the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all our latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “Up The Creek”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Today, I got horribly stuck with needles. Not acupuncture; I went for my annual physical. I guess everything is okay.

Things here have been weird, as usual. We had “fire weather” warnings last week, and then it rained and snowed all day the next day. We didn’t get a lot of moisture out of that, about five millimeters, but it was enough. (A millimeter is about the thickness of one dime, if you didn’t know; the guy I live with says there’s no point in measuring in inches any more.)
This is it snowing. I’m not in this picture. The plastic things are “personal greenhouses” for bulbs.
We were under a “winter storm warning” for that night, but nothing happened.
The guy I live with said they must have mowed this hill. His powers of observation are really amazing.
This hill, which is artificial, is to the north of us, across the canal, and is mostly covered with weeds.  There are a few native plants growing there, though.You can see how green the field is, now.
Plants are stirring in the garden. The sempervivums in the pots are growing again.
Yesterday we did some gardening. This is me, eating grass. Someone has to do it.
In that border there are a couple of seedlings of Orlaya grandiflora. The guy I live with was hoping for more, but a couple are just fine. This border might be too dry for them.
The guy I live with planted out all the cyclamen that were in pots upstairs. He said they do better in the garden than in pots. He also said it’s time for him to stop ordering cyclamen. There are a lot in our garden. A lot.
The main “crop” of Corydalis solida haven’t really started yet, but there is this seedling, growing in plain old dirt.
We have “fire weather” warnings tomorrow, and then rain and snow forecast for the next few days after that, though how much rain and snow, if that even happens, is uncertain. The guy I live with said this is becoming extremely tiresome. He doesn’t know why it can’t just rain like it did in “the old days”.
He said something about “El Niño”; the last years we had that were 2018 and 2019, and there were a lot of thunderstorms, which the guy I live with used to hate, but not any more. I don’t like thunder at all.

So that’s what’s been happening. “Fire weather”, snow, “fire weather”, snow, over and over again.

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 about my scary day yesterday, as well as some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “A Super Scary Day”, among, so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see what happened here. This is good. It started to snow night before last; most of it has melted. It might snow again tonight, which the guy I live with is in favor of.

There have been a lot of scary things happening here, involving fire engines, paramedics, and sometimes sheriff’s vehicles. Three times in maybe as many weeks. One just a couple of days ago. Not involving us, though the guy said that in a sense, it did. Our neighborhood is pretty quiet, so things like this can be very scary to me.

Well, yesterday, while he was fixing dinner, the guy I live with cut his finger, and couldn’t stop the bleeding, even though he knew First Aid, so he called the doctor, who told him how to wrap his finger with string (like kitchen twine), and then told him to go to the emergency room.
So he went. I was really scared; I almost never get left alone that late in the day. And it was snowing.  He said he “got every red light” on the way to the emergency room. I’m not sure what that means, but he said it’s because the world doesn’t revolve around him. Apparently some people think it does, for them.

He came back a couple of hours later with a big cotton thing on his finger; I was so happy to see him, and he was happy to see me, too.
He said when he was there he started to worry that he’d left the stove on, and also realized that the last time he’d been in an emergency room was the day his wife died.  (She died here, at home, but he had to go to the emergncy room to find that out.) He thought about that a lot, when he was there.
It was difficult for both of us.

He ordered some “cut proof” gloves for kitchen work. He had a pair like that when he worked for the phone company.

That was yesterday; back to today.
Here’s a picture of me patrolling for rodents. The ephedras are Ephedra equisetina and two E. intermedia.
The guy I live with was surprised to see Iris stolonifera ‘Morning Coffee’. He thought it had died because he got a few of these very late one year and he wasn’t sure if he could get them to grow again. Their life cycle isn’t like that of a regular iris.
Yesterday, before the Finger Incident, he saw Eunomia oppositifolia in flower. He thought this had died. I guess it’s one of the few plants growing in the troughs here that didn’t die in the last few years. He grew it from seeds collected in Turkey; it usually flowers the first week in February.
And if you needed a picture of Cyclamen coum in the snow, we have one.

So that was our day. Our day and a half, I guess.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me waiting for my after-dinner biscuit.

Until next time, then.