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 bring you right up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “A Bit Chilly”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. This is my interpretation of how things have been going lately. Just like the post I mentioned, from last year, it’s been chilly and not very pleasant here lately. “Snowing way too much”, according to someone I know. 

The muskrat is back; the guy I live with said it seemed bigger than last year. I looked for it but couldn’t find it. Maybe on another walk. I looked for voles too, but I think it was too cold for them to poke their heads above ground. The wild plums are flowering. The guy I live with said that back in the last century they were a sign of spring along the Front Range, but the last few Aprils have been so cold that you can hardly ever smell them. Here they are, along the canal road. I was ready to keep going but the plums needed to have their picture taken. The guy I live with said the plums make a really good jam, but he’s never made jam. Just eaten it. It’s best on toast with lots of butter. So much butter that it gets the toast soggy before you spread the jam on it. The sun hasn’t been out much, lately. It came out later today, and we could really smell the plums when we got close to them.

There’s a “weird tulip” flowering in the front yard.About twenty-five years ago a bunch of ‘Queen of the Night’ tulips were planted in the front yard (along with the orange ‘Dillenburg’ which everyone said to plant with it), and this is what had become of them.

Today an order of plants arrived, from Edelweiss Perennials. Mostly cyclamen. The guy I live with was very happy to get them. He likes cyclamen a lot, if you didn’t know. There were some other plants, too.The box came right in the middle of a big project, so we took some time out to look at the plants and water them.

Remember this fence? Hideous, isn’t it? (Ignoring the equally-unattractive bamboo fence behind it, I mean.) This was the big project today. There was a lot of hemming and hawing about the fence after it was put up. Most of the materials were already here so it didn’t cost much money at all, but it was really, really ugly. It was necessary to have a little fence here to mark the end of the sand pile and sort of wall off the little corner in the northwestern part of the garden, but doing it with an ugly fence didn’t seem right.

Last weekend the guy I live with went to Denver Botanic Gardens and walked around the gardens with his friends, while it was snowing. He remembered the fences around the Bill Hosokawa Pavilion, a Japanese-style garden with bonsai in a greenhouse, and really handsome fences and paving, and this week he went and bought some lumber to make his version of the fences.

At first he had the idea that he would use cedar, and then when he looked at the various wood that was available there was oak, but all of these were sold by the linear foot, so he settled on pine. Much, much cheaper.

It might need to be stained later, so it hasn’t been thoroughly fastened to the uprights.

And you can see through it.

So we have a new fence. At least the other one wasn’t there for very long.

That’s all I have for now. Maybe things will get busier soon, but that all depends on the weather. I do know what to do when it gets chilly, though.

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 to bring you the latest news from our garden, and some vole-hunting news, too. You may remember me from such posts as “The Ugly Garden”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. The guy I live with said that lying on the thymes he planted on my Personal Hill wouldn’t hurt them. You can probably see how “desperately gloomy” the weather here can be, with no forecast of rain. Super gloomy.

But never mind that; things are happening in the garden now. Remember the epimediums he ordered and planted last autumn? They didn’t die. There are a lot of corydalis flowering now; these are forms of Corydalis solida. Some of them still have labels. The guy I live with said that a certain purebred border collie puppy swiped a lot of the labels, so we’re not sure what all the names are, here. This is ‘Purple Beauty’.This is ‘Going Rouge’. This is “the red one”. (Not ‘George Baker’.) It’s even redder than this but the point-and-shoot doesn’t do red very well, for some reason. These corydalis have begun to seed around which is kind of interesting. They’re easy to grow, too. Unlike some of the others.

Here are the funny tubes of Allium pskemense.  Named for the Pskem River in Kazakhstan. The guy I live with said these are dug up in the wild and eaten, like regular onions. I’m not allowed to have onions. And just today, or maybe just yesterday, the guy I live with noticed a peony seedling. He planted a few peony seeds about fifteen years ago, which a friend in New York sent him, and a few came up. At least one is still left.There’s another thing going on, and this is kind of sad. Maybe not for me, but for the guy I live with. He’s decided to do some downsizing and rearranging. The three troughs near the patio, that you often see in pictures, were at one time filled with porophyllum saxifrages, and in fact there were over sixty of them here. He would read and re-read the book on them, dream of getting more saxifrages (not easy to acquire), and when they began to flower, usually in March, sometimes in the snow, that would be very exciting. And best of all, his wife really liked them, the leaves and flowers, but after she died the saxifrages didn’t get the care they should have gotten, and so there are only a few now, and these are being moved. The troughs might be filled with hens and chicks instead. Some of the ones he got last year look really great now. 

A lot of the cactuses, like in the clay dishes, are being given away, too.

And then there’s this. The green fence is new, and possibly ugly, but this little corner got cleared out, as I mentioned a while ago. Really the only thing that was done was a bunch of branches from the New Mexican privet were cut back, and suddenly this space became visible, and empty. The definitely ugly bamboo fence is now super-visible, but won’t be during the summer.

So that’s the garden news.

I decided to go up the creek and thought you might like to see me doing that.There isn’t any water in the creek, obviously, but when there was, the guy I live with let me go splashing in the water, so long as the water looked and smelled good, which sometimes it doesn’t.

Anyway I was hoping there might be voles along the creek banks. There weren’t, but it was fun looking. It’s always fun to look. That’s the trunk of the cottonwood tree you can see from our house.This is me looking for voles, but not in the creek, which is over there.You may think this is totally pointless, but it really isn’t. There are holes like this all over the field. 

What you do is jam your nose into one of the holes and sniff. The guy I live with said that when I do that, dirt blows out my ears. I think he’s making fun of me. I didn’t catch any voles, of course, but I did wind up with Vole Hunter’s Nose.A condition which is easily remedied by soap and water.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s update, and maybe learned a thing or two about how to hunt for voles.

Until next time, then.