the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you all about my scary day. You may remember me from such posts as “A Super Scary Day”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is my Upstairs Fort. There was thunder. Very scary thunder.

It’s been really dry here again, and the guy I live with said he felt unsettled. I mean more than usual. He’s been feeling mildy unsettled ever since his wife died, and the anniversary is coming pretty soon, and he feels that, because of the time of year, but it was also because spring isn’t supposed to be a dry time of year for us.

But still, a lot of work has been done in the garden. Mostly clearing away the Employee’s Only section of the garden, so it will be nice to walk back there. It’s a pretty big area that the guy I live with said could maybe have some bulbs planted in it. Like cyclamen, or something.

Last night there was terrific lightning way out in northeastern Colorado.
This picture also shows the neighbor’s hideous tree. The person who pruned it had no idea what they were doing.
It was a very dry day here yesterday. You can see how dry the canal road looks. There were all these birds hopping around on the canal road.
I bravely scared them away.
You can also see the new gate, made from recycled wood, that was put in the fence by the apartments to the north of us. The guy who built it did a really nice job, according to the guy I live with, who stopped and talked to him while he was building it.

The guy I live with took some pictures of cactus.
This is Pediocactus simpsonii. It often flowers in late March here, but not this year. The flowers are scented of “old roses”.
And here’s a cactus with a really long name, Echinocereus triglochidiatus. This was supposed to be the spineless form but as you can see there are little spines. The guy I live with grew this from seed about twenty-five years ago, and it has a lot of buds.
A few days ago he got a shipment of plants in the mail. They’re in this temporary cage so as not to be knocked over by anyone chasing squirrels. I’m not sure who was being referred to, here.
He said he’d already spent too much money on plants. He told his friend he didn’t need to go to the Mother’s Day sale at the botanic gardens, which made him feel kind of “off”, because he’s always liked going there, but she said she didn’t need to go either, so that was that, and they both felt relieved.
And anyway, he bought three zauschnerias at the rock garden sale, forgetting that he’d ordered two already. They’re in those gallon pots, getting the “super genius” treatment, so the roots will leave the root ball before they’re planted.

So that was the last few days, give or take.
Today we were supposed to have rain, and maybe a thunderstorm.
Instead, we got a tornado warning. The weather forecast said that radar had shown rotation. The guy I live with could see this weather headed straight for us.
I went into my Upstairs Fort.

It started to rain.

After about an hour of tornado warnings, the storms veered off to the northeast. We do occasionally get weather from the south, and when we do, it can be really bad, but tornadoes are not very common in our part of the world. And especially not like the really big ones you see on the news sometimes. But it was still scary.
The guy I live with has seen a tornado here, and said it was very scary.

Then the rain stopped, and we went on our walk. It started to rain again, a little. You can see the drops in the canal, and some petals floating by.
That’s all I have for today. It’s still raining here.

Until next time, then.