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 to bring you the latest news from our garden. 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 like to stand in the door like that; half in, and half out. The guy I live with said that Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, liked to do this too. It’s nice to feel icy wind on my face while my hindquarters are ultra toasty, but the guy I live with said it was too cold for me to do that and to come back inside.

The other day we had snowdrops in flower in the shade garden. And kind of a nice sunset.Then it snowed. The guy I live with said everyone around here was complaining because there hadn’t been much snow this winter. He hates snow and thinks people who complain about not having snow are just odd.

Every so often someone comes to the door, even though I try to viciously and loudly dissuade them from doing so (the guy I live with said split infinitives are okay), and what these people who come to the door do is try to talk the guy I live with into buying something. He never does. He hates it when people try to talk him into something; he says that’s been the story of his life, people trying to talk him into things (he’s never tried to talk anyone into liking classical music), and one thing they try to talk him into is liking snow. It never works.

Well, I like snow, and I don’t need to try to talk him into liking it. I know he likes me and so we go for walks in the snow, even when it’s really cold.

Today it was sixteen degrees, which is about minus nine Celsius, and eighty-eight percent humidity. The humidity made it feel very cold, but I liked it anyway.

There was a big hawk in the cottonwood, as usual. Almost in the center of the picture. People aren’t suppose to drive through the field, which is open space, but they do anyway.

If you think that looks cold, it’s because it is. Those are pinyons, Pinus edulis, on drip (which is weird because they don’t need to be watered at all here). Last autumn the cones were full of nuts. The guy I live with talked about taking them home and roasting them, but he said collecting them was a sticky business, and he didn’t have a bag to carry pine nuts in.

What I wanted to do, though, was do some exploring in the area behind where the guy I live with was standing when he took that picture. Like if he turned around, we could go into this area I’ve always wanted to check out.

The guy I live with said it was a wilderness. It’s by the creek, and so he said we could go down and wander around there. You can still see the hill. 

The hose thing you see looks like it’s part of a drip irrigation system for the trees on top of the hill in the picture I showed earlier. Kind of weird to see something like that in a wilderness.

It was fun to explore the wilderness but the guy I live with had a hard time following me because he’s the wrong height for wilderness exploration. I know I’ve seen Norm, the coyote, exploring in there too, in the summertime, while I was walking up by the hill.

The only other thing that’s been happening here is a lot of moaning and groaning about the seed mix the guy I live with has been using. For some reason, maybe he wasn’t paying attention when he did it, the mix is full of some kind of compost which has way too many wood chips in it. “What is it with wood chips?” he asked, and of course I had no answer.

The wood chips get all moldy and eventually they get this blue fungus. One time, about twenty-five years ago, the guy I live with got some “soil conditioner” and dug it into the soil, and even now when he digs into the soil in places where the conditioner was added there is all this fungus in the soil. Maybe it’s okay but it looks weird.

So anyway he tried to screen out the largest of the wood chips but it still left smaller wood chips. Now there’s talk of making a mix out of vermiculite, perlite, coarse sand, and not much else. Apparently that’s been done before and it was the most successful mix that has been made. “A whole lot better than mixes made with peat moss or wood chips.”

Another choice would be “decent garden soil”, that is, just the dirt, with perlite and some other things mixed in. The soil in the field would be perfect, but he might get into trouble digging there and taking the soil.

It will be interesting to see what happens. This is something the guy I live with totally obsesses about. I don’t find it all that fascinating but I do have to hear about it.

So that’s the latest news. It’s supposed to warm up again tomorrow. Maybe the snow will be gone in a couple of days, like “it should be”. 

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 news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Another Fantastic Week”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Nothing like lying in the garden, in the sun, chewing on a pine cone, I say.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of sun here lately, though as you can see quite a bit of the snow has melted. Yesterday was cold and cloudy. The guy I live with said that clouds were pointless unless they brought rain, drizzle, or mist, but sometimes it’s cloudy without any precipitation at all. “Like last summer”, the guy I live with said. I remember all the complaining.

Hardly anything has been happening here, as usual. Well, that’s not quite true. On my walk yesterday I came upon something quite unusual. Unusual for me, that is. The guy I live with said that these were called geese. The same birds that fly overhead all the time, honking like an aerial traffic jam, but this time they were on the ground.

He said that at this time of year there were more geese than people along the Front Range. I don’t know why I never met them before. They were pretty big, as you can see. They’re Canada geese, and they fly down here from up north because our winters are supposedly less cold than where they live. Sometimes you do see them in the summer, here, too.

He also said that one of them is called a goose, but more than one are geese. I don’t know how anyone learns to talk, with rules like that. There was also a big hawk in the cottonwood. We see the hawks every day. Maybe you can guess one thing they catch, if you keep reading.

You can see the coyote path I’m walking on. My house is where the path turns to the right, just ahead. I’ve been working on making the path perfect, since the one on the other side of the creek was wrecked by mowing. There was too much mowed grass to be able to find the path again.

The hawk flew away before we could get a good picture of it. The hawk must find me terrifying. But you can see it in the tree. There are snowdrops in flower, and so at least one of us is excited. Snowdrop don’t fully open their flowers unless the temperature is above fifty degrees Fahrenheit, so it’s obvious that it hasn’t been that warm. But still, flowers in the middle of winter are delightful, I hear.

Galanthus plicatus ‘Chequers’ in the Snowdrop Frame.

‘Brigadier Mathias’ in the frame.

G. plicatus subsp. byzantinus.

The last one has a funny little story attached to it. He and his friend got a clump of these bulbs a while back; he persuaded her that snowdrops were excellent, and so they planted most of them in her garden, and a few here. Last year her snowdrops were in flower in the middle of January, and this year they were in full flower on the seventeenth. The guy I live with tried desperately not to be jealous.

The soil here is frozen solid; probably because it snowed and then got warm over and over again, and some of the snow melted down into the ground, where it froze the soil. The soil usually doesn’t freeze, or, of it does, it’s just the very top layer.

The guy I live with said that during the winter there are creatures called voles that make tunnels and eat plant roots and do all kinds of damage. He said that there were voles in the garden here, years ago, but that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, really detested them and got rid of them. That’s how he described it.

The voles did come back the winter after his wife died and they destroyed a third of what was called The Long Border, and so he decided to take out the remaining plants there and do something entirely different. Then the voles stopped coming, which was fine with him.

On one of our walks I saw the tunnels voles made.Tiny little tunnels just under the snow.

I looked at the tunnels but didn’t think they were all that interesting. However, the guy I live with bought me a new long leash (because the old one had knots in it) and I quickly learned that I could wander off the path out into the grasses in the field. He said this didn’t make for much of a walk, exercise-wise, but I don’t really need all that much exercise since I get plenty racing around the back yard, monitoring stuff.

Anyway, I quickly discovered that when I wandered into the grasses I started hearing things, and smelling things, things I hadn’t heard or smelled before.

There are voles in the long grass.

So this is kind of what we do now. My walks have turned into vole hunts, and looking for geese. The geese are easier to find. Hunting for voles is really enjoyable. I don’t know what I’ll do if I find a vole, but I have no doubt the guy I live with will say not to do that.

Until next time, then.