the third wave

Posted on February 6, 2014 by paridevita

Hello everyone; here I am, Chess the purebred border collie, once again, with all the latest and most up-to-date news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Another Chilly Day”, and “A Cold, Cold Day” (which today definitely was), among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.14020605It was really cold today. Like, extremely cold. When we woke up it was nine below zero (-23C), and we didn’t go on our walk until it warmed up to minus four (-20C). It was bracing, let me tell you. The guy I live with made me turn around on the canal road because the wind was up, there, and it was “like a trillion below”, he said, so I turned around. I still got in plenty of sniffing and walked a little way down the creek path before I agreed it might be too bracing.

Today’s post is mostly about indoor stuff, because, well because it is, and the guy I live with said at least some of the posts should be about gardening instead of me, me, me. I don’t see why, but, okay.

Here is “the third wave” of cactus seedlings. The light is kind of bright. They’re under fluorescent lights.14020601

 

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14020603I showed pictures of the second wave the other day, and here is the first. These are year-old plants, which might be bigger if he had a greenhouse and paid more attention, but he says wait until they get their first exposure to sun this spring. Cactus seedlings are sensitive to sunlight so they’re have to be introduced to it slowly.

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14020606He didn’t use GA-3 on these, and you can see they’re just coming up. The little plants get misted a couple of times a week.

He is using GA-3 on a couple of bunches of seeds. If you’ve never used this, or don’t know what it is, it’s kind of like a growth hormone. This is how much he uses (it’s a powder).14020607Not all of that will go into the tube, because it just doesn’t. Then the seeds go in. He had a packet of seeds of Ranunculus andersonii and it said to rub the seeds to get rid of the impervious seed coat. I thought he was going to lose his temper doing it, but he rarely does. He did say “stupid impervious seed coats” a couple of times, rather forcefully I thought. In the upper left you can see the stupid impervious seed coat. It was really hard to rub those sufficiently to remove the wings, or whatever they are. 14020608Finally he won, and the seeds went in the tube. Here’s a tube, with seeds of Viola triternata. Warm water was added before the seeds went in, and the tubes will be left overnight for the GA-3 to dissolve and be absorbed into the seeds. The seeds will be sown tomorrow after the GA-3 is diluted and rinsed out, hopefully without the seeds going down the drain too. (It’s funny when that happens. One time he made some pasta and when he poured it into a colander in the sink, the colander fell over and the pasta went right down the drain.)14020609The tubes go into a high-tech holder. “Former Soviet military” said the guy I live with, but it wasn’t that funny.14020610Well, that’s really it for today. See, this wasn’t about me hardly at all. Sigh.

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Until next time, then.

 

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snow on my nose

Posted on February 5, 2014 by paridevita

Greetings and salutations, everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from the garden. You may remember me from such startlingly excellent posts as “N.D.Y.” and “Things From Afar”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.14020509Today’s post is more of a weather report than anything else. You might say it’s a little chilly here. In fact….well, just look at the gutter he didn’t get to. That little shelf, by the way, is a nesting shelf my mommy made. Birds use it to make nests. The grape vine (Vitis riparia, the native grape, sown by a bird) has to be held up by a rope because there was chicken wire wrapped around the downspout for the grape, but the downspout blew apart last winter, because of freezing, and so he had to fix it, and the grape vine had to be removed, and he just hung it like this until he thinks of something else to do with it.

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14020503It’s pretty cold, and everything is covered with snow. The guy I live with says we have to endure this so that we can have water to drink. And of course so people can water their lawns. The guy I live with doesn’t have a lawn to water any more. Technically, of course, it could just snow in the mountains and we’d still have water, but it never seems to work that way. So I guess, if you look at it that way, this is all a good thing, though he says it could still be warmer.

The pine on the left, by the way, was supposed to be Pinus pumila, the dwarf Siberian pine, but it isn’t. It’s something else. Still a pine, though. The other conifers aren’t pines. Oh, there’s one in the cage there, but you can’t see it, so that really doesn’t count.

14020504The guy I live with claims it’s more fun to look at seedlings in the house than stand outside freezing. I like standing outside, but there’s an awful lot to be said for central heating. His picture of the baby cactus could have been more in focus, if you ask me. These are seedlings of Echinocereus coccineus, and were germinated without using GA-3, which he says it’s important to say. It must be, then.

14020508And the “big deal of the week”, Calochortus gunnisonii. I showed pictures of the stratified seeds germinating in “Of Seeds And Soil”, a week ago, I think. And now here they are, coming up. There are actually more there than the picture shows. It’s kind of hard to believe that stuff like this really works, but it does.

The seeds were stratified for about a month, which breaks down the abscisic acid, the germination inhibitor, and then the seeds germinate. It doesn’t always work this elegantly, he says.

14020507I think he really needs a greenhouse. You can also sow the seeds outside in November, and they come up the following spring, “like nobody’s business”, which is a funny way to put it, but anyway, once they come up, then the bunnies graze on them, and the guy I live with gets mad, and yet does nothing except spray Deer Off, which works, but of course since he forgot to do it before the little bulb sprouts were eaten, it doesn’t work as well as you’d think.

Anyway, that’s the gardening part of the post. All indoors.

I got to go on both of my walks, because the guy I live with is indifferent to cold, and he likes me well enough to take my on my walk even when it’s chilly. This is how chilly it was when we walked. (And you can see how chilly it was last night, too.) It was too cold for ice to get in my paws. That part was okay. I thought the weather today was refreshing.

14020510I got snow on my nose.

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Until next time, then.

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