the miserable gardener

Hello everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such stellar posts as “Guarding The Fort” and “A Winter Wonderland”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’ve just had a biscuit, and it was good. The guy I live with was gone for kind of a long time today, and I was really glad when he came back.

He bought some more plastic on the way home. You might wonder why he needs so much plastic, and it’s because he has this weird plan. Remember that he put an Arizona cypress in its own personal greenhouse, well, he made another one this afternoon. The cypress is almost totally dry, though you might not be able to see it in this picture. You can see one dry, broken twig, from him touching it, on the left. The branches are still alive, though. It was a fairly big tree grown in a fairly small pot, and even though he knows better, he forgot to loosen the roots before he planted the cypress and so it never drew up enough water to make the “cryoprotective soluble sugars” which it needs in order to make it through the winter. This doesn’t just happen; water is necessary to make the solution. The sugar solution lowers the freezing temperature of the water between the cells and keeps the plant from exploding when it gets really cold.

Well, he says, if there isn’t enough water in the tree before it can make the sugars, then the parts that have no sugars just dry out. Normally it’s the tips of everything which dry out first, because they’re furthest from the roots. So he dug up the cypress and looked at the roots, and not a single root had left the root ball and grown into the surrounding soil, making it difficult for the tree to take up water. (He’s been digging up plants to look at the roots since about 1958, so I guess it’s harmless enough.)

He loosened the roots and replanted the cypress, higher than before, and in a different location, with a lot of mulch added. His idea, with the personal greenhouse, is that keeping the cypress from getting too cold will extend the growing season so that maybe it can grow back a lot of what it lost before it experienced this winter we’re having. But really, this looks pretty weird.Almost scary, even. It’s fairly close to the other personal greenhouse, and then there will be another one directly behind this one in a few days. I’m not sure what the neighbors are going to think, and I don’t want to be out there if anyone walks by.

Here’s a picture from the exceptionally dirty upstairs bedroom window. Those lights you see in the distance are cars on the highway. And the new personal greenhouse. You can kind of see the other one, too, to the right of it. It’s pretty noticeable, isn’t it? I hope that when we go out there at Tinkle Time I don’t get scared by it, but if I do, maybe I’ll get an extra biscuit before bedtime. Which sounds good, like it might make up for being scared by a huge plastic thing in the back yard.

That’s really all I have for today. More weirdness in the garden. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I. Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such cutting-edge and delightful posts as “Of Seeds And Soil” and “No Pizza For Me”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Speaking of cutting edge, the guy I live with clipped my toenails today, but carefully, so I didn’t bleed all over everything like last time. He says they still need to be clipped way back but he’s not going to try that. Whew, huh.

It was really nice on Monday, then an icy wind blew in from the north, and it was, according to the guy I live with, “cold, humid, and horrible” yesterday, with a little bit of snow. I thought the weather was just fine and didn’t know what he was complaining about, as usual. I don’t know what most of the stuff he complains about has to do with anything real, but I pretend nothing is happening. Which, technically, is true.

The guy I live with spent quite some time “mouseproofing”, since it was obvious that none of the places he’d “mouseproofed” before had much of anything to do with keeping mice from getting into the house. This morning I was sitting on the kitchen floor, just like in my picture above, and a mouse ran right past me. It was totally shocking.

The most disconcerting thing about all of this is that the guy I live with has this look on his face, like the look of a person thinking about getting a cat. I don’t like that look. He knows we can’t have a cat with the back door open all the time, so I think he just has that might get a cat look on his face to scare the mice. I certainly hope so.

There are seeds germinating on the shelves I showed a while back. Just in case you thought the guy I live with didn’t know what he was doing, putting pots full of seeds out on the back patio when it was freezing cold. This is Asyneuma compacta. An alpine plant from Turkey, related to campanulas. So that’s the big excitement there. It only took a few weeks, and up came the seedlings.

There’s also big news on the hellebore front. They’re showing buds. The guy I live with said this was “awfully late”, but I pretended not to hear him. Yes, it’s true, some winters we see hellebores in flower in February, but then usually they get, oh, you know, nipped in the bud by cold, and then he complains, and then the main flush appears in March, just like always. All his complaining doesn’t help the plants grow any. 

As I said, it snowed yesterday, and when we went on my morning walk, we could see that rabbits had been hopping all over the front sidewalk. It looked kind of funny. The snow is all gone now.I know the guy I live with took pictures of the rabbit who spent a lot of time in our back yard, but there isn’t a rabbit here any more. I won’t say why. Something bad happened, and that’s all I’ll say.

Well, anyway, the guy I live with was all irked because some of the newly planted Arizona cypresses got really badly toasted over the winter, and he spent a whole lot of time looking for useful information on the internet. He couldn’t find any, which might be a surprise to some people, so what he decided to do was try to warm up the air around the damaged cypress in order to try to encourage bud break. I think this is just plain weird, but, you know, whatever.

There’s a cypress in there. “In its own personal greenhouse”. Uh huh. Let’s see, what else? Oh, he’s all excited because the reticulate irises are coming up. “They’ll probably all get frozen, so we get excited now”, is how he explained it to me. This is Iris hyrcana. He says it comes from the Greek name for the land on the south shore of the Caspian Sea, in present-day Iran. That’s mostly subtropical, but the Elburz Mountains just to the south are really super high, and there are forests, called the Hyrcanian Forest, that’s sort of where the iris comes from. He says it sounds like there might be centaurs there, hunting wolves, which is where the word Hyrcana comes from. I don’t think wolves need to be hunted, though they’re scary, but then I bet so are centaurs. Or maybe it comes from the Talysh Mountains, which aren’t as high. The guy I live with has never been to Iran, let alone the Hyrcanian Forest, let alone never seen a centaur, so, well, I just don’t know.And that’s the news for today. I guess I’ll go now. I’ll leave you with a picture of me in my fort, looking all nonchalant and everything.

Until next time, then.