying things. Sometimes there are things that need to be surveyed, and I’m the one to do it. I guess it’s kind of dreary. The soil is frozen, which I understand is not good at all; the cyclamen are certainly suffering. I know because I hear about it. I guess dreary really is the right word. Some of the little cactuses that the guy I live with grew from seed died after it got cold in October, even though they made it through the last couple of winters, but some others are still fine. They’re about the size of golf balls.

I forget if I told the story of all these seedlings, how he had like six hundred of them, and transplanted them into pure sand, then watered them, and they almost all died. (The water wicked back up into the pots.) These were the only ones that survived.
That was a while ago. I’m not sure why he doesn’t just give up; I think I would. You can see here that Sternbergia lutea is not suffering from frozen soil. 

It’s true that there are some snowdrops in flower in the frames. They’re hard to photograph, I guess, so you’ll just have to trust me. He goes out to look at the pots in the frames, which are “plunged” into ordinary garden soil.
There are some pots in which there are no snowdrops up, and there was a lot of discussion about this (he talks to himself, and to me, but I don’t know anything about snowdrops), and also a lot of digging around in the pots to try to figure out why some were up and some weren’t. He discovered that in the pots where snowdrops were up, the soil wasn’t frozen, and in pots where the soil was frozen, it was because the soil mix in the pots had what he calls “store bought gunk” in it. Stuff he bought that came in bags. His definition of gunk.
The pots where snowdrops are up, and some in flower, are ordinary garden soil, with some sand mixed in. No gunk.
You know, like the stuff you buy that’s called “compost” or “top soil”. It may be good for regular garden plants, but in cases where you need plants to grow and flower in winter, not good at all. It holds water which then freezes.

There are also some snowdrops which normally flower in November that aren’t even up yet, though they’re alive (he checked, by digging around). He said it might be because of where they are in the frames; they got too cold in October.

So, that’s the snowdrop story.
The guy I live with took a bunch of pictures of the hens and chicks in pots, because he likes the way they look in the winter. Maybe you will, too.
These are phone pictures and not super-focused, though they looked sharper before they were uploaded. It’s a mystery. There are some crocuses which look like they’re about to flower but I think they froze and are just standing there. Sometimes they do flower at this time of year if it’s warm enough, and if the soil isn’t frozen. (I keep hearing this refrain about frozen soil.)That’s pretty much it, though I suppose I should show owl pictures. We saw him today on our walk. His mate is in the tree next door but we didn’t see her. Forgot to look. The guy I live with said he finally figured out what was with the left eye. “Sleeping with one eye open”, he said.
So that really is a thing.

Now that definitely is all I have for today.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again, but for the first time this year, it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here with yet more boring stuff to talk about, and also to wish you a Happy New Year. You may remember me from such equally possibly tiresome posts as “Caulk And Vernation”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Even though I intimated that this post would have boring stuff in it, this is really interesting. It’s me, about to have my dinner. That’s pretty excellent.
You can see my eating platform, or dinner tray, if you will, there; it’s an old cardboard box, with an even older dish towel on it. The box and the towel stay the same, though the towel gets washed every so often.
This eating platform was Chess’s, the purebred border collie who lived here before me. There’s another one, which was Slipper’s, another purebred border collie, but that one is never used. It just isn’t, I guess, is why.

So that’s the interesting part of my post. The rest is pretty much stuff you’ve seen before, but different pictures of it.
Well, this is different, but nothing you’ve seen before. I didn’t get to see it, because I was at home on Christmas Day. The guy I live with was coming home from his niece’s and stopped by the library, even though it was of course closed, because he saw this, and had to take pictures of it.It’s a bald cypress, Taxodium distichum, which you don’t see a lot of around here.  You can see it’s growing in a lawn, a soccer field actually, so it gets lots of water.

The other moderately interesting thing is this object, which is nailed to a tree in the sort of forest by the creek, on the other side of the canal.The guy I live with said it was a nesting or roosting box, for birds, and that he might duplicate this design and make a whole bunch of them. (He can do things like this.)

Then, getting a bit less interesting, are the snowdrops. You can see more are coming up in this big pot. Very exciting. Not necessarily to me. 

And, the guy I live with said he was going to get into sansevierias, which, for me anyway, is about where the interestingness bottoms out, but he says they should do well just sitting around in pots. He might order some from Arid Lands, because they have some other species.
For some reason he likes plants that “just sit around” without him having to do anything. That’s really all that’s been going on here. I guess I should show the now-obligatory pictures of sunsets, willows, and owls, since we have some here. The guy I live with posted the sunset pictures, which are also willow pictures, on Facebook, but if you didn’t see those there, here they are here. Okay, I admit that these are fairly nice pictures. The guy I live with was happy with them. And they merge into owl pictures pretty effortlessly.We don’t see the owls every evening, but almost every evening. Sometimes they aren’t where they usually are. (I know they fly, because I’ve seen them do it.)

We think this is the female. And this is the male; half asleep, and then completely asleep. Sometimes they sit in the same tree together, but usually they sit in separate trees, quite a distance from each other. The guy I live with and his wife slept in separate bedrooms for most of their marriage, and he said that was the secret, or at least one of them, to success. Well, that’s it. Not very much at all. But, I guess, something. Maybe not as much as something, but slightly more than hardly anything.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me on a cozy winter evening. That’s something. 

Until next time, then.