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 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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you my tale of a very rough day indeed. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “A Handful Of Dust”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Here’s another picture of me later in the day, checking on the sprinkler.
The garden is bone-dry now, after yesterday.
We were under a Red Flag Warning most of the day. It was scarily windy. I was too frightened by the wind to go out, even though the guy I live with said he would go with me. The highest recorded wind gust was “only” 58 mph (93 kph), but it’s been fairly dry here and so there was cause for worry.

The guy I live with double checked our bags. Mine is the one on the left.
At one point, yesterday afternoon, the guy I live with walked outside and smelled smoke. He walked out the front door and into the field to see if he could see anything.
Later he said he saw blowing dust to the west, but now he thinks it was smoke, because there was a fire about six miles northwest of us, near Red Rocks.

Everything was calm by six in the evening.

After the longest winter either of us has ever seen, almost the first nice day brings us wind and critical fire danger. The guy I live with said if this sounds discouraging and depressing, that’s because it is.

There’s a seventy percent chance of snow this coming Tuesday, which will probably evaporate by the time Tuesday arrives. That’s what’s been happening over and over again: rain or snow predicted, the chances go down every day, and then nothing happens.
It’s “supposed” to be either raining or snowing in March and April.

That’s my weather complaint.

I didn’t think I would be showing more snowdrops, but here they are anyway. Snowdrops in April. The guy I live with says that’s totally bizarre.
This is a large-flowered form of Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus, from the garden at Colesbourne in England. It would normally flower at the end of January, or in February, here.
This one has a label that says ‘Augustus’, but that’s a form of Galanthus plicatus, and this is clearly G. nivalis.
The guy I live with said “Whatever”, since this is beginning to look like a very vigorous form.
The snowdrops escaped from the main herd, now growing in the front yard in an extremely dry location under oaks, are still looking good, though most of these are finished flowering. There were more, but he gave away some clumps.
It really is too weird to be showing snowdrops in April, so I’m going to stop.

The Fritillaria imperialis under the New Mexican olives (Forestieria neomexicana) are up (there’s also one Eremurus robustus). They’re said to have a sort of “fox” smell combined with garlic, but I’ve never smelled a fox and so wouldn’t know.
The guy I live with says that, even before they emerge from the ground, he can smell them. The bulbs have been here for years.
So that’s what I have for today.
I guess the sprinkler might be on a lot, in the next few days, though the guy I live with didn’t like the “feel” of the faucet when he turned it on. Imagine the heavy sigh.
He said the same people who installed the new furnace could replace the faucet, and the one out in front, too, even though it hardly ever gets used. It makes a funny wheezing noise when it’s turned off.
He said if he waters a lot it probably will snow.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me chewing an Ark Naturals brushless toothpaste thing. I really like these a lot.

Until next time, then.