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 talk about our garden again. You may remember me from such posts as “Our Winter, Thus Far”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I know I just posted yesterday, but the guy I live with has been getting very antsy about winter, which he claims will never end, and so he thought another post might be in order. He suggested the title. He said using the word “diverse” when “divers” is meant makes him slightly crazy. That’s the sort of thing he thinks about.

You can see there’s still snow in the back yard. This drives the guy I live with right up the wall. So that’s another thing that gets to him. He says it’s unnatural and that the snow “should” be gone. And when it doesn’t go away and then snows again, he gets even antsier. (I’ve had ants crawl on me so I know what that’s like.) The sun was out for a while, and then it got all gray and dismal. This is the garden all gray and dismal. 

This is me licking the snow. I’m not supposed to be standing in the rock garden. But it has the best-tasting snow. He took some pictures of plants, too, even though he said the light was awful.

A dwarf Cercocarpus ledifolius. The guy I live with said to say it really is a dwarf, and not a small regular-sized one. Not hugely photogenic, I think. Yucca rupicola is behind it. So then he went into the front yard to see if there was anything interesting there. This oak also isn’t very photogenic, but it gives a good idea of what the oaks here look like in winter. Its acorns are the size of a pea. That’s a wavy-leaf oak, Quercus undulata. It’s not very tall. There is a taller one behind. Here’s the taller one. Its acorns are much bigger. The big Arizona cypress, Cupressus arizonica. It has cones at the top. This Mahonia (or Berberis) aquifolium was self-sown. There’s a old plant up the street so that may have been where it came from. Some leaves stay green, some turn chocolate brown in the winter. The guy I live with did notice the creature in the last picture, if you were wondering. It wasn’t very cold today, and so the guy I live with did some raking. I like it when he works out in the garden, which he doesn’t do much of during the winter. The path by the shed is extremely icy. His friend gave him some YakTrax which he can wear on his shoes so he doesn’t slip on the ice, but there wasn’t much work to do in the garden besides raking, and none that involved walking on ice.

There was a lot of mud in the garden today, too, and I got to run around in it.Which was fun for me, but the guy I live with shampooed the living room carpet last week, and, well….It was fun, though.

The guy I live with spent some time downstairs, in the studio, to admire his work, and he brought this thing back to the kitchen. It’s a sieve for separating chaff from very fine seed. Custom-made, too. The square of duct tape is where it was torn and repaired. He thought this had been thrown away. You can see the care with which this was made.There are other sieves here, in the shed, made of steel. But this one is special. It will be put to good use again, I’m sure.

After all of this, there was still an evening walk that needed to be gone on. The guy I live with says that’s not the way to say it, but it sounds good to me. There was a walk that needed to be gone on. Pretty desperately needed, in fact. And so we went on it. Coyotes sometimes sneak down the creek bed at night, but mostly they use the paths. There’s a path on the right side of the creek, which I’ve shown before, the one that Chess used to go on, before I came here, but the other one goes behind the houses on the east side of the creek, including ours.We walked behind our house so you could see the squirrel-feeder wheel thing. The corn is mostly eaten now, as you can tell. There’s more corn in the garage. About this time of the evening, ducks begin to fly from the west to the southeast. There are some larger lakes there, I guess.You can see them here, too. You might have to squint. The guy I live with says that this is a melancholy view. He says he’ll explain that to me later. He also said not to tell readers to squint, when they can just click on an image and enlarge it, which they already know. This seems like a good place to stop, for now. A last picture of me, heading toward the setting sun.

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 “Selling Insurance”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I look busy, don’t I? It’s been kind of chilly this week, and the snow hasn’t melted, which annoys someone else who lives here to no end, but there’s not much that can be done about it.

There was an “issue”, you might say, with one of the old down pillows on this bed. It kind of exploded, and there were feathers everywhere. It wasn’t my fault, of course. So in that picture I’m making sure that the other pillows don’t explode. The guy I live with said they weren’t down, which was weird, because they are up on the bed, but….well, as you can see, even purebred border collies can have a sense of humor.

