the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here on this extremely chilly day to bring you up to date on the news from our garden and its environs. You may remember me from such posts as “Horticultural Invective”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Roughing it, of course.Since I last posted, the guy I live with has been busy talking on the phone a lot, and filling out forms. It doesn’t seem like he’s having a huge amount of fun doing all of this.

I totally forgot to show the picture of the cloud we had a couple of weeks ago, so here it is now. The guy I live with said that you sometimes see spirals like this when the wind off the mountains is just right. Last week it felt like the water in the canal might stop flowing within a few days, so we looked for the muskrat a lot. Sometimes we saw it, and sometimes we didn’t. Here I am doing some serious looking. Then it snowed, and the water level in the canal dropped quite a bit. The guy I live with said that the muskrat would spend the winter either in its cozy canal-bank home, all lined with dry grass, and a tiny bed, a tiny television; maybe even wi-fi. Or it would go to a place called “Florida”. So we won’t see the muskrat again until next spring, when the water begins to flow. (I say “muskrat” but we think there are two of them.)Then the other day, the water in the canal stopped. The guy I live with said that someone shuts it off, farther west. There was some water left, in pools here and there. As the water level went down, it began to freeze, and the ice made patterns. 

Down the canal road, heading east, I discovered I wasn’t the first one to go on a morning walk. Those tracks weren’t made by a dog. I didn’t see anyone except the guy I live with, who follows me on my walks.I’ve seen big hawks in the trees every single day. Sometimes more than one hawk. They sort of screech at each other. I guess they’re red-tailed hawks. Hardly anything at all is happening in the gardening, though there are snowdrops up in various places, and some flowering in the snowdrop frame. But a couple of days ago there were crocuses flowering. This is Crocus damascenus. 

Things slow down in the garden at this time of year, and if it isn’t snowing, the guy I live with says it can be very pleasant in the garden.

But today it was misty and drizzling, with the temperature right at freezing for most of the day. The guy I live with said the humidity was about a thousand percent. Everything was coated with a thin film of ice. This sort of weather is unusual for here. My evening walk was a brisk one.

Aside from snowdrops, the new cyclamen are happy in the flats upstairs. The cyclamen are in “nanodomes”, which help prevent them from drying out too much. There are little vents in the tops of the nanodomes, which can be closed, though with the cyclamen the vents are open, so the cyclamen won’t get soggy. You can see that the plants are happy right now. This is Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Tilebarn Helena’. And this is the same species; a selection called ‘Silver Shield’. The guy I live with likes cyclamen a lot. I guess that’s obvious. He said he would join the Cyclamen Society, something he’s been meaning to do for a number of years, but never has. You can get seeds from the Society, as well as the various rock gardening societies.

I guess that’s all for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me in what the guy I live with said was complete repose.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news about me, and about our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Bleak Season”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.We were looking for the muskrat, just as the sun was setting. We’ve seen the muskrat, or maybe muskrats, almost every time we walk by here, and just as the guy I live with gets out his camera, we hear this “floomp” sound, which is kind of the sound a muskrat makes when it dives under the water.

The water in the canal is getting pretty low now. I suppose it will be shut off any day now.

We’ve seen a lot of hawks lately. There was one in the tree a couple of days ago.One just today. Maybe the same one.I scared one. I can be deadly and terrifying, as you know. 

That blue that you see in the background of those pictures is the sky. We’ve hardly seen it at all for months, now, and so I thought I would mention it.

There was even a bit of a sunset the other night. November is the month for spectacular sunsets here, but only if you can see the sky.For the last couple of days it’s been cold and gray, though the sun did come out some, today. It was also freezing today. Right at or a little above freezing, I mean. I didn’t mind it, but the guy I live with had to put on a coat when he went outside. He’s a lot less tough than I am.

Not much else has been happening around here. The guy I live with brought home an old  walking-stick, probably made in the Philippines, from his mom’s house which he had never seen before. It’s not in focus, but you can get the idea.He’s been on the phone a lot lately. I mean a lot. Sometimes for hours. He used to spend all day long talking on the phone trying to fix phones, actually fixing them, and talking some more on the phone, so this is something he’s used to. But he’s on the phone a lot.

He got a smart phone because he said it was time to. Some of the pictures here were taken with it. Like this one, when there was sky in the background.

And like this picture of Cyclamen mirabile ‘Tile Barn Nicholas’. 

Speaking of cyclamen, a shipment of them came the other day. These pictures were taken after the cyclamen were repotted and watered.

They’re going into the upstairs bedroom because it’s really too late to plant them out in the garden here, even though all the tubers had very nice roots. The roots won’t have time to grow into the soil before it gets cold here, which it does, and so the cyclamen will be perfectly content upstairs. They’ll be planted out in the garden next year.

Then, with the new phone, he took some pictures of things he felt like taking pictures of. Partly old things, partly things that were old, but new to the house.

One of the water buffalo bookends. It’s pretty dusty. It’s been here for ages. 

And the ashtray. Also very dusty. Like all the other stuff, it was his grandfather’s.

One of his grandfather’s watercolors. There was a set of these at his mom’s house, and now they’re here.

The little picture his wife framed and attached to the kitchen door, going into the garage.

I know I talked about books being rearranged in the living room a while back, and since the guy I live with has this new phone–I mean his old phone could take pictures, too, but you needed a magnifying glass to see them–he took some pictures of the bookshelves in the living room just to prove there had been some rearranging. Instead of just talk of rearranging. Though some books from upstairs were put in these bookshelves, this wall, below, has looked the same way for the last fifteen years or so. The guy I live with didn’t have anything to do with the way this wall in the living room looks. So those are some of the phone pictures. Mostly the guy I live with has been talking on the phone, as I said, but sometimes he takes pictures with the phone. He also looks at stuff on his phone, like everyone else does, and now he feels like everyone else. At least in that way. He said he could blend in if he were at a bus station or airport or any place where you had to wait for something, and you were expected to look at your phone, like everyone else.

I’ll leave you with what I’m pretty sure is the best phone picture of all. Me after a day at Day Care. 

Until next time, then.