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 completely up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such newsworthy posts as “The New Berm”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Not hugely in focus, of course. I’d just had a nice drink of water and was waiting to get a couple of Fruitables. They’re really good.

So is our water. We get Denver Water Board water, which is not only inexpensive, it tastes great. The guy I live with said that it’s easy to get icky-tasting water in cities around the country, but that Denver Water water is some of the best.

There are things finally going on, here, which is a relief to me since I don’t have to hear about the endlessness of winter or how cold someone is all the time. The change to Daylight Savings Time was pretty weird, but I managed it all right.

It did look a little chilly this evening, but it wasn’t.

There are crocuses in flower. More or less everywhere.The white ones here are called ‘Snow Bunting’. You can get this variety anywhere, and it’s still one of the best. That’s the tail of a French scare cat on the right, if you were wondering. Still snowdrops, too. This is part of the main group. With scare cats. (Only one in the picture.) The snowdrops in the frame are done now. A little fence was built right next to the frame, to replace a kind of ugly wire fence. There’s a big clematis just on the other side which will cover most of the fence. The fence does look kind of tacky right now but the guy I live with said to wait for a while, and see. Some bulbs are up “way to soon”, though the forecast doesn’t call for much freezing at night, now. This is Fritillaria raddeana. We have a large collection of “frits” here. Some of the coldest weather can come in April, and so we have to be prepared to cover these things at night. By “we” I don’t actually mean me, of course. Though I could guard the frits, if necessary.

The mosses in the troughs have turned green. 

The moss pictures aren’t as in focus as they might have been. The guy I live with cultivates moss in two of the troughs, and it does quite well here. It’s a native moss of some kind; can go completely dry in the summertime.

This is left over from when the guy I live with was super seriously into rock gardening, and there were all these cool plants in the troughs, but then things changed and a lot of plants died. Except for the mosses.

And if you remember the last post where some calochortus seeds had germinated, this is what they look like now.So that’s the gardening, here.

My walks have been about the same, which of course means excellent. The geese are still here.I got to hunt for some voles, today, too. The guy I live with said it’s possible I could be imagining things, all these voles rustling around under the grass. But I looked anyway. 

The guy I live with said not to stick my nose in there but I did, because I wanted to. The only thing we found was what I was sure was a giant egg of some terrifying prehistoric creature. The guy I live with said it wasn’t. I’m fairly certain that’s all for today. If that egg hatches and it’s something scary, I’m not going to like it. But meanwhile things are okay. I thought you might like a short movie of me getting a biscuit; I do have a speaking role here. And notice how I stare at the cabinet where the biscuits are kept, to make sure I get one.

Until next time, then.

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.