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 a bit about our interrupted spring. You may remember me from such spring-related posts as “Sunless Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. That’s my internet radio on the dresser behind me. It can pick up streaming radio stations from all over the world.

I have an idea that you can tell what happened here, from my nighttime pose.
It rained a lot, and then it snowed a lot. The garden is soaked. The guy I live with said the grass in the field will become “seriously green” because of this.
Right now, nothing is green.
Yesterday there was a lot of water in the creek. It’s not very cold outside and so the snow is mostly slush.
All this snow doesn’t bother the guy I live with, since it’s “free water”, though I can tell he’s really irked that his neighbor, shoveling off their driveway, piled a whole bunch of snow in our front garden, flattening all the snowdrops growing there.

The guy I live with said that with all this snow, really the only thing to do was to eat some fermented tofu.
He said it was really good, kind of salty and sweet, very much like cheese, but that I didn’t need to try any.
Next, he’s going to try some hot fermented tofu. I definitely won’t get any of this.
Tofu aside, there is a bit of gardening news.
There are seedlings of Mirabilis longiflora.
And he got some snowdrops in the mail.
Snowdrops actually do better here when planted “in the green”, like this, especially if they’re autumn-flowering snowdrops, like some of these are. They have the rest of spring and all of summer to grow roots and get all healthy and stuff, instead of being planted as dry bulbs in October and expected to grow roots and prepare to flower in less than a month.

And so that’s my report for today.

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 tell you what’s been going on here lately. You may remember me from such posts as “The Geese Police”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If it looks damp, that’s because it is.
You may also notice that the two birch branches that hung over the flagstone (bent over by snow and never righted themselves) are gone. I’ll talk about that more, later.

Last week, on a pretty nice day, we went on a longer walk and I got to explore parts of the canal I’d never really looked at. You know how you walk by things and never really notice them, until one day you do, well, that’s what happened with me.
This was all very interesting to me.

You can see that the grass in the field is turning green. This is a cool-season grass so it turns green earlier than the warm-season grasses we have in our yard.
The fill dirt over the abandoned muskrat den, where the water was leaking into the sinkhole, looks like it needs some work. The water in the canal could start flowing any day now.

A sad thing happened last week; one of our neighbors died. I really liked him and he liked me, too.
The guy I live with spent quite a bit of time on the phone talking to his daughter, kind of guiding her through the various steps of what to do next, since he went through that a few years ago.

There are crocuses in flower. The guy I live with posted pictures of these on Facebook but I thought I would post them here, too.

Crocus korolkowii.

Crocus abantensis.

Crocus versicolor ‘Picturatus’.

There are “regular” crocuses (ones he didn’t buy from overseas) in flower too.

And Cyclamen coum is flowering all over the place.
There’s a weird-looking plant coming up. The guy I live with said it was a fritillaria.

So today the guy I live with decided to get rid of those two birch branches that hung over the flagstone. He got out his chainsaw, and was sawing (the chainsaw doesn’t make much noise), when all of a sudden the chain came off.
He spent some time looking at the instruction manual (I couldn’t believe he actually did that), and eventually got the chain back on. The chain tensioner had accidentally been turned the wrong way.
He got this chainsaw last year, or even the year before, on a whim, and then wondered if that had been a good idea, but he’s been using it a lot in the last year. It’s an Ego.
As I said, it hardly makes any noise at all; just kind of a whizzing sound.

Maybe the biggest deal, though, was this:
The guy I live with finally got some Datura wrightii seeds to germinate. He said there was so much conflicting information online on how to get the seeds to germinate that he just soaked them in water overnight (not that that’s necessary) and sowed them in pots and put them in a propagator.
If they live, these are going into the front garden.

And that’s our news, for now.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me on our damp walk this evening.

Until next time, then.