the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, Mani the goose-chaser, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you some pretty interesting gardening news. You may remember me from such posts as “A Bit Of Work”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I got the biscuit, too.This was me a bit earlier, when I was about to say something about my dinner. I got that, too. Today was what almost anyone would call a very nice day. It was sixty-nine degrees (that’s twenty Celsius), with eight percent humidity.

The first thing that had to be done, this morning, I mean after my breakfast but on my walk, was policing the geese. 

I wanted to walk where they were standing, so they had to move.

For some reason they like this little hill. It’s an artificial hill, by the way. It used to be a sort of–according to the guy I live with–haunted woodland with scary trees and an abandoned house and broken-down barbed-wire fences. Now it’s just a hill, with geese on one side of it. Sometimes they’re at the top, too.

So that was me, policing the geese.

We really have to watch where we walk, when we walk on this hill. For not just geese-related things. While we were walking over the hill, the guy I live with told me that they had discovered a supercolony of penguins, like over a million, in Antarctica because they could see all the poop from space. That would be a lot of poop. Someone told him about the poop-from-space thing and and he looked it up just to make sure it was true.

The guy I live with says that the next stuff is much more important and to focus more on that.

This is what the flock of snowdrops looked like in the shade garden today. So much for the big temperature drop of a while ago. Those are French scare cats, if you didn’t know. I’ve talked about them before. They’re not made to scare the French, they’re made in France, to scare the birds so they won’t shred the snowdrop flowers.

There are crocuses, too.

Crocus adanensis

The big thing that happened today was the sowing of calochortus seeds. This was a lot of work. I just watched. The way I see it, if something’s going to be a lot of work, it’s better to watch the work being done than to have to do it.

The calochortus seeds were in this box in the vegetable drawer in the refrigerator. I talked about this in the post titled “Up In The Air”. 

Some of the seeds were germinating. I was amazed to find that some of the stuff he does actually works. 

Water was poured into the bags of seeds that had germinated; the water and sand were poured onto a sieve, and then the excess sand was sprayed away with water, using a sprayer.Then the seeds were plucked off the sieve with tweezers.

The seeds were sown into these pots, which are going upstairs under lights. The guy I live with is not happy about the soil-less mix at all, but he says it will do for now. A little fine gravel was sprinkled on top of the seeds.Now we wait.

Not all the species germinated so those bags went back into the refrigerator. The bags do get checked every so often to make sure the seeds aren’t being frozen.

Well, that’s really all I had for today. There was a lot more gardening today than there has been in quite a while, and I really enjoy that.

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 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.