the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you yet another post. You may remember me from such posts as “Going With The Flow”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I think you can see how sunny and dry it is here. It was seventy degrees (21.1C) with nine percent humidity.
We were under another Red Flag warning but there wasn’t too much wind.

I know everyone knows just how tough and super-deadly I am, well, the guy I live with is pretty tough, too. He says he reminds himself of someone called “Hemingway”.
The smell from next door was so bad today I thought the guy I live with was going to pass out, but, no, he just put on a mask and tried not to breathe while he worked in the garden.
“Working” often just means he goes around looking at plants, while I lie in the sun, supervising. I did a lot of supervising today.

He found a white-flowered form of Cyclamen coum, which some people say can’t possibly be hardy here (the regular ones are, totally).
It’s true that he’s never gotten the white-flowered form from the Golan Heights to do well here, but this one will do just fine.

The puschkinias have started flowering. There are thousands of them here. The bees like them, and I tried to eat a few bees, even though the guy I live with said not to.
I have to go for my physical week after next, and the guy I live with said I’d have a lot of explaining to do to my doctor if I showed up with a stomach full of bees.

There are also thousands of Corydalis angustifolia. This is scented of vanilla.

The guy I live with said that one of the cardinal rules of sping gardening is not to go poking around your plants seeing if they’re going to come up, but he was pretty delighted to see this seedling of Eremurus spectabilis.
Especially since the roots of Eremurus robustus he planted last autumn haven’t made an appearance and probably rotted, in a bed where one already grows.
The guy I live with said that Eremurus robustus was “kind of ordinary”, where E. spectabilis is not. He can be kind of a snob, if you didn’t know.

He took a picture of my Private Lawn, to show just how brown it is at this time of year. We actually should be seeing a bit of green, but some things are very late.
He thought it might be nice to plant some bulbs in this buffalo grass. Bulbs do very well growing in buffalo grass.
You can also see the broken birdbath, the big branch from the apple tree broken by snow earlier this year, and the wasteland beyond that, where nothing has ever been planted, for unknown reasons. Even the guy I live with says that. But we have a wasteland, and a lot of gardeners don’t, so that’s something.

So today, despite everything, there had to be an Emergency Snowdrop Relocation. I didn’t quite understand why, except that the guy I live with “reasoned”, if you can call it that, that a snowdrop species native to subalpine regions (Galanthus koenenianus) might be happier in a location that didn’t get completely baked, if not utterly toasted, in summer.
Even though it had seemed perfectly happy where it was.

It was transplanted into the old rock garden, but there were things in the way. Rocks. “Dumb, ugly rocks.” These were picked up on the side of a mountain road by the guy I live with’s late father-in-law, and eventually, they’re all going to go. I’m not sure where they’re going to go, but somewhere.
They were pretty firmly lodged into the soil, so the guy I live with had to get out his spade.
Not just any spade, but this:
A steel-strapped tree-planting spade that the guy I live with bought when he was buying all those tools from Smith&Hawken thirty-some years ago.
The rocks came up like nothing at all.

Obviously if all the rocks are removed, the holes with have to be filled, and something will have to be done with the rocks. But I guess that’s a story for another time.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me supervising. It’s a tough job but someone has to do it.

Until next time, then.