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 up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “At A Standstill”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic after-a-day-at-Day-Care pose.Day Care is fun, but a lot of work.

Maybe you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me in a while. If you read my last post, “Another Cold Front”, you remember that they were predicting a huge drop in temperature, which happened, though it was even colder than they predicted. “Naturally”, the guy I live with said.

On the eighteenth, it was almost seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and by Monday night, the nineteenth, it was four below zero (Fahrenheit). There was no point in thinking about gardening for over a week, because there was snow on the ground and it was too cold.

It finally warmed up again, and it’s supposed to get even warmer in the next couple of days, and then, of course, snow. This usually happens over and over again until the end of May; the weather gets all spring-like, and the guy I live with skips around the garden, singing “La dee da“, and then it snows, and he’s totally disgusted.

I hear that it used to rain here, in spring, without thundering, even, but that seems to be a thing of the past.

Still, the snowdrops recovered. Kind of amazing considering what they went through.

‘Wasp’

And there are crocuses in flower. The bees noticed them right away.

Someone has to guard the crocuses, and it turned out that that someone was me.I spent an hour or two guarding the seed pots in the frame, too. You know, just in case. It was, as I said, a pretty nice day, though there is still some snow on the ground. A couple of snowdrops came in the mail yesterday, “in the green” (they looked like green onions, which I don’t eat–I don’t eat snowdrops either) and they were planted in pots and put in the Snowdrop Frame, which was open for part of the day today.

And, of course, there were walks that needed to be gone on. On my morning walk, there were geese again. 

I kind of snuck up to them but I didn’t think they were all that interesting, really. The guy I live with wondered about my herding instinct but the geese didn’t seem like they needed to be herded, since they were moving all by themselves.

He also said he wondered for years why geese never showed up in the field. This afternoon there were geese in the field. Also a bunch of poop, which I tried, though the guy I live with said not to. He says that a lot.

They flew away though, making a lot of honking noises.

I guess that’s it for today. March came in like a lamb, which is unusual, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. The guy I live with said that March is the snowiest month of the year here, though he can remember when it rained, as I said earlier, and it wasn’t so horrible. To hear him talk you would think that the good days had passed, long ago.

As for me, I’m looking forward to more trips to the mountains and things like that, in the summer.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, hunter of voles, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Mostly Iceless”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. The old biscuit-on-the-head ploy, again. And not hugely in focus. It was a pretty nice day, considering. You can see how the little mugo pine ‘Carstens Wintergold’ kind of glows.The snowdrop frame was uncovered for a while today.There are seeds germinating in the propagators upstairs. This is Poliomintha incana.And all the seeds from Alplains, mostly penstemons, were sown and the pots put in the frame. The frame was supposed to have bulbs in it but still doesn’t. The guy I live with said he wasn’t going to order any seeds this year and he wasn’t going to do this and wasn’t going to do that, and just might spend the next several months just sitting in the chair he sits in, staring at the rug on the floor, but I kind of wondered if this wasn’t counterproductive. This is a difficult climate in which to garden, I think, and sometimes he does lose heart, but then keeps going despite things.

So he ordered the seeds and when they arrived he seemed a bit excited, and started talking about how blue the flowers were, and how he envisioned maybe a slight slope on a hill somewhere in, say, northwestern Colorado, where penstemons grew wild, with the dark blue, almost black, bee-kissed flowers swaying in the breeze, and then he got this far-off look.

I get that look too, but for different reasons. Anyway the seeds were sown and I started to look forward to bunches of blue flowers, like were here in the old days when a book was being written about them. I can see blue.

One of the advantages of growing things from seed, if you were wondering, is that you can have plants that you sometimes can’t get from nurseries. The little Aethionema oppositifolium was flowering today in the rock garden. (There are a couple in troughs, too.)This little plant is also known as Eunomia oppositifolia. I wondered about the gender agreement when I heard this; you know, Aethionema oppositifolium, but Eunomia oppositifolia, until the guy I live with said that the Greek ending –nema was neuter gender and so the specific epithet would take a neuter ending, -um. 

I was very glad to learn all of that, of course.

It was seventy degrees today. About twenty-one Celsius. Seventy. And windy. Even super windy. If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time you will know that seventy degrees in winter means a sudden drop in temperature very soon after, and sure enough, the temperature tomorrow night is predicted to be four. Four. That’s minus sixteen Celsius, almost.

So there is going to be a drop in temperature of almost seventy degrees in less than forty-eight hours. Really. I could hear a heavy sigh, every so often, coming from the kitchen, so I though it might be best to come into the kitchen and spend some time in my Kitchen Fort, close to the guy I live with, and all the sighing.

I have to listen to a lot of this. Maybe in exchange I get to do a lot more hunting for voles that I might otherwise do. Of course I’m not really allowed to do anything but just look.

This is me just looking. Here, by the cottonwood, I was certain that there was something lurking in the grass under the leaves.

The guy I live with said he wasn’t just going to stand there while I lay on the ground waiting for a vole to show up. I can smell them, and hear them, but have never seen one.

He said they were like big mice, and that maybe eventually I would see one.

So that’s pretty much everything that’s been going on, plus the incredible drop in degrees we’re expecting tomorrow. I could talk about how the wind is blowing plastic grocery bags all over the place, and how some are flapping in the branches here and there in the garden, but instead, I’ll leave you with a short film of me on my walk today, in the wind, by my own back fence.

Until next time, then.