the miserable gardener

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.

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.