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 about things that never happen, and to show some snowdrop pictures. You may remember me from such posts as “Mostly Iceless”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s certainly not as dry as it looks, and the “north border” isn’t as empty as it looks right now.
You can see that upturned nursery pot and section of rabbit fence, which have since been put back onto the patio; those made a sort of roof over the snowdrops planted in pots, and then some “frost fleece” was draped over the rabbit fence, when the cold weather was predicted a few weeks ago.
The weather forecast at the time was for cold weather to come in before it snowed. That never happens here, but it did that time, and now the soil is frozen, so things are delayed again.
The guy I live with said he didn’t care all that much, but he was weirded out by cold weather with no snow.

It’s also not as dry as it looks, out in the field.
The ground is really soggy.

Still, even though things are happening that never happen here, there are snowdrops in flower.
This one (there are actually a few bulbs here) came from one of the “bulk” purchases (you buy a whole bunch for not very much money). These “bulk” snowdrops have a reputation for not being very long-lived in the garden, and in fact these are the only ones left from the first purchase he made. I made a post on that: “One Hundred Snowdrops”.
He said he’s not going to do that again, though I guess some gardeners have more success with these.
And, for that matter, he’s not planning on spending money on “special” snowdrops, even though he says that’s a popular pastime with people who are fascinated by snowdrops.
He told me I would not believe the amount of money people spend on a single snowdrop bulb. But then I guess people spend even more on certain houseplants.

One that is special is Galanthus elwesii ‘Theresa Stone’, which I’ve talked about before. We expect to see these in flower any time after the new year, but since the soil is frozen it’s going to take them a longer time to flower, even though it was 65 degrees F (18.3C) yesterday.
These were a gift, and planted in the shade garden twenty-three years ago. There are now a lot of them. More than a lot; hundreds if not thousands.

I don’t know what this one is. It’s an elwesii, for sure, though there are other species planted in the shade garden. If there were more sun in this garden things might be different. But you can see that, right here anyway, the soil isn’t frozen; the leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium clearly show that.

The guy I live with posted a picture of this one on Facebook and said it was a seedling, but it turns out that this is really one called ‘Daphne’s Scissors’.
You can almost see the scissors pattern on the inner segments.
What happened here is that the guy I live with dug up some bulbs for sharing, and replanted the remaining bulbs here, and then forgot he did that.
The year after he got this it flowered in late December. Not any more.

There aren’t any crocuses or irises in flower now. The guy I live with said that there normally would be, but things have changed.

The last time the guy I live with saw a fox here, walking at night with his wife, was about thirty years ago. And now I’ve seen them several times. I wanted to go meet one, on an evening walk, but the guy I live with said no. I guess they’re not all that friendly.
And then there was a fox in my front yard at three in the morning today. I felt compelled to do a lot of barking, even though the guy I live with wanted to sleep.
The guy I live with said that’s never happened before. Coyotes have come into the front yard, but never foxes.

I’m not sure if this has happened before, but I kind of don’t think so.
There was a mouse in the bird feeder.
The guy I live with had to refill the feeder anyway, and when he set it down on the ground, the tiny mouse ran away.

Another unusual thing happened today, and I know this has never happened since I’ve been here.
We listened to some very different music.
I liked it. It went very well with all the gardening we did today, though it wasn’t really loud enough to hear when we were out in the “way back”.
I got a lecture on the music, of course. The guy I live with said that Chick Webb, the drummer who led the band, had a nineteen-year-old female singer, and the band’s manager said Webb should get another singer because the one who sang with the band wasn’t “attractive enough”, and Webb, who obviously knew good singing when he heard it, told the manager…well, I can’t say what he said. I might blush.
The young singer’s name was Ella Fitzgerald.

The guy I live with told me that when he was writing the books, especially “High and Dry” he would listen to music like this on his computer, and he hesitated in playing this, like it would be dragging up the past and make him very unhappy, but it turned out to be okay today.

The last thing that never happens here, at least for now, is rain in the winter. It always snows instead of rains. The guy I live with said that when gardening books talk about “winter wet” they’re describing something totally alien to him.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me experiencing something that never happens, on my evening walk in the rain, just 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 bring you a post with some highly unusual content. You may remember me from such posts as “The Long Lead”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It was a pretty nice day today. The weather website says it’s snowing here, but it really isn’t. It might later, though. It’s probably snowing somewhere, but not here.

Here’s our resident front-yard bunny in a characteristic pose, too.
The guy I live with has, so far, left the dried stems of Sphaeralcea parvifolia just so our resident bunny can have some cover. The bunny doesn’t do much damage, now that the guy I live with knows what it likes to nibble on.

While he was out in the front yard, the guy I live with checked up on some plants, and was surprised to see basal leaves on Salvia ‘Raspberry Delight’.
This is a really good sign. The guy I live with has tried this salvia several times, and it looks like it will make it through this winter, because, he said, plants native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico almost always grow basal leaves which overwinter. He said it was “some monsoon thing”. Agastaches and some penstemons do this too. If they don’t grow these basal leaves, the outlook is grim.
And this is Zauschneria ‘Sky Island Orange’.
The guy I live with said this was excellent.

I know there’s been something weighing on the guy I live with’s mind; something about “fifteen years”, and I have no doubt I’ll have to say more about this later, but he’s also been thinking about the snowdrops that aren’t up yet. They should all be up now.

Today, the guy I live with decided to check on the snowdrops, and pulled pots from the ground.
I wondered about this, but he said he’d been checking on plants by digging them up for over sixty years, and so not to worry.
He removed the soil from the pots very carefully, and found the bulbs sprouting at the bottom on the pots, so he even more carefully transferred the bulbs into his new pond baskets, being ultra super careful with the roots.

Galanthus cilicicus

You can see that the emerging foliage isn’t green, so this was covered with more soil, and then the pot was “plunged” back into the soil, with the bulbs at normal depth insteadof twice as deep, like they were before.
The pond baskets will make it even easier for the snowdrops to be removed, for sharing purposes, later.
I was glad to see the guy I live with so happy doing this, especially since he was afraid he had lost this particular snowdrop.

And now for the unusual content.

Yesterday afternoon the guy I live with got a text from his neighbor asking him if he had seen the emergency warning. He said he hadn’t, so his neighbor called him to say there was a “shelter in place” warning, and that law enforcement personnel were turning cars away from the major intersection near us.
The guy I live with then discovered there was that message on our landline. Yes, we still have a landline, because the guy I live with worked for the phone company.
We waited for four hours to go outside.

It turned out that new owners of a storage shed had found a landmine. I guess if people don’t pay the rent on a storage locker it and the contents get auctioned off, and that’s what was found. The guy I live with didn’t tell me what a landmine was, and I decided I didn’t want to know.
The sheriff was called, and then someone from the army, and eventually they determined that the landmine was inert, but let me tell you, that was a very long four hours for me. The guy I live with apologized over and over again, even though it wasn’t his fault.

Eventally the “all clear” was sounded, and I got to go on my evening walk.
So that’s our news of the last day and a half. We don’t lead very exciting lives, which is the way both of us prefer things to be, and maybe yesterday evening was a bit much, but for now, anyway, things are calm again.

Until next time, then.