the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about bulbs. You may remember me from such posts as “The Last Of The Bulbs”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in characteristic pose.
You may be able to see the bunny on our tiny front lawn.

Much to the guy I live with’s disappointment, it hasn’t rained here on any of the days when rain was predicted.
All it’s done is rained flowers. These are flowers of Fontanesia philliraeoides, the “desert bamboo”. (It’s really in the olive family.)
He’s also been sick for like eighteen days, which he says is a bit much, but maybe he’s over the worst of it now. There has been a lot of moping around here.

There are some bulbs in flower now. This is Ixiolirion tataricum. It’s kind of a weed here.
What I really wanted to talk about, though, and this isn’t about me so maybe not all that interesting, is growing bulbs from seeds, and the mistakes the guy I live with has made over the years.
According to him, it’s been one continuous mistake. Maybe not exactly in the Zen sense of the phrase, but maybe kind of, too.

You may have seen pictures of bulb seeds being stratified in the refrigerator here. This technique, sowing seeds between damp layers, or strata, of vermiculite or sand, in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator for a period of time, has resulted in excellent germination. Depending on the species, it can take a month or more at 39 degrees F (about 4C) to activate the enzyme that breaks down the abscisic acid, the germination inhibitor.
The germinated seeds were planted in pots of peat moss, perlite, and sand, and never appeared again.
The tiny little bulbs, the size of the head of a pin, dried out within days, and that was that.
Every summer the guy I live with said he was going to pay more attention to watering, but that didn’t help. One continuous mistake.
A couple of years ago he said he was going to use the native soil, creek-bottom loam, which would insulate the bulbs against summer dryness, just like in real life, but he didn’t do that, and instead just kept doing the same thing over and over again.
Year before last there were three dozen pots of calochortus which never came up the next year.
Well, almost never.
You can see one seedling (Calcohortus gunnisonii) in front of the label in the first entire pot in the middle row, on the right. It looks like grass. This must have been one that didn’t germinate after being stratified.
But there’s nothing except weeds in the other pots.

So, since we don’t have a greenhouse, and it’s far too dry in the upstairs bedroom where the grow lights are, the guy I live with decided to sow the seeds outdoors in pots, last autumn.
This is Fritillaria recurva, from California.

This is Calochortus lyallii.
So far, so good.
The pots in the seed frames are watered regularly throughout the summer, so there won’t be much of an issue with the soil-less mix drying out.

But now there’s another problem: this next winter. Bulbs are only hardy to about 15 degrees F (-9.4C), and the little bulbs won’t survive winter in these pots. There’s not enough soil-less mix to insulate the bulbs against colder temperatures, like there would be in their natural habitat.
One plan is to mark every pot with bulb seedlings, and take them indoors for the winter, right after the first night below freezing (we don’t have frost here so we have to watch the temperature), and maybe put the pots in trays filled with sand. Another option would be to cover the pots with sheets of rock wool, out in the seed frames, though this sounds a bit risky to me.
A third option would be to plant the entire contents of the pots, or just plunge the pots into the ground, in an out-of-the-way place in the garden. The guy I live with says this may be the most practical thing to do, if cages are placed around the pots.
(He has had some luck sowing bulb seeds dry into the garden in late autumn, but rabbits tend to mow down the emerging foliage in spring.)

Other seedlings in the frames, not bulbs, don’t have that issue of being frozen solid.

I guess we’ll see if the mistakes continue.
Maybe my next post will be mostly about me, and so probably a lot more interesting. Here I am being fascinated by something on my evening walk.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about various things. You may remember me from such posts as “Much More Springy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The other day, a friend, whom I hadn’t seen in quite a while, came over to take some pictures in the garden.
I spent some time lounging around, watching the proceedings.
The guy I live with, who’s still somewhat under the weather and super annoyed by it, got some cactus from Cistus Nursery in Oregon; these are going out in the front garden, away from my nose. You can see all the glochids; nasty things.
The cactus may look the same but they’re all different.

For the last year, give or take, the guy I live with has been having a lot of pain in his knees. I mean a lot. So much so that he had a lot of trouble taking me on my walks, and wondered if he’d be able to go up and down the stairs for much longer.
The guy I live with was planning to whine about his knees to the doctor, when he has his annual physical next month.

He ordered a gardening bench, or kneeler, from Garden Talk. He says it’s totally excellent and he could get up very easily after doing some weeding. He’d thought about getting one of these for a while, because even before his knees starting hurting it wasn’t always that easy for him to get up after weeding.
The bench can be turned upside down, too. (Well, almost everything can be turned upside down, but here I mean with a purpose.)
He was also suffering from plantar fasciitis, which he’s had before and said really hurts. He saw an ad on Facebook for shoes specially-designed to help with this.
Here’s a picture of the shoes, and his very stylish compression socks with ladybugs on them, which the doctor said to wear because of the aftereffects of radiation therapy several years ago.
He’s had these shoes for a month, maybe less, and all of a sudden, one day, he said his knees no longer hurt. Not even slightly. He can go up and down the stairs without using a cane or holding onto the rail.
This could be a coincidence, of course, since it’s hard to figure how shoes can make knees better (I don’t wear shoes, so I don’t know), but my walks are now a lot more enjoyable, not hearing all this moaning and groaning, and occasional cries of pain, behind me.

And that’s all I have for today.

Until next time, then.