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 some things, and show you some pictures, too.  You may remember me from such posts as “A Windy Interlude”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m waiting for a biscuit, which I received.

Not much has been happening here, which is fine with us. It hasn’t been below freezing at night, but some of the snow is still here, and everything seems pretty damp.

The guy I live with took some pictures yesterday.
This is Galanthus bursanus, still flowering.
This is Galanthus elwesii ‘Potter’s Prelude’.
This is Crocus pulchellus, flowering very late.
The guy I live with says this is very similar to Crocus kotschyanus but the base of the flower is all yellow in C. pulchellus, instead of just yellow blotches at the base of the petals in C. kotschyanus.
“Pulchellus” in Latin means “very pretty”. The “ch” is pronounced like “k”, like in almost every single other botanical name.

Really the main thing here these days, or rather nights, is taking pictures of the willow at the end of our evening walk. It isn’t the end of the field, but the area south of the willow has so much rough vegetation, even after being mowed, that it’s no fun to walk on. The nice path was on our side of the creek, but the guy I live with doesn’t want us to go that way, since there are dogs that jump the fence. We’ve had a couple of unpleasant confrontations and so now we just avoid going that way.

A couple of evenings ago we stopped, and the guy I live with took this picture of the willow, which he posted on Facebook.
It was almost completely dark here; the only thing the guy I live with could see was the street lamp off to the right, which illuminates the grasses.
Maybe the clear skies allowed the camera to see the shed in the distance.

This evening he took a couple more pictures. In this one it looks like someone is burning wood off in the distance, which is possible since these neighbors have a firepit.
But now you can’t see the shed.
This one, taken a bit farther away, and from a slightly different angle, is maybe his favorite so far.
If you were standing here you would not believe how dark it really is. But the camera gathers a lot of light.
You can click on these pictures to embiggen them, of course.

We may get some more snow early next week, and one thing I know we’re going to do is walk down there again to get a picture of the willow in the snow.

So that’s it for today.

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 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.