the miserable gardener

of snow and snowdrops

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 news from our garden. You may remember me from such snowdrop-related posts as “White Fever”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I hurt my nose somehow, and you can see the hurt spot there. The guy I live with says it was from eating dirt, or eating snow. He says that only the latter is dignified.

As you can see, it snowed here the other day, and so the snow was relatively fresh. It didn’t taste like anything, but it was cold, and good.You see that little mound on the left, where the pinyon was; well, the guy I live with claims that he’s going to get a bunch of pea gravel and dump it there, and that will be a new rock garden. I can hardly wait. Hardly anything has been happening. It’s so important that I get my pills that we don’t do much at all, which is fine by me.

You know the guy I live with has been fiddling with seeds, and the other day, Saturday to be precise, he nicked and soaked some astragalus seeds that had been collected in 1988, way before I was born, and then yesterday morning he put the seeds on filter paper, and looked what had happened by last night.The guy I live with says it was like one of those horror movies where the bad people summon some ancient sleeping creature, and bring it back to life. Though not as scary as that. Just weird that this happened so fast, after so long.

That’s the level of excitement around here.

Oh, and in the places where there isn’t snow, and where snowdrops are living, there are now snowdrops. There are bunches of them in the shade garden on the north side, but there’s still snow there.

I can’t think of anything else to say. If the guy I live with were doing the posts there’d probably be another ten thousand words, but I’ll just let you go now, as the sun sets over our garden.

Until next time, then.

more white medicine

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the excellent 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 white-colored posts as “Wright’s White” and “A Hint of Winter”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically pensive pose.It’s really sunny and windy today, which is why I’m squinting.

sunny and windy

The guy I live with is “fiddling with seeds and stuff” and not much else is going on, why is why I’m lying out on the patio. There’s a rug out there, especially for me, and as you can see, I’m lying on it in the first picture. The concrete is pretty warm, too, though, and so I lie on it, sometimes, too.

Some of the gardening (the fiddling with stuff part) struck me as fairly pointless, but it happened anyway. I mean, the plant he transplanted itself wasn’t pointless,but you might understand why I say this was pointless when I tell you that this plant is actually dead. Why anyone would move dead plants around in the garden is beyond me, but he does it anyway.

“It might not be completely dead”, he said, as he moved this agave into the front yard.

Well, you see the color of the leaves, right? And that streak of liquid running down one of the leaves? Dead.

Now, it could be, because it sometimes is, that the inner leaves are still alive, because their color is right, and the guy I live with didn’t really feel like putting his hand in the agave to see if the leaves were soft (a sign that it’s dead), so that was the justification for moving the thing.

You can hardly see it here anyway.The agaves with the white spots on their leaves there were damaged by the sudden cold in November, but they’ll recover. The guy I live with, who supposedly knows everything, says they didn’t have a chance to get winter-hardy before that cold spell.

Whatever, huh.

He saw this yesterday and got all super-excited for a couple of minutes.

Crocus niveus

And then of course there are the snowdrops. Some part of this picture is in focus; you can try to find it if you want to. You can also see the coiled seed pod of Cyclamen hederifolium here. Some self-sown snowdrops almost growing in the front yard.I guess that’s it. There would probably be a lot more to talk about if the guy I live with did more interesting stuff, but he rarely does.