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 the totally strange thing that happened yesterday. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Yet More Weirdness”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m surveying the total weirdness that took place yesterday. If you look closely, you can see it.
Yesterday was Christmas Day. That was normal, though I was surprised that the guy I live with wasn’t as sad as he usually was on this day. He just wasn’t.
You can see here we had a tiny dusting of snow this morning. That’s not the weird part.
The weird part is that the ground is wet.

About three-thirty yesterday afternoon it started to rain. It rained for five hours. We got 0.66 inches of rain (about 17 millimeters).
It doesn’t rain in Denver in the winter time; it snows. But it did this year (and two Decembers ago, as well).
Some of our neighbors were freaked out, because it’s “supposed” to snow here in Christmas. It hardly rained at all east of us, in Denver itself, but it rained a lot on the west side. The garden is completely soaked. And muddy. It was soaked before, from the snow in November, but now it’s really soaked.

I was very disappointed, but a little after nine p.m. it stopped raining and the guy I live with took me on my evening walk, which made everything better.

In other words, it hasn’t been very cold here so far, and we’ve already exceeded the average precipitation for December.
The cactus know it’s cold, though. You can see they’re all wrinkly.
They do this to prevent water between the cells from freezing.

There are a lot of snowdrops up. I mean a lot.
Some people think that this is too early. It isn’t, and nothing bad will happen to them if it gets cold later.
Gardeners are kind of weird that way. Our winter has been pretty mild so far, and some people are saying we’ll “pay for it later”, which he says is a completely absurd way of looking at things.
‘Potter’s Prelude’ is still flowering. This has been moved so many times it’s a wonder its still alive. There are seed pods on Galanthus bursanus, which the guy I live with hopes will ripen.
Still talking about snowdrops, the guy I live with decided to transplant some snowdrops that were almost in flower. He told me that people say not to do that, which is a cue for him to do it. These were Galanthus plicatus subspecies byzantinus, and a form from Colesbourne, the famous snowdrop garden in England. The flowers are somewhat larger.
I promised not to tell anyone he did that.

We have a terrible infestation of voles here and the guy I live with was worried about the snowdrops maybe being eaten.

He also did some work on the bulb frame.
He sawed the cedar boards with his Japanese saw. He said it was quicker than dragging out a power tool.
He loaned this out once and some of the teeth were broken. He should have known better.

So that’s what happened yesterday and today. The guy I live with said rain on Christmas Day was “stranger than fiction”, and he’s almost always right.

I also have some willow pictures for you. The pictures depend a lot on the background sky.

This one was taken on our walk last night. It started to rain a little, again, as we were walking.
The willows in the green belt are very photogenic, but this one is pretty special.