the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you our news, on a gray and rainy day. You may remember me from such posts as “A Rainy Afternoon”, among a surprisingly large number of similar posts.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I guess while the pose may be characteristic (me looking out into the back yard), the reason isn’t all that characteristic.
This is what I’m looking at.
It rained a whole bunch yesterday, and then rained for an hour this morning. I had to wait for kind of a long time to go on my morning walk. I still got wet, though.
We’re having Opera Day because there isn’t anything to do. I take naps on Opera Day; the guy I live with does too, sometimes.

The water stopped flowing in the canal, the last time it rained a lot, about a week ago, and for a couple of days there was no water in it at all.
I had to go down into the canal to make sure.
There were  very different smells down there. I’m an authority on such things, so you’ll have to take my word for the fact that this was all very unusual.
I’ve been in the canal before, but only when there was water in it.

There was also an exceedingly strange thing in the canal road.
The guy I live with said it must have been a pretzel offering to the rain gods.

A couple of days later the water was flowing again. Everything was back to normal.
The canal road, by the way, veers off to the right here; the other road is an access road that goes out to the street. I’ve walked on the sidewalk on the street quite a few times. It’s not even in our neighborhood.
Since it’s been raining so much, there really isn’t much of any gardening news, except for one thing.
The guy I live with noticed that Yucca torreyi was producing a flower spike. He was really surprised by this, and posted a picture of it on Facebook a few days ago.
This is what it looks like today.
The guy I live with said he could probably stand out there and watch it grow.
I think it’s going to be very big. It leans, for some reason. Maybe the yucca got pushed over by all the snow this winter.

There really isn’t all that much to do, as I said, but when the front door is open, which it usually is, I can look out and check for rabbits, or make sure no one is walking down my street.
The guy I live with keeps saying the house needs to be painted, and he was going to do that a couple of years ago, but unexpected things intervened.
He’s kind of sentimental about the cheap, battered aluminum screen door. Even though it adds nothing to the appearance of the house, you can see that a purebred border collie can stick his head out the door. The guy I live with said all the purebred border collies who have lived here have liked to do that, after the screen itself broke, so it’s not very likely the door will be replaced.

So that’s what’s been happening. Not much, except rain, I guess.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the completely soaking purebred border collie, here to show you pictures from today.
You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You may notice that I’m totally soaking wet.
It’s been raining. It’s been raining since about six o’clock yesterday evening.

I have two towels, just for me, that the guy I live with uses to dry me off.

The guy I live with tells me two thoughts occur to him every morning as he wakes up. The first is that he realizes it’s going to be another day without his wife here, and the second is that it’s going to be another day without rain.
But today was different, with the rain part. It was raining when we went to bed last night, and it was raining when we got up this morning.
The rain stopped for about a minute, and then it started again.

Some of the houseplants went outside this morning, to get nice rain water, and to be washed off, too.
You can’t see most of them in this picture, which I think is pretty funny. Three on the left, including the dwarf plumeria which has never flowered.

The creek is flooding.
On my evening walk, the water level was down a bit.
You can also see that the water in the canal has stopped flowing. This might be related to all the rain. Maybe they had to do something with the floodgates at the reservoir, where the water in the canal comes from.
There were huge crawdads crawling around.
On the other side of the canal, the creek is sort of flooding there, too.
This flows into Bear Creek, which flows into the South Platte River, which meets the North Platte River at North Platte, Nebraska, and then becomes the Platte River, which flows into the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
A lot of water.

There is a little bit of actual gardening news. The guy I live with was delighted to see seeds of erythroniums germinating. This is Erythronium idahoense.
It’s time for these to be potted up. The seeds were put in this plastic bag, with some very damp vermiculite, in January, and the cold in the refrigerator has done its work.
There are about six species to be potted up now, as well as some other things.
We have some erythroniums in the garden here, the commercially-available ‘Pagoda’, ‘White Beauty’, and ‘Kondo’ in the shade garden, as well as a couple of species. They’re not hard to grow, even here (with watering).

And that’s the news for today. The very damp and soggy news. I’ll leave you with a picture of me on the wet canal road.

Until next time, then.