the miserable gardener

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 latest goings-on around here. You may remember me from such posts as “Mistletoe And Snow”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.  (This is a phone picture, so smaller. I don’t know why it’s smaller; it’s the only one taken with the phone that is.)

Today was a pretty leisurely day for us, which was a pleasant change of pace. We worked in the garden; it was over seventy degrees today, so of course it’s supposed to snow tomorrow. And snow for the next three days.

If you’ve followed our blog for any length of time, you know that it now snows regularly here at the end of April. It never used to do that, but it does now. The guy I live with of course detests snow at this time of year (and, really, at any time of the year), but there’s nothing to be done about it, except move, which we are not going to do.

This past week was anything but leisurely, though. On Monday I went to the doctor for my checkup and shots. That was okay. Then on Tuesday the guy I live with went back to the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center. He’s been there before. Nothing to do with the prostate cancer, which may actually be gone now. (We have to wait and see, on that one.)

His doctor sent him there because of low platelets, which he has had before. The first time he went, he was also sent to a place where he got ultrasound on his innards. But anyway, this time it turned out that his platelets were fine, and so he wasn’t put on a diet of kale, much to his relief.

Then on Thursday he had his eyes examined, because he’s supposed to do that every year. He has cataracts, but 20-20 vision with his glasses on. Weird, huh.

Then on Saturday he went to the dentist to have a new crown put on. I guess this isn’t like becoming a king, though I don’t really know.

So maybe you can tell that for us, who are used to doing mostly nothing, the last several months have been pretty chaotic. The guy I live with said he hoped this was the end of it, for a while.

Anyway, as I said, today was nice.

It started to get windy, and that was nice too, because wind has been so rare here the last few years.

There are things flowering in the garden. Iris bucharica, the latest to flower and easiest to grow of all the Juno irises. This is one called ‘Top Gold’.

Tulipa butkovii is flowering, too. 

And Fritillaria pallidiflora. The guy I live with grew these bulbs from seeds, a long time ago, and now they’re spreading by seeds, too.

Here’s a not-very-good phone picture of the clove currant, Ribes aureum, which is scenting the whole garden right now. It usually flowers in March, I think. There are a lot of these currants in the garden. 

And here are a couple of pictures of the garden, too, which show how dry it is right now. There won’t be enough snow to help with that, and the cold at night also won’t do any good, either. The guy I live with constantly wonders why it can’t rain in the spring, like it used to.

My walk this evening was a pretty long one, which I enjoyed, of course. Yesterday the guy I live with noticed that the owls were back, but in a different place. This evening there was only one in the tree. Maybe the other one had to go to the store. The guy I live with is always having to go to the store, too. 

The field where we walk has become a green sea of grass; a sea of brome. The guy I live with said that smooth brome, Bromus inermis, had been seeded in the field and now its taking over everything. It’s invaded the garden to such an extent that the guy I live with has become a bit discouraged. He says this grass is exponentially worse than bindweed or practically anything else he can think of.

Sometimes people who live in places farther south come to Denver and say how green it is as they drive along the highway west of here, but it’s really because of the smooth brome, which doesn’t need a whole lot of water in the spring in order to turn green.

It really is a nightmarish grass. It can be dug out, and just comes back again. Nothing kills it. The guy I live with doesn’t spray anything in the garden, but years ago there was a time when spraying was done occasionally, and it never did anything to the grass. The smooth brome just pretended it had been killed, and then came back with a vengeance the next year.

But it’s a good place for a purebred border collie, like I’m, to hunt for voles. There wasn’t a movie of me searching for voles in the grass, like there might have been, because the guy I live with said that since it was so windy I thought there were voles moving everywhere, and would have looked like an idiot on film. We wouldn’t want that.

But we did get some pictures of the kind-of-creepy willow. 

I think someone lives here. This is a different hole from the one I showed a while ago.

It was so windy that the guy I live with suggested we move out from under the willow, because of the huge broken branch.

The guy I live with said he thought he saw a meadowlark in the willow, but changed his mind. He said he hasn’t seen or heard a meadowlark in years. That makes him sad.

We went back to the path. The guy I live with struck up a conversation, over the fence, with a neighbor he’d never met. That always means I just stand there, or try to find something to do, while he talks and talks.

Eventually I got to go home. It was a long, long walk today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me, going home as usual, but I think you can see some of my hair being blown back, which shows how windy it was. I still had a good day, sailing along in the sea of brome.

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 bring you up to date on what’s been happening in the last several days. You may remember me from such posts as “Up The Creek”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I guess you can see how hectic it’s been around here lately.

It was cold, then it wasn’t, then it was, and now it isn’t. That pretty much sums up things around here.

The guy I live with had his last radiation yesterday. That was thirty-nine in all. He has to have follow-up appointments in a few months. The hormone therapy is still going, will be peaking in a few weeks, then slowly things will return to normal, though of course things won’t ever be all that normal here again.

The guy I live with said that for a while now he’s been happier than he has been in a long time, and I can tell. He is just going with the flow and not thinking too much about the future. We had a pretty good day today, working in the garden.

Here I am helping. You know, watching out for stuff. 

There are bunches of things in flower now. He used the phone to take pictures of these color forms of Corydalis solida. The focus could have been better. He says the corydalis all had labels once, but that a certain puppy stole all the labels because it seemed like a fun thing to do.

Most of these were selected by nursery people in Latvia and Lithuania, but now they don’t ship here. You can get some color forms from Odyssey Bulbs, though. These corydalis (the guy I live with won’t let me call them “corydalises”) are very easy to grow in sort of a woodland setting.

We kind of have this policy of not showing dead things, except for dead plants, of which there are always a lot, but we kept wondering when water in the canal would start to flow again. It seemed like it was really late in the year for it to start. One day we looked down into the canal bed and there was this huge dead crawdad.

I went down to look at things, but not at the crawdad. It might only have been playing dead and pinched me on the nose. The guy I live with said there were some others lying in the dirt, pretty pathetically, but I prefer to err on the side of caution.

Then just a couple of days ago the water started flowing. It felt good just to walk by it.

I went in, but the water was really cold. I mean really cold. So I jumped back out again. The guy I live with would have said I was a wimp, but he knows better. He know just how fierce I can be.

Well, I guess that’s all I have for today. I know this post was a bit rambling, but I hope you liked it despite that.

Until next time, then.