the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to make a slight correction. You may remember me from such posts as “The Empire Of Light”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You see those gray plants just to the left of me? They’re in almost every picture of me when I’m standing here.
These:
The guy I live with said this may be the first time he’s seen evidence that these plants flower.
Not spectacular, I know, but the guy I live with said the color of the flowers, which he thought might be spent, go well with the silver foliage.
He also said someone told him this was Artemisia ludoviciana ‘Silver Frost’, but if you look up this name on the internet you’ll see pictures of very different plants with that name, and you also see this as ‘Silver Queen’, or ‘Silver King’, and of course if you look up ‘Silver King’ you’ll see the plant above, as well as what the guy I live with has in our garden as ‘Silver King’ and so, well, he said “Whatever”.
It’s an artemisia and it’s in flower. Or done flowering; it’s hard to tell.

The guy I live with did some research on the sternbergias here and realized that these bulbs had been planted in 2012 or 2013, to replace ones he accidentally dug up. So they haven’t been here for twenty-five years.
He said we needed to issue this slight correction.
There are some others in flower, too.
More crocuses are coming up.
Crocus speciosus is in flower here and there. These are self-sown.
I was helping the guy I live with with all of this; my help is very important to him. Here I am looking at a crocus. You can barely see the flower, but it’s there. You’re supposed to look at crocuses.
I had to move to another part of the garden to do some work there. Mostly keeping bees away from things, including me.
The guy I live with said October, even though it can also be a sad month for him, is one of his favorite months for gardening, especially when the cyclamen leaves are up.
There are four species in this picture.
The red at left in the picture above is Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Corfu Red’. Even though this was found on an island in the Ionian Sea it’s hardy here.
It’s growing through Philadelphus madrensis.
This cyclamen is one grown for the flowers (there’s one so dark red it’s almost black, and the guy I live with would like to find that some day), but most cyclamen are grown for the leaves.
Like this one, Cyclamen purpurascens ‘Extra Fancy’.
The green leaves are Cyclamen coum.

That’s it for flowers and leaves today.

I have one other thing. The guy I live cut down the rose ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk Rambler’ a while ago. He said the flowers were tiny, unscented, and the rose was devoured by Japanese beetles worse than any of the other roses here (though this wasn’t a bad year for the beetles), so it wasn’t something he wanted in the garden any longer.
After he cut down the rose he didn’t notice anything, but today, which is his wife’s birthday, he noticed the bats she put up. He always knew they were there, but now they’re like really there.
There are four more under the eaves of the shed.

I guess that’s enough for today.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about how annoyed the guy I live with was today. You may remember me from such posts as “In Trouble Again”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The day started out pretty nicely. We did all the things we always do, but after the guy I live with had his breakfast we decided to walk around the garden.
As you can see, I began the walk with a rather noble pose.

We went our separate ways for a while, like we sometimes do.
The guy I live with saw some more snowