the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you a post for no particular reason. You may remember me from such posts as “Into The Wilderness”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can probably see that it was a nice, warm, sunny day today, though in the morning there was a little wind which was kind of chilly.
No one sits in those chairs any more, except for the guy I live with, who occasionally sits in the one that doesn’t have the birdhouse. The birdhouse needs to be hung somewhere in the garden. It fell down some years ago and needs to be put back up. There’s at least another one, on the arbor which you can’t see. Wrens like to nest in the birdhouses.
The buffalo grass is still brown, but we’ve seen other lawns turning green lately.
The grass in the field is turning green, too.

The guy I live with spotted the first crocus in flower. This is Crocus reticulatus, from areas on the north side of the Black Sea.
This is a snowdrop from the same region. Galanthus plicatus.
Maybe you can see how the outer edges of the leaves are slightly folded inward. This is called explicative vernation, which gives the species its name.
There were bees all over the flowers today.

This is something different; a small spring-flowering colchicum called Colchicum munzurense.
So things besides snowdrops are starting to appear, though there’s still a lot of snow in the garden, in places anyway.

Today, the guy I live with sowed some mandrake seeds he got from J.L. Hudson. (He also got some other seeds, too; he’s been ordering from Hudson for decades.)
He kind of grumbled about the “wildly conflicting” information online about how to germinate the seeds, and so eventually he decided to sow them in pots and then he set the pots outdoors on the patio shelves.
He tried mandrakes before–his wife wanted to grow them–but the seeds didn’t germinate. The plants are poisonous so they’ll go in the shade garden, where I never go.

It is that time of year, rough for people who have lost loved ones, with spring coming, and he thought of getting the mandrake seeds because his wife wanted to have mandrakes in the garden.

I hear that about the last five years have been rough for a lot of people (though it’s been pretty good for me, since the guy I live with has been home with me a lot), with constant weirdness. I’ve experienced some of that, with not seeing owls as much as we used to, strangers digging a big hole in the Employees Only section of our garden, the sinkhole, strangers in our house when the new furnace was installed, the mysterious piles of trash north of the canal, foxes, the landmine, and now there’s something else.

Just the other day, when we went to walk along the canal road, a block from our house, I noticed a big truck blocking the road. I wanted to turn around, but the guy I live with said to keep going, and eventually we saw a guy working in the canal.
The guy I live with talked to the canal guy, introduced me as the Discoverer of the Sinkhole, and talked about that and all the other related weird stuff.
He was a very nice guy, who said he was a “ditch rider”, and gave the guy I live with his card, in case we saw anything else weird going on, canal-wise.

His job was to clear out obstacles from the canal, and all the willows on the north side of the canal were cut down. The willows had been a real mess for a year or two; some of them had fallen into the canal, and so forth.
You can also see how muddy it is. There’s a lot of mud everywhere. Especially on my paws, as the guy I live with has pointed out more than once.
I kind of like mud, though not having willows on this side of the canal feels super weird. The guy I live with said they’ll grow back. But I did have to thoroughly check all this out.

So that’s all I have for today. I guess I’ll get used to having no willows on that side of the road when I go on my walks. The weirdness is exhausting, though.

Until next time, then.