Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on the many fascinating happenings in our house and garden. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “One Hundred Snowdrops”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. 
Then like half a second later, with me still posing characteristically, some snow slid off the open frame on the right.
I guess it would be superfluous to mention that it snowed here. But allow me to take you back in time, to a few days earlier.
The water started flowing in the canal again. It’s been shut off four times now. (It’s off now, for the rest of the season. Maybe.)
The ducks went back into the canal. The guy I live with said there was a phrase about ducks taking to water, and that made sense.
There was even a bizarre object in the canal. The guy I live with suggested that it might be a Mystery Egg.
There was something in the southern sky, too. We see this every now and then, though not when it’s snowing. The guy I live with said we’d never try this, unless he became a spy, and had to do this because he was being chased by evil agents. He might just hide, instead.
And there have been sunsets. This is the time of year for the best ones. The wind comes off the mountains in just a certain way. 
The best sunset picture got posted on Facebook, but I think I should show it here. The guy I live with really likes this picture. It was just pure luck that everything and everyone came together here.
Well, anyway, it snowed. But first, it rained. It can rain in November, and sometimes does. It’s about as common as seeing Mystery Eggs. And then, that night, the rain froze, or at least some of it did. (The macro feature on the point-and-shoot doesn’t always work very well.)
And then it snowed.
That’s my tail, there, in the picture below, if you couldn’t tell. It’s too great a tail to be cropped out of the picture.
The willows are really photogenic at this time of year. I know I show a lot of pictures of them, but they’re pretty cool.
There were strange tracks in the canal, too. Tracks in the slush. 
Then the next day it was nicer. The sun came out. 
So that’s the weather here. Back and forth. Or up and down.
A week or so ago the guy I live with read about a snowdrop sale, and so he decided to order some. Two hundred of them, if you can believe that.
And they arrived in the mail. The bulbs looked pretty good, with flowering shoots emerging, but with no roots at all, and that’s a problem, here. The snowdrops should already have formed roots by now, if they were in the ground, and roots are more important than shoots, so he decided to plant them in nursery pots, of which he happened to have a lot of, because the chances of the bulbs forming roots when it’s this cold are not so great.
It’s different from other bulbs, because these snowdrops would be up in less than six weeks. And the guy I live with explained something about cryoprotective sugars, which are a product of photosynthesis, which pretty much requires roots to function.
This turned out to be one of those plans that sounded better than in theory. It was a huge amount of work; the guy I live with’s hips and knees are really achy and sore from the hormone therapy, and there was a lot of colorful language, especially when he tried to get up after all the planting.
But it all got done, and hopefully the snowdrops are busy making roots. (They were soaked in water for a couple of hours before being planted.)
If everything goes according to plan, like it almost never does, the bulbs will be planted out next spring. Maybe even “in the green”. They look like green onions then. You can imagine the fun of planting two hundred green onion things.
He told his friend that most of them were going in her garden. If this all works, I mean. The last time he got bulk snowdrops, like the post I mentioned right at the beginning, only some of them came up, and I think none has survived. These are just Galanthus elwesii which is easy to grow here, so maybe starting with good roots is the key.
While he was struggling with that, he took a picture of the view from the upstairs bedroom window, where the snowdrops are. (Cyclamen, too.) That’s the shed roof, covered with snow.
And then just a little while ago, today, he took a picture of a snowdrop in the Snowdrop Frame. It’s “ridiculously late” this year, but there hasn’t been any rain, and that dip down to 0° in October probably didn’t help.
Galanthus reginae-olgae ‘Cambridge’
It doesn’t really matter that this autumn-flowering snowdrop is so late. What matters is that this was originally one bulb, and it’s been increasing very nicely. I think there are even more bulbs than the ones whose shoots you can see.
Well, that really is it for today.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 