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 tell you all the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Talking Turkey”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m lying next to the big pile of leaves, and the guy I live with has been talking about making another bulb frame there, but this time “more successful” than the last ones he built. He’s thinking about using cinder blocks, which might be ugly, but there are ways of disguising them, like making a sort of front panel with some of the cedar boards removed from the enclosure fence, attached to the cinder blocks.

Well, we’ll see about that.

Meanwhile, and even though we had a light dusting of snow this morning, we still have Crocus niveus in flower, though this picture was taken a few days ago.
Most of the gardening here, lately, has involved raking up leaves, cutting back plants that were smashed by the heavy snow that fell two weeks ago, filling the bird feeders, and sprinkling vole repellent all over the place.
Really not much of anything, which is a relief to the guy I live with, who says gardening can be exhausting.
Though he was finally able to lift the cover to the seed frame and put all the pots of newly-sown seeds there, so they won’t dry out sitting on the patio.

Most of the interesting stuff, for me, has involved walking among fallen leaves.
The creek is very interesting right now. Not to the guy I live with, but to me. There isn’t any water in it (the guy I live with said that when he and his wife first moved into our house there was water flowing in the creek all the time), but there are very interesting scents there now.
The guy I live with said that maybe coyotes were using the creek for cover. He said they do that sometimes, instead of running through the field.

I didn’t see the other interesting thing, the day before yesterday, but the guy I live with did.
That’s a culvert that drains water from the streets on the west side of the field.

But yesterday I did see the interesting thing. I was just walking along, like you see me doing in the picture, when all of a sudden there was this orange tabby cat super-arched right in front of me. The cat then went right for me, and it was a good thing the guy I live with had a firm grip on my leash, otherwise, as he said, I “might have been shredded to pieces”.
The cat ran off. Maybe I looked too tough for it.

Then yesterday afternoon it suddenly got chilly and very overcast.
On my evening walk yesterday, the guy I live with started taking pictures of the willows in the field.
All the pictures were blurry except one, which he posted on Facebook, but he said he liked this so much I’m going to share it here.
You can see how overcast, dark and gloomy it was last night.
Pretty cool, huh?

By Tinkle Time last night mist was falling, and then this morning there was a dusting of snow, which melted in the sun today.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me and the planet Jupiter, which is almost right over our house.
That light in the upper center of the picture is in our back yard.

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 bring you up to date on all the latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “New At The Zoo”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see we still have quite a bit of snow in the garden, though there’s no snow in the front garden now, and not much out in the field.

We still have crocuses in flower. These are Crocus niveus, in their rabbit-proof cage. This is a species that grows overwintering leaves, as you can see, and rabbits love to eat the leaves right down to the ground, which is very bad for the crocuses.
And still more Crocus speciosus. These grow leaves in spring. The leaves have to be protected against rabbits then, but a spray like Rabbit Stopper works well.
Though there are more snowdrops elsewhere, this is ‘Barnes’.
There’s a reason why there’s only one flower. He got a bulb of this some years ago, in spring, and thought he had planted it, but a few months later he saw the bulb lying on the ground. Maybe someone dug it up. So he replanted it, but it’s taken all this time to regain strength.

There are some crocuses upstairs, too. They’re growing under lights because when it started to get cold, the crocuses barely had leaves (they were just being slow about it), so they were brought upstairs and put under LED lights, and you can see they’re growing quite well now.
You can see that they’re in pond baskets.
These will go back out into the garden on the next warm day, with little cages to protect the leaves.

Anyway, about the title of today’s post. The guy I live with had ten packets of seeds, and he decided to sow them today, but he said he probably wasn’t going to sow any more seeds (unless he got seeds of cyclamen, crocuses, or snowdrops), mostly, as he said, because we’re running out of room in the garden. So this may be “the last sowing”.
We have a terrible infestation of voles right now and if the voles eat everything, then he’ll probably sow more seeds, but he’s also been sprinkling Mole and Vole Stopper around the garden, so maybe the voles will leave.

He sowed the seeds in “the usual manner”, which is says is the most effortless way to do it. I know I’ve shown this method before.
You can see the seeds in some of the pots.
There’s still a little bit of “squeegee” left, too, in the bag.
The squeegee gets sprinkled on top of the pots after the seeds are sown.
He was going to put the pots in the seed frame, but there was a slight problem there.
The pots are going on the shelf on the patio, for now. The guy I live with watered the pots, which he wouldn’t have done if there wasn’t snow on the frame cover.
Snow is the best insulation for seed pots, and if snow falls on the pots they don’t need to be watered.
The issue with having pots just sitting on the shelves is that they can dry out, which can delay seed germination for a very long time.

He said you know how some activity holds your interest for a long time, and then one day you realize you’re no longer all that interested, well, that’s what’s happened to him.
I could relate, because there was a time when I liked chewing things, like the linen curtain in the living room, but I’m not interested in that any more.

We saw a bald eagle fly over our house a couple of days ago. The neighbors walking their dog saw it too.
The guy I live with sometimes goes over to talk to those neighbors and actually touches their dog, which I find deeply offensive, but I do get over it.

I think that’s all I have for today. The guy I live with said we may get more snow next week, which is fine with him.

Until next time, then.