the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about the pumpkins. You may remember me from such posts as “Missing The Muskrat”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I should probably clarify what I said about it not being “super dry” here. The month of October wasn’t super dry, despite us receiving only about half the average precipitation for that month, but in the last four weeks we’ve only received one-tenth of an inch (2.54mm) of rain.
The guy I live with is not thrilled with this at all, let me tell you.
We do have a possibility of rain or snow this next weekend, but most of those forecast possibilities since June evaporated just a few days before rain was predicted.

Meanwhile, some gardening has been going on. The guy I live with is “driven nuts” by the sight of people raking up leaves and throwing them in the trash, but that’s what some people do.
The fallen leaves in our garden get raked into beds, and especially the little garden on the north side of the house.
This little garden has almost forty years of leaf mold in the soil.
There are still some crocuses in flower. This is Crocus pulchellus; the corms have been here for a very long time.
And there’s another snowdrop in flower.
The guy I live with separated this bulb from the main group, and planted it in a small pond basket, thinking he might give it away, but he decided against that.

Galanthus elwesii ‘Potter’s Prelude’.

The main group of ‘Potter’s Prelude’ is planted much more deeply so the bulbs are barely up.
As you can see, they’re growing in a pond basket, too.
The guy I live with said next year he’s going to lift the bulbs in this basket and plant them at a “normal” depth.

A few days ago the guy I live with was out in the front garden and thought about removing all the dried stalks of Aster bigelovii, without shaking the seeds all over, because then there might be too many plants.
Later that day he noticed there was help removing the seeds.
The mouse, which is what that is, spent quite a bit of time eating seeds.
That green squiggly thing is a stand to hold a spray hozzle; you wind the hose through the squiggles.

Speaking of help removing things, this is what I encountered on my morning walk yesterday.
Someone, kids probably, had smashed a bunch of pumpkins.
The guy I live with said the pumpkins would be gone in a couple of weeks, but I didn’t understand that.
Until today, when we came back from walking farther down the canal road than we did yesterday.
Maybe you can’t see them, but there were four or five squirrels snacking on the pumpkins.
The guy I live with said pretty soon every squirrel in the neighborhood would be here, snacking on pumpkins.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about our day. You may remember me from such posts as “The Bleak Season”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with watered the whole back garden yesterday. Not with the “tower sprinkler” you see to the right of me (it’s now been put away in the shed) but with the oscillating sprinkler he got earlier this year, a Melnor XT Metal Turbo, which he likes a lot.
He said he watered mostly because it helps keep the leaves he raked into various parts of the garden in place. He knows people who rake leaves and then throw them into the trash, but he doesn’t do that.
(Some parts of the garden don’t get leaves raked onto them because the plants wouldn’t like it.)

It really isn’t all that dry here, compared to some years; we did have an hour of rain last week.
But it looks kind of dry. And autumnal.

Water is still running in the canal. I had to inspect the old sluice this morning.
As I’m sure I’ve said before, there was a steel wheel at the top of the sluice gate behind me, but somebody swiped it.
There used to be a farmhouse to the north of here, behind me. The wheel was turned and the gate opened upward, and water flowed to the farmhouse.
And sometimes you can see trout in the water, especially in the foreground where the water slows. We haven’t seen any trout this year.

We haven’t seen a lot of things, like goldfinches, orioles (maybe one or two), striped kitties, and raccoons, but fortunately there was no plague of grasshoppers this year.

Back in the garden, there are still flowers, though not a lot except for snowdrops.
The tiny colchicum, Colchicum baytopiorum, is still flowering.
The guy I live with said the species was named for two Turkish botanists named Baytop, and the ending -orum is genitive plural, “of more than one”.  I’m sure you wanted to know that.
There’s also the beautiful light blue Crocus baytopiorum.  I guess I’ve never shown a picture of that crocus; maybe next spring.

There are more Crocus oreocreticus.
And one of the latest crocuses, Crocus hadriaticus ‘Purple Heart’.
There are also some Crocus ochroleucus starting to come up; kind of a tiny one and may not get its picture taken.
That’s always a late crocus here, and it tend to form lots of tiny cormlets which don’t flower for a few years, but it is nice to see something in flower in late November.

Speaking of things that flower late, or super early next year, the guy I live with noticed that Viburnum farreri has lots of buds on it.
The plant at Denver Botanic Gardens can be in flower any time from about mid-December to the end of February, but the one in our garden is in more shade and so flowers later.
The flowers are scented like heliotrope.

I’ve shown pictures of this oak before, but the color today was particularly nice.
He got this from the late Jerry Morris; he doesn’t know what the species is. It produces acorns about the size of the nail on his little finger. Either finger, really.

And there there’s the moss in the trough, which I’ve also shown before. (It’s nice to have at least some continuity from year to year.)  The guy I live with thinks this is a native species which may have come from a trip to the mountains a long time ago.
It becomes totally brown and dry during the summer, to the point where clumps of the moss can be easily dislodged.
The guy I live with really got into moss after reading Moss Gardening by George Schenk, which he says is one of the best gardening books ever, and I’ve probably said that before, too. There are a lot of posts on this blog, after all.
Unfortunately this isn’t a terribly ideal climate for moss, but this species seems fairly content to live here.
We do get quite a bit of lichen growing on the wood of the patio frame and elsewhere though.

I’d like to close this post with a little editorial comment.
It seems to me that my dinnertime is later than it was last week, which, let me tell you, has taken some getting used to. The guy I live with said it was something about the clocks “setting themselves back”, which sounded very weird to me. He explained that “back in the old days” people would set clocks back by turning dials, but now the clocks do it by themselves.
Also, the period between my dinnertime and the time when darkness falls seems to be a lot shorter than it was last week.

So my evening walks have seemed early to me, like practically in the afternoon, but dark.
The guy I live with took a picture of the canal, illuminated by lights from the apartment complex.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me inspecting something farther down the canal road.
The sluice I pictured earlier is just beyond that boxelder tree which looks like it’s in the middle of the road, but isn’t.

Until next time, then.