the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today just to explain why I haven’t posted for a while. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Light, Some Dark”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.If I look a bit subdued, it’s because I am. We are, really. A possibly very bad thing is happening right now: snow, and record cold temperatures. It’s supposed to get down to zero tomorrow night. That’s not normal at all.

The guy I live with worries that the snow won’t melt, and there that will now be snow on the ground here until March or April. That’s not a joke.
A lot of the woody plants may not have been prepared for this sudden extreme cold, so we don’t know what next year might bring. Of course that’s true for everything in life, isn’t it?

The other thing that’s happening is that the guy I live with really hurt his leg, I guess today, so walking has been hard. He thinks that the hormone therapy wearing off is affecting his muscles, and making it easier to injure himself.

On top of that, it seems like it’s right before Christmas, since we wouldn’t expect this sort of weather for at least six weeks. So now, with his hurt leg and it being so cold, he’s starting to think about how much his wife loved Christmas, and it’s making him very, very sad, because this is another of those tenth anniversary things.

Naturally we have things to offset that. The guy I live with saw his friend last week, and then went to the urologist yesterday and the tests showed “cancer well treated”, so maybe I’ll have him around for a few more years.
And, even better, maybe, we’ve developed an excellent set-up for watching TV, where I lay my head on one of the pillows, cuddling up against the guy I live with, while he watches Monty Python. Over and over again, as is the custom here.
He says sometimes my ears are in the way, but whatever.

The only other thing, or really, the only other thing I have that comes with pictures, is the geese yesterday. The whole sky was filled with this trilling sound, not honking like usual. There were hundreds of geese. I know you can’t really see them. This was a phone picture. The guy I live with put the picture in Lightroom and zoomed in a bit, so maybe you can see a few of the geese.

He said they were flying to a lake southeast of here, or maybe to Chatfield Reservoir, which is more south of here, so they should have been making a right turn pretty soon. But it was certainly something to see, and hear.

So anyway that’s what’s been happening. Not a huge amount of stuff, except for it being really cold. The guy I live with isn’t going to give up gardening, and we’re not going to move, because his friend is here, but maybe there will be talk of hoophouses or greenhouses in the future. A house full of hoops sounds weird to me.
I’ll leave you with a fairly frigid picture of me, surveying stuff, like always.

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 entertain you with all sorts of fascinating things. You may remember me from such posts as “A Trick Of The Light”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Pretty similar to the one from my last post, actually.I wasn’t feeling as serious, though.

The guy I live with said I forgot to show pictures of a couple of grasses that he’s quite taken with; he was at Denver Botanic Gardens with his friend last Saturday and took a couple of pictures.
The first one here, a big grass, is Achnatherum splendens, which now he says he really has to have.
The other one is smaller, about the height of blue grama, which at first he thought it was, but it turned out to be Themeda triandra.
Well, so, anyway, back to today, or really yesterday, first, because I have a picture of a sleeping owl. Lots of crispy, dead silver maples leaves, too.
And a picture of some crocuses, Crocus puringii, which was taken yesterday. With the “big camera”.
Also, this douglas-fir got transplanted, into a pot. It was very unhappy living smack out in the garden, and so now it’s in a pot, and will be shaded in the winter, and hopefully recover. One whole side is brown, and has been for several years. It’s a dwarf douglas-fir that the guy I live with got from Jerry Morris when he visited Jerry’s nursery (gone now). It has a fancy, romantic name: ‘352’.
(That’s another of Jerry’s dwarf conifers, a limber pine, next to it.)Okay, now, today. Mostly cyclamen. If you didn’t know already, the guy I live with is really into cyclamen.
Some live in the upstairs bedroom. (I call it a bedroom though it’s never been one.)
That reddish flower is Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Corfu Red’. There are some cyclamen that flower in the summer, though those don’t do as well here, because summers are so dry. Still, the ones that have been here for years look pretty good now. This is Cyclamen purpurascens ‘Extra Fancy’. It’s true that it’s looked better in past years. There are lots of cyclamen flowering out in the garden right now, which might be hard to believe, considering how horribly dry it’s been. But they seem to be happy. These are almost all Cyclamen cilicium, some of which have self sown.  This is what the leaves look like. Slightly scalloped on the edges. Similar to Cyclamen mirabile, but cilicium has a smooth tuber where mirabile has what they call a “corky” one. The leaves of Cyclamen coum are coming up now, too. Smooth on the edges.

Sometimes the leaves get damaged in cold winters, but new leaves grow in spring. The guy I live with gave some Cyclamen coum to his friend, and these were planted in an area that’s sunny in the winter. The cyclamen start to flower in late January there.  When that happened the first time, he was super jealous, but he does like his friend a lot, and so it was really okay.

There are some crocuses flowering where the cyclamen are, too. These are Crocus kotschyanus ‘Reliant’, which are now seeding around. 

Um, well, here I am going on about cyclamen, and I’ve almost completely forgotten the reason why my post has this title. It was something that happened today.
The guy I live with suddenly got hungry, in the afternoon, and didn’t feel like cooking anything, so he rummaged around in the pantry, and out came this funny, folded bag, which he put into the microwave.
There were a bunch of sounds I didn’t like at all. I had to go out onto the patio and bark.

A minute or so later, the guy I live with took the bag out of the microwave and opened it. I had to go hide in my kitchen fort.
Then all of a sudden, there were these whitish things right in front of me. The guy I live with said to try them, which I did.
They were really good. Salty.
He said this was called microwave popcorn. Newman’s Own. I’d never had anything like this before. He said that Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, and his first cousin Chess, both loved popcorn, and they got to have it every so often.
I understand there’s something called white cheddar popcorn, and I’m pretty sure that’s something to look forward to.

Well that definitely is all for today. New grasses, an owl, crocuses, cyclamen, and microwave popcorn. Not bad at all.

Until next time, then.