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 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.

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.

That’s all I have for today’s post.

Untl next time, then.