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 just to talk about crocuses. You may remember me from such posts as “Crocuses And Snowdrops”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.It’s pretty cold, and it’s going to be cold today, too, but tomorrow, not so much. On our morning walk it was seven degrees F (-13.9 C).
The only drawback for me is that I have to wear my boots, and the only drawback for the guy I live with is that the brightness of the sun on the snow hurts his eyes, even with polarized sunglasses.

Anyway, you may recall the guy I live with’s pontificating about crocuses and their corms. In particular, autumn-flowering crocuses.
He said that autumns are now so dry that newly-planted corms often don’t get enough water to form cormlets after the plants flower, which is why he’s growing some in pots upstairs under lights.
You can see that the leaves in the pot third from the left are starting to wither. He thought the leaves would stay green until spring, but apparently not. They do, growing out in the garden.
What really matters is the formation of cormlets.
In the pot closest in the picture, the leaves had all withered, and he thought it might be because of the heavier, silty soil which makes it difficult for water to infiltrate. He was afraid the corm had died.
He told me (I’m not sure I listened much) that a more porous soil makes it easier for water to infiltrate, and that water is more readily available to roots growing in porous soils.
Like this:
This is old soil-less mix taken from the troughs which were given away.

So he removed all the soil in that one pot, and after searching around for a while, this is what he found:See the new cormlets? The tunic, or outer covering, of the old corm is at the left and middle.
It may take a couple of years for the cormlets to grow large enough to flower, but the process is well on its way now.

And that’s all I have for today. We’re eagerly looking forward to tonight’s -6F (-21 C), warmer weather after that, then colder weather, then warmer weather, and so forth.

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 talk about the vortex. You may remember me from such posts as “The Cold”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that there’s snow on the ground. So far this year we’ve received 0.26 inches (6.6 mm) of water, from now. The average for this month is 0.38 inches (9.7 mm), so that’s not bad.

Not much has been going on here, which is why I haven’t posted in a while. We did have a “fire weather” warning on the 30th of December, on the third anniversary of the Marshall Fire, which didn’t make the guy I live with happy, to say the least, but he also told me that right around where we live is probably the wettest part of the state right now. We had three times the average precipitation for November, and well over the average for December. It was a lot drier in Denver.

I can tell when the guy I live with is unhappy, and let me tell you he’s been extremely upset by the news of the fires in Los Angeles, where he grew up, and has lots of happy memories of the place.
He’s also been upset by the idiotic and nasty comments online made by people who don’t understand weather, or firefighting (his nephew is a firefighter), or, really, anything.
In some places in southern California it has not rained since last March. It rains in Los Angeles in the winter; the city gets more precipitation in winter than we get all year. But this winter, none.
Imagine getting no rain for nine months.

We get katabatic winds here, like the Santa Ana winds in southern California, and those winds caused the Marshall Fire here. (There was also something burning at the time.) That year there was no precipitation for six months, and the winds swooped down from the highest part of the Continental Divide, sometimes gusting over 100 mph (161 kph).
There isn’t much firefighters can do with winds like that.

Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind” takes place with a Santa Ana wind blowing, all through the story.

Anyway, it was 57 degrees F today (13.9 C); pretty nice, especially in the sun. We’re a lot closer to the sun than most people so it’s hard to convince people that it’s very warm in the sun, even when it’s really cold.

The guy I live with said there’s going to be a “polar vortex”, which sound scary to me, but he said we’ve gone through this before. I tend to forget things like that.
We’re supposed to get snow, and temperatures below 0F (-17 C) by this Sunday night.

It won’t really affect anything but I’ll have to wear my boots on our walks. I’m very glad the guy I live with made the decision to get a new furnace a couple of years ago.

The snowdrops, which are the only plants in flower here, will have to wait.
This is Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus:
These are the ones he moved just a few weeks ago.

The snowdrops in the shade garden (there are about a thousand of them, maybe more) are just starting to open:
There are so many of these that the guy I live with doesn’t even walk in this part of the garden. There are many more right under the surface of the snow.
The snow you see there is just slush. For now.

I don’t have any willow pictures for this post. We walked down there this evening, hearing weird noises (the guy I live with said maybe the noise was from foxes), but the pictures he took were about the same as the ones I already posted, so that’s really it for this post.

Until next time, then.