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 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.

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 “Our Winter, Thus Far”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. This was taken last Tuesday. It’s still characteristic. I’m guarding my Personal Hill, which is just behind me. It was pretty chilly that day. On my morning walk, the jet contrails looked like they were frozen. Maybe they were.

This picture is looking south.Looking east. Then it warmed up again, the way it does.

The guy I live with said that there were honeybees clamoring to get into the Snowdrop Frame, so he opened it to let them in.

The bees seemed to be pretty happy visiting the snowdrops.

The guy I live with was also happy because the amsonia seed he sowed on the seventh germinated very quickly. Usually nothing happens with amsonia seed but, as you can see, serious things are happening here. These are Amsonia eastwoodiana and A. tomentosa (which some botanists say are the same species). Dryland plants from western Colorado and Utah.That’s really the gardening news, here. He thought these seeds would need stratification or have to be sown outdoors in pots and then nothing would happen, but instead this is happening, the seeds just sown in pots, the pots put in a propagator under lights, and with a heating pad underneath.

He also sowed the paintbrush seed. We were going to show how it was done but there wasn’t anything to it and it had to be done in a hurry because we were expecting more snow. The seeds were rubbed, which I guess you don’t have to do, and then sprinkled in the troughs next to the native grasses which have appeared in the troughs (not totally by accident). Then the snow would push the seed farther down into the soil-less mix in the troughs, hopefully.

So this happened yesterday.There’s a funny thing about winter here. Everyone gets worried when it doesn’t snow. They even say to water the garden in the winter. This winter, people were totally panicked.

The guy I live with, who’s a worrier, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, never worries about whether or not it will snow in the winter, and never, ever waters the garden in winter. And nothing bad has ever happened. He’s even had people over to look at the garden after a winter of no watering and they still think the garden should have been watered. The guy I live with said that people can freak out and water if they want to, but it’s not going to be done here.

He explained that we’re surrounded by a flora, extending hundreds of miles in every direction, which has never been rained on in the winter, no one ever waters it, and yet the plants still live, because they’re adapted to dry winters.

The snow that falls on the garden in winter is just snow. Like the Zen saying, “Mountains are just mountains”.  It evaporates under our hot winter sun, which is good, because a lot of the bulbs in the garden would rot in the winter if they got wet.

The snowdrops are a different story, because they’re growing now; not dormant.

Anyway, it wasn’t very cold but there wasn’t much of anything to do in the garden so I spent time on the soft Pottery Barn sheets, like any normal person would. I wasn’t sleeping, as you can see, just being as soft as the sheets. Today the sun came out. The guy I live with has been watching Sherlock Holmes on TV and he said he would get out “the long lead” yesterday (like in the Bruce-Partington Plans, at the end, in the TV version), so I could enjoy walking in the snow more than usual, and it was even better today, though it was also windy.

That’s really all that’s been going on here. Oh, the guy I live with got some pistachios which were supposed to be roasted and salted but they were unsalted. He said that he couldn’t re-salt them once they were unsalted. I didn’t understand that. It was a really big deal, though. They were icky, so he got some roasted and salted pistachios to make up for it, later. He said that Chess loved pistachios, but I haven’t tried them yet.

And he said the snow might be gone by June, so I guess I’ll be spending quite a bit of time walking on the long lead, sleeping on the bed, and on the couch. The guy I live with has been sitting with me on the couch in the evenings, and I like that a lot. We listen to records. I guess they’re called CDs now, but about his favorite thing to do most of his life was to sit and listen to records, so he still calls them that. Gardening always came in second.

Well, I know this has been another of my rambling posts. I’ll leave you with another picture of me almost on the couch.

Until next time, then.