the miserable gardener

snowdrop roundup

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you what I personally think is some pretty dumb news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Revenge Of The Rodents” and “The Worst Laid Plans”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically sun-drenched pose.It was a pretty rough day today, as you can see.

The guy I live with went out into the “way back” for the first time in months, maybe, and looked at stuff. You can see that the fence surrounding “the enclosure” is still seriously leaning, though I’m assured that it’s in the process of being fixed.

The thing that made him feel pretty good is the Arizona cypresses, one of which you can see leaning, in the center right, sort of. They’re still alive. Maybe two dozen cypresses have been planted in the back yard, and almost all of them have died. The guy I live with claimed that the root balls were too small for the size of the tree, and so last year he bought some with more or less the right ratio of roots to top, and they’re still alive. Right now, anyway.

And other things are happening. Here’s Hyacinthella glabrescens. It’s way tinier than this in real life. (Also more in focus.) The guy I live with likes gardening with a magnifying glass. The first of the porophyllum saxifrages, ‘Jiři Vesek’. (The leaves are supposed to look like that.)Well, so, anyway, about the title of my post. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with spraying. Yesterday the guy I live with found a snowdrop “separated from the herd”and so he decided to do a roundup. In fact, he decided to “wrangle some snowdrops” and started humming the theme to “Rawhide”, which really annoyed me, because I couldn’t get it out of my head for hours.

Here are the wrangled snowdrops. Of course we are vastly more sophisticated and urbane than this roundupping stuff, which is why we’re showing the snowdrops in a genuine Sussex trug.The guy I live with re-planted the wrangled snowdrops and then re-re-planted them, because the first place turned out to be a dumb one (as usual), and now they’re where they ought to be, with the others.

You might notice that some of these are in pretty bad shape; that’s because they were in the middle of the path and kept getting stepped on.

None of the snowdrop pictures he took today came out. The focus issue again. Oh, one turned out okay, I think.

Lapwing

So that was our day. I didn’t do much, really, except think of the theme to “Rawhide”, when I wasn’t asleep on the patio. It’s supposed to be nice tomorrow, and then snow, and then be nice after that.

I’ll leave with with a picture of me showing my “totally wrecked nose”, which I’m sure will heal. The guy I live with was saying something, but I wasn’t paying attention, which is almost always the best way to deal with that.

Until next time, then.

twinges of spring

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest and most fascinating news from our garden. You may remember me from such other fascinating posts as “Inching Toward Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic, albeit slightly serious, pose.Today it was about seventy (70) degrees F (21.1C), sunny, breezy, and dry (eight percent humidity). It was pretty excellent.

Sometimes when the weather is this nice in winter, people here don’t know what to do. This is what you do.I also got my dinner al fresco this evening, and that was pretty good. I’ve decided that steak was way too much trouble to chew, so the guy I live with got me some stew in a can. What a hunter, huh. It’s salmon stew, really good, and I can pretend I’m stealing cat food while I’m eating it. My grandpa Flurry said that stealing the cat’s food was what he did when he was little. He sometimes got a lecture when he showed up with cat food breath, but not much of anything else happened.

And since it was so nice today, the guy I live with got all these twinges of spring and started moving plants around, which is mostly what he does in the garden.

He took some pictures, too. Here are the emerging multicolored leaves of Allium platycaule, from California.

Oh, and snowdrops, too. If you look closely you can see that some are different from others, with the little green marks on them. Some are more marked than others.