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 a post about Spring, such as it is in these parts. You may remember me from such Spring-oriented posts as “The Terrors Of Spring” and “Retro Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a, well, not incredibly characteristic maybe, but definitely delightful, pose, illuminated by a ray of sunlight.I know it looks like the flagstone is wet but it isn’t.

Today it was about seventy-two degrees F (about twenty-two Celsius). The expected low tonight will be about twenty-eight degrees (a little over minus two Celsius).

The guy I live with does not like this forecast. Not much we can do about it; the bulbs can’t be covered because there’s a high wind warning tonight, and the covers would just blow away. They can be pinned to the ground with the pins made for them, but that probably won’t help.

Yesterday we saw a pretty cute thing happen in the neighbor’s yard. These pictures were posted on Facebook but not too many people noticed them, so here they are in a more noticeable form. And in chronological order, too. The bunny was eating some bird seed which the ducks thought was theirs.

It looks like ducks can be mean.

There are lots of things in flower right now, though it’s hard to get good pictures of some of them. Cyclamen coum is in full flower, still. But this one is a little different; it’s called ‘Lake Effect’. (With a bunch of Crocus tommasinianus.)

The “lake effect’, if you didn’t know, refers to the huge piles of snow that places on the south and east shores of the Great Lakes get sometimes during the winter. So, white as snow.

Some of the so-called “steppe” corydalis are flowering. I know these are extremely difficult to grow because of what the guy I live with says when he finds another one rotted.

This is Corydalis ruksansii. It’s easier than some of the others.Corydalis glaucescens ‘Pink Beauty’. Not so easy. They need to be grown in clay soil which only gets wet in the spring, when the snow melts. Several tubers which were planted in the sand pile rotted because the winter was so warm and every time it snowed the snow melted into the sand pile. The tubers got wet and rotted. If they had been grown in clay nothing would have happened.

The other problem is when the flowering stems freeze, and that can rot the tubers. The very expensive tubers.

Woodland corydalis like Corydalis solida are a lot easier to grow, and now that there are lots of colors to choose from, very satisfying as garden plants. They haven’t begun to flower yet.

That’s pretty much all I had for today. I’ve been walking along the canal, as usual, but haven’t felt like going in. I think the water’s going to be cold for a while now. We haven’t seen any more crawdads, and haven’t seen the muskrat yet. 

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 up to date on the latest news from our garden and its environs. It was Chess who first used that word, but I’ve used it more. You may remember me from such “environs”-using posts as “Escape Claws”, among at least one other.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I think you can see what happened last night. Before it snowed there were some things in flower which got their pictures taken. The iris, Iris rosenbachiana ‘Tovilj Dara’ is always photogenic.I don’t know if I’ve said this but there are some juno irises which are easy, like Iris bucharica and aucheri, some which are difficult to grow but you can’t get them anyway so it hardly matters, and some which are easy if you plant them in just the right place but now you can’t get these either.

This one, with a lot of other junos, is growing on a little hill in the “way back” next to the Employees Only section, in a location where it doesn’t get much sun until early March. Iris rosenbachiana used to come up in January here, and that was the end of that. I don’t think I need to say why. Not all bulbs are tough like snowdrops.

Apparently some people, like botanists, think this is really Iris nicolai or Iris popovii. The junos are really cool; I did a post on them a while back called “Day Of The Scorpiris”. But you do have to make sure that the ones that like to come up very early don’t.

There are lots of cyclamen in flower here now. Cyclamen coum. They’re actually about three weeks late because the soil froze. Now it’s thawed out and everything seems fine. On our walk the other morning there was a lot of barking at something from across the field and we looked and this is what we saw. The barking was coming from off to the right in this picture, from a yard you can’t see. The coyote watched us (me, really; I’m the deadly threat, of course), then turned around and went home. The guy I live with said he felt sorry for it. He knew exactly what it was like to want to do something but feel too shy or awkward to do it. He told me he’d only been to a restaurant all by himself maybe three times in his life, and all of those times in the last nine years.

Today the coyote came back. The dial on the camera had been turned too far so the pictures are dark, but you get the idea.

I got to run back and forth in the mud, which was fun, except then the guy I live with said to look at my feet, which I did.Some work, of an unknown kind, is being done in the northwest corner of the garden. This is maybe the most nondescript part of the garden. Even ramshackle. It was of course the first area to be dug, and so has been neglected for about twenty-five years. But something is happening there now. (Even though it might not look like it.)Well, the work isn’t happening right now, because it snowed last night, but I’m not being very chronological in my post today. But that big post on the right is now much shorter; it was sawed day before yesterday.

It was yesterday, or maybe the day before–I think the day before–that the water in the canal stopped. It was kind of strange to see. (It’s flowing again as of this evening.)

We walked along and could see movement in the canal. The guy I live with said there was a crawdad fight and so I went down the bank a little, just to look. 

The guy I live with said these were really big crawdads. If you read the post I mentioned earlier, “Escape Claws”, you’ll know that I came sort of close to being pinched by a crawdad a couple of years ago, and so he said I couldn’t go all the way down into the canal bottom, or bed I guess, and look at the crawdads, because the next thing I knew we would be racing to the vet’s with a crawdad pinching my nose. It would seem all serious and everything but eventually everyone would laugh, except me, and then people would snicker for years afterward when they told the story of the crawdad and my nose. I’d probably have a scar, too.

So we just looked at them.

I know this has been a really rambling post, but today seemed like a good day to be ultra-rambling. I’ll leave you with a picture of me when I was much cleaner than I wound up being today (though I did go into the canal to wash my feet). 

Until next time, then.