Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you an utterly fascinating post. You may remember me from such other fascinating posts as “Still Nothing”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m there; really I am. I like to blend in with the scenery.
It was a nice day today, though a bit too chilly to do anything besides fill the bird feeders. They say it may snow tomorrow; it didn’t yesterday, when they said it would. Or might; I forget. They say it will, and then it doesn’t, which to me is just plain weird.
The one thing about our winters is that they’re very sunny, compared to most places.
So far, our winter has been kind of monotonous: the same temperature every day, and a little below freezing at night. Neither of us is all that big on “exciting weather” like storms, and we really don’t mind the monotony. And anyway, one of us, not saying who, has had a difficult time adjusting to the time change, even though that was weeks ago.
It’s going to be colder next week.
The guy I live with saw this, and was not hugely thrilled.
This is new growth on Colchicum kotschyi, from Iran. The guy I live with said this was “completely wrong”, and if it gets as cold as they say it will next week, these leaves will be covered with pine needles, just in case.
We have to go into the front yard for the remainder of this post. I’m going to stay in the house, though, so I’m not totally sure about the narration.
But before I let the guy I live with out into the front yard, I’d like to talk a bit about the title of this post, especially the spelling of “mold”. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology says the word comes from Old English “molde“, and Old Norse “mold“, so what’s with the rest of the English-speaking world spelling it “mould”?
The guy I live with said that was because of Norman influence; the English decided to spell words like “mold” to look more French. “Mould” does look sophisticated, for sure.
(More on this later.)
Okay, now we’re in the front yard. Or the guy I live with is.
The guy I live with planted a bunch of seedlings of Penstemon palmeri right by the front stoop. He did this in August or September, maybe later than that. He said that’s the time to do it, and the little seedlings will be okay all winter.
He didn’t separate all the seedlings but instead just pulled the seedlings into clumps of two or three.
Even though there are healthy green seedlings in the garden, most of the garden has taken on a definite winter tint.
This is Opuntia ‘Dark Knight’.
The guy I live with said that the reason it’s spelled “knight”is because, unlike, say, the French and Germans, no one attempted to correct English orthography after the Great Vowel Shift, or some time around then. Before that it was pronounced something like “knicht” (like the German Knecht). They retained the K even though it was no longer pronounced, and now the word sounds like “night”. (German, Nacht.) Oh, sorry. That was another one. Sounds like “light”. (German, Licht.) Wait a minute.
It rhymes with “bite”. There, that’s better.
There are tons of words like that in English, from Anglo-Saxon; the guy I live with said he truly pities people who try to learn English and have to deal with all these peculiar spellings.
We’re getting close to the point of this post, so don’t worry.
The guy I live with is in the front yard. He was in the front yard, I mean.
He said he was walking by the single-leaf pinyon, Pinus monophylla,
which is a pretty big tree now,
and he noticed how soft and springy the soil was.
He bent down and grabbed a handful of the soil, and under the pine needles and oak leaves there was actual leaf mold.
After the got up, which was a feat in itself, he said that he’d always read about leaf mold in English gardening books, and wondered what on earth they were talking about.
There is thick leaf mold in the shade garden, but that’s a watered garden, and the garden in the front yard isn’t, so this came as a real surprise.
This is what it looks like:
“Kind of amazing stuff”, he said, and then talked about how he was going to rake it up and take it into the back garden, but that (to use more of those igh words) might not be the brightest idea, since he’s read that having all this leaf litter aids in drought resistance for dryland plants like the pine.
Maybe he’ll just rake up some of it.
The guy I live with is now obsessed with leaf mold.
Before anyone says anything about composting, we do have four compost bins (sort of), but the thing is, in a semi-arid climate, unless you water the compost in the bins, it only takes about 10,000 years to get any kind of compost, and he says he’s not going to wait that long, which is why he’s been raking all the leaves into that mound of soil I showed a while ago. Raking the leaves, and digging them in.
Okay. I know this was sort of a rambling post, filled with the guy I live with’s obsessions rather than tons of pictures of me, but I work with what I have, and this was all of it, today.
Until next time, then.
It was about midnight, and 7 degrees Fahrenheit (-13.8C). I thought I heard something.
the miserable gardener 