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 and house. You may remember me from such posts as “Helping In The Garden”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Showing off my retractable ears, of course.I know I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks. The guy I live with thought we might do a post Wednesday before last, about Chess, who’s now been gone for over two years, but he decided to let that go. It seemed too sad. Then the guy I live with spent a whole day getting the airbag replaced on our car. That was something he’d been fretting about for a very long time. He said there wasn’t much of anything like getting something super major like that over with. Taxes are done, too, I hear.

The guy I live with has also become addicted to “Q.I.”, a TV show he watches on the “Acorn channel”. He laughs a lot, which I guess is a good thing. But he watches a lot of TV now.

So some stuff was happening. This is what part of the back yard looked like, last Monday.The yellow snowdrop ‘Primrose Warburg’ was about to open. And then this happened. The guy I live with had things to say about this. Of course. The garden, and everything we were doing, came to a complete standstill. It wasn’t very cold, but there was a lot of wind, and so our walks weren’t very pleasant. That was last Thursday.

But at least some of the snow has disappeared. You can see there are some crocuses flowering. There flower pots are covering some eremurus which may have come up “too early”. The holes in the pots are covered with duct tape. And the little irises are “coming along quite nicely”.  These aren’t our irises; they’re going to Denver Botanic Gardens when they grow up. One thing which I especially enjoy at this time of year is how, because the garden slopes away from the house, down to the “way back”, if the snow starts melting along the edges of the two paths that go out there, a whole lot of water trickles down the paths and forms a big sea of mud out in back. And then I can run through it.

Mud is excellent, if you didn’t know. It’s especially fun to track onto the carpet afterwards.

But today, because of all the stuff I tracked into the house, the guy I live with brought something up from the laundry room which I didn’t like at all. It made a horrific noise when it was turned on. After the incredible racket was over, the guy I live with said that, years ago, the lady of the house was using this little vacuum cleaner on these very stairs, and Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, pulled the bag off the vacuum cleaner while it was running. The bag was full, too. Until it was pulled off.

So now I know what to do when I see that awful thing again.

I guess that’s all I have for today. Not much of a post, I know. I’ll leave you with a picture of me lying in one of my favorite places, beneath the living room window. 

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 “Nothing Again Nothing”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Well, there’s been a whole bunch of stuff going on lately, which is why I haven’t posted in a while. Most of it has involved painting. Painting, painting, and then more painting. I don’t help at all, if you wanted to know.

But before that, there was some construction. You’ll notice that this thing, which is a “snowdrop frame”, looks quite a bit like this other thing                 but in fact the second thing is just a “bulb frame”, which right now has a bunch of seed-pots in it, instead of bulbs.

The “snowdrop” frame is for the early-flowering snowdrops, because this past year they didn’t get enough water and sun at the right time, in order to flower in November, and the guy I live with, who is kind of a nut, after all, decided to build this smaller frame, move the November-flowering snowdrops into it, and maybe propagate the bulbs. There’s this process called “twin-scaling” that he said he might try. Later, of course.

This is one of the November-flowering ones, which is actually flowering now. It’s been flowering for over a month, but “should” have been flowering earlier. I’ve mentioned these before, because they have such a ridiculous name. Galanthus elwesii var. monostictus Hiemalis Group.There are a lot of regular, that is, flowering at the right time of the year, snowdrops here now. This is a slightly different picture from the one the guy I live with posted on Facebook. After it was posted, someone said that snowdrops all look alike. But, in fact, the species in the genus Galanthus are all readily distinguishable from each other simply by looking at them. You don’t need a hand lens to tell one species from another. This is pretty rare in botany.

There are a lot of selections and hybrids in snowdrops, and one of these has been flowering here for a while. The guy I live with says it has “very long outers”, which is kind of funny.

‘Wasp’

So that’s part of what’s been going on here.

When the guy I live with was painting, upstairs, he found more packets of seeds. All really old, like at least twenty years old, but he thought he might sow them anyway. Some of the seeds are pretty large.

These are seeds of the Mexican buckeye, Ungnadia speciosa, which probably isn’t hardy here (since one planted here died in its first winter), but he said why not try it anyway.These are seeds of Sapindus drummondii, the western soapberry. They’re not really in focus, of course.I’m not sure how these will be sown, but I guess we’ll find out later, won’t we?

The guy I live with painted all day today. First there was furniture to move, and then the vacuum, which I don’t like much, had to be brought up to clean the place where the furniture, mostly bookshelves, stood, then there was painting, and then everything was moved back.

I still got to go on my walks. It was a little colder today than yesterday; yesterday it was seventy-five degrees (about twenty-two Celsius); it cooled off during the night, and even rained for a minute or two, but the birdbath didn’t have any ice in it this morning.

This is the field, looking southwest, late this afternoon. We walk along the trail made by Norm and Celeste, the coyotes, on the afternoon walk. The trail curves around by the fences, on the left.I guess that’s all for today. The painting is mostly done, so I’m not sure what other project will be started next, but there will probably be something.

Until next time, then.