the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to tell you about a big difference here. You may remember me from such posts as “A Slight Change”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see what happened last night.
I can’t begin to tell you what a huge relief this is for us. It’s been so, so dry.
Before I got to this willow I checked out some coyote tracks; they ran through the field last night.
I think this is beyond totally excellent.

Day before yesterday, the garden looked like this. Super dry, even with a little snow on the ground.

The cyclamen were safely tucked in, with a covering of pine needles. The pine needles were just to keep the soil from freezing in case it didn’t snow like was forecast.
This isn’t all the cyclamen, by any means, but now all of them are under a blanket of snow.
If the soil freezes, then the cyclamen won’t be able to pull water from their tuber’s roots, and the leaves can collapse.
The soil freezing business really only started in the last several years, when it got cold before it snowed. It would usually snow first, and the soil wouldn’t freeze.

It looked like this last last night.
That spotlight is extremely annoying. The guy I live with says that “code” requires lights like that to have hoods on them so the light points downward, but a lot of people ignore that stuff.

This was how it looked this morning. You can see I went out briefly, just to make sure this was real. It was.

And that’s all I have for today. It snowed.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about the instant greenhouse.
You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “The Finished Project”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I think I don’t need to explain what happened here.
The guy I live with said he would have liked a lot more snow, but that this will do for at least a little while.

Yesterday, or maybe the day before (I forget), since he read that it was going to get cold and maybe even snow, he decided to construct an “instant greenhouse” over the bulb frame.
He just wanted a little extra protection for some potted snowdrops. They don’t really need it, but he wanted to do this anyway.
You may recall that there was another bulb frame here, which I talked about in the post I mentioned at the beginning, but the guy I live with decided that it was a failure, and ugly, too, so this is the instant greenhouse.
I think you’ll agree this is a truly magnificent bit of construction. Elegant and practical, too.

He said he was going to call everyone he knew to come over and marvel at his effort.
I wondered if it might be more sensible if he offered to pay people to come over.

Anyway, it snowed, and this was the instant greenhouse this morning.

I don’t have anything more to say.

Until next time, then.