Today, even though it was chilly, the guy I live with spent some time trying to get macro pictures of birds. This was with a new lens he got. He finally figured out how to change the shutter speed on the camera, but hasn’t yet figured out how to focus on the birds in the squirrel-proof bird feeder rather than the cage itself. Depth of field or something. But at least he figured out that one thing. “One step at a time”, is what he said. 

Those chew marks are from the squirrels, trying to get to the feeder, which they can’t do.

A lot of bird-feeding goes on here, as I guess it does elsewhere. There are some dried ears of corn in the squirrel-wheel thing out in the “way back”. It’s this kind of wheel where you attach ears of corn and the squirrels can whirl around on the wheel while eating corn. But I guess, with this thing, they are pretty much total idiots because the corn hasn’t been totally devoured like it was in the past. There was this other feeder, with a lid that the squirrels could lift up, and the guy I live with actually had to show the squirrels how to do that, and at least one figured it out, and you could hear the lid being lifted constantly, but the other squirrels didn’t want to learn how to lift the lid, like that was hard or something, so they tried to chew into the feeder, and destroyed it.

The project in the studio downstairs is almost finished. A few pictures which were tacked to the wall need to be framed, and then that will be it. Some things were thrown away; everything else was cleaned. He took pictures so everything could go back the way it was, because it would look better than if he re-did everything. There’s only one picture of the guy I live with above the picture of North America on the right, with Slipper and Chess, because he didn’t put up all the pictures. He says bunches of pictures of him would look weird. The empty part of the wall to the left of the wolf is where the framed pictures will go. They’re on the drawing table right now. This is the view out of the window, looking west. Maybe I said earlier that the window was deliberately left dirty, to help filter the sunlight. If I didn’t, that’s why the window is dirty. The guy I live with made that arrangement of birch branches. Anyway, while he was cleaning down in the studio (I didn’t help), he looked in all the little boxes and tins. There are a lot of them. He calls them “sad little mysteries”, which, well, for obvious reasons, seems appropriate to me.

This is what he found in one of the tins. Lots of packets of seeds. On top of the seed packets was this little plastic thing. It’s for sowing seeds; you put the seeds in the top by unscrewing it, and then the top rotates so you can control the number of seeds that are dispensed.I think this came from some place like Garden Talk, a long time ago.

Most of the seed packets had dates on them, like 1994. That makes them pretty old. Not as old as the guy I live with, but pretty old. He didn’t know why the packets were stored away; maybe they were forgotten. At one time there was a cutting garden here, where the enclosure is now. Most of the packets were from Hudson or The Fragrant Path, and they had seeds which would have been appropriate for a cutting garden.

I didn’t know that seeds that old could still be viable, but they can. It depends on what. Like, members of the pea family, and others which have impermeable seed coats can be viable for decades. This is one of the packets. I hear that we call this Caesalpinia gilliesii now. The “desert bird-of-paradise”, which comes from Argentina and Uruguay, not really in deserts, but it’s grown in gardens in Arizona, and also grown here.Being a member of the pea family, there are a couple of things about it. One is that container-grown plants are often very difficult to get established because the roots are growing around and around in the pot. That’s why, he says, people have a hard time getting redbuds to grow here, even though they do grow here. The redbud that was planted here never made it, because of that. So these will be potted in deep pots, for the roots to go down, instead of around. The other thing is that it’s a pea, so naturally the guy I live with nicked the edges of all the seeds, put them in a dish of hot water, and then put the seeds into a wet coffee filter and then into a plastic bag, three nights ago. As an experiment.

And look what happened.It isn’t exactly magic, but it seemed to me that it was. If all of these grow (there are more seeds), and the plants don’t die after they’re planted out into the garden, we’ll have a dozen desert bird-of-paradise bushes in our garden. Besides the two that are already here.

Pretty cool, huh?

That’s all I have for today. I know it was a lot, but I think at least some of it was interesting.

Until next time, then.