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 “the pump”, as well as some other stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “Hens And Chicks”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
See all the conifers? Those all came from the late Jerry Morris. I’ll talk more about that in a bit.

The guy I live with is kind of irked with the puschkinias. This year, they’re all over the garden, despite him pulling a lot, last year. Here are some of them:

It rained here a bit, a couple of nights ago. There was even a little snow.
Yesterday there was water in the creek again.
And the field is pretty green now.
So the guy I live with was talking in the last post about the conifer he planted in a pot, and how he would water it with a very weak solution of Miracle-Gro.
As I’ve said before, the first time he met Jerry Morris he was dumbfounded at Jerry’s intimate and extensive knowledge of trees, especially conifers.
He showed the guy I live with and his wife a bonsai which had been “rescued” from its owner. The tree didn’t have many needles, and the tray was full of roots.
“Do you know about the pump?” The guy I live with just stood there, the way he often does.
Jerry explained that with so few needles, he would have to cut a bunch of roots in the tray, because the tree didn’t have enough above-ground resources to pull water from all those roots. Likewise, if there were a lot of needles but not enough roots, the above-ground parts couldn’t be sufficiently hydrated with so few roots.
In order for “the pump” to work properly, there has to be roughly equal below-ground and above-ground masses.
Since conifers absorb water through their needles, as well as roots, watering the needles would help a conifer with not enough roots.

So that’s that story.

Something else has happened here, and it’s about time.
In this last picture, you can see that the “ditch-rider” has been through here; last year this part of the road was totally overgrown.
I think that’s part of an old sluice on the other side of the canal.

That’s all I have for today.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, looking at the guy I live with, who was telling me just how many bags of biscuits there were in the pantry, and that they were all for me (just not all at once). It was a pretty interesting story. I like biscuits.

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 bring you up to date on all our news, which isn’t really much at all. You may remember me from such posts as “Biscuit Time”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose, after “illegally” drinking from the birdbath.At least the water was clean; the guy I live with refills it all the time. Yes, I know mice and squirrels drink from the birdbath, with their icky rodent lips.

In the background, you may spy a pot with a conifer in it. The guy I live with dug up one which had fallen on its side and was being smothered by other plants.
The stones are there to keep the conifer, Pinus ponderosa, from falling it. It’s a dwarf conifer.
Since the root system isn’t as big as the green parts, it will get fed through the needles with a weak solution of Miracle Gro all summer. Maybe once a month.

The reason I’ve been away for so long is that it snowed again, and the guy I live with said showing pictures of snow can get old really fast.
The snow melted, and this crocus, Crocus tommasinianus ‘Albus’. flowered.
This is Tulipa ‘Ugam’. It also has another name, which the guy I live with forgets.
The purple-padded cactus are starting to turn green.
But mostly this post is about all the snow that melted.
You can see that the grass in the field is turning green now. This is right behind out garden, and there’s been no grass here for a couple of years, but it all came back, the way grass does.
Lots of water flowed down the creek in the last couple of weeks. The guy I live with thought this looked very odd.
We found part of a crawdad, too.
What was really surprising, besides finding half a crawdad, was seeing all the sand in the creek. It’s a lot of sand, as you can see.
Of course I had to check it out. It’s not often I get my paws in sand.
The guy I live with said he would have scooped out some of the sand, for potting mix, but the water that flowed here came from streets, so it could have oil and “other gunk” in it.

And that’s all I have for today.

Until next time, then.