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 leaves. You may remember me from such posts as “The Big Turn Off”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You can see how dry it is here. The guy I live with is really hoping for some snow this weekend, but, the way things have been going, he does expect those hopes to be dashed.
I’m aware of how unsettling this is to him.

There are snowdrops in flower. This is ‘Barnes’. It’s had a rough life; some years ago the guy I live with was sure he had planted the bulb of this, and then discovered the bulb lying on the ground. He had no idea how long it was just lying there. Maybe a squirrel dug it up, or something. Or he forgot to plant it. That does happen.
The guy I live with has been especially irritable lately. I can tell.
Fortunately no one told him he should be going over to someone’s house to eat turkey today, which would make him feel even more lonely, even though people not in this situation don’t have a clue about this. He said he would rather spend the day with me, and, except for the couple of hours when he vacuumed the whole house (I had to stay outside), we had a pretty good day together. We did some gardening, looked at things, went on walks, and so on.
But the most irritating thing now is seeing all the leaves raked up by the neighbors so they could be thrown in the trash. This really makes him kind of crazy. I talked about this in my post “The Pumpkins”.
Leaves can be taken to the city greenhouse less than five minutes from here, instead of being thrown away. What a waste.

This is the result of almost forty years of leaves falling on the soil and not being raked up and thrown into the trash.
This is on the north side of the house, in the shade garden.
You can see that there are snowdrops up, already. The snowdrops love this soil.
They don’t need to be protected against cold weather or anything like that.
And now I do need to stop this for a minute and show a selfie of me, to make this way more interesting. I didn’t know that selfies reverse everything, but I do now.
Think of it like old-time TV, a pause “for a moment from our sponsor”.
Okay, now back to improving the soil.
The guy I live with doesn’t improve the soil for dryland plants, of which there are a lot of here, but for the rest of the garden, he definitely does. All you have to do is rake leaves onto the soil, year after year. Instead of throwing them away.
And the cyclamen certainly like this. Here are some of them.
There are even more cyclamen in the garden here. If you asked the guy I live with what his favorite plants are, he’d probably say cyclamen and snowdrops.
He posted these pictures, and more, on Facebook and discovered that having this extensive collection of cyclamen growing “in the open garden” was a highly unusual thing. Not just in Colorado, but everywhere.
I guess we’re highly unusual. Not necessarily a bad thing.

So that’s my post for today. I’ll leave you with a very usual picture of me sitting under the kitchen table, right next to the guy I live with. I’ve taken to doing this and I like it a lot.

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 today to take you on a short walk. You may remember me from such posts as the highly-relevant “Employees Only”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
We’re going on a short walk, for not much of a reason at all except to look at the trough patio again.

First we’re going to the wrought-iron table, and we’re going to see something highly unusual, at least for Colorado. Not as unusual as seeing giraffes in the garden, but pretty unusual.
The guy I live with picked up those snail shells from the garden. He ordinarily would have said we don’t have snails here, but I think that’s incorrect.

Now out to the shed. I’ve shown pictures of this before, but it’s on the walk.
I was running, not walking, out to the back fence to bark at something, which is what I do.
Viburnum farreri on the left.

Behind the shed is the trough patio. You can now see the pattern laid down by the guy I live with’s wife.
The low wall in front is like the most level thing on the planet.

The patio abuts the Employees Only section, divided by a large hedge of Rhus trilobata, which is out of the picture on the left. I’ve shown a picture of this section before, and here’s another one.
It’s at least twenty-feet feet to the corner of the yard. I’m the only one who goes in here regularly.

And that’s the short walk. I’ll leave you with a picture of me on my much longer evening walk.

Until next time, then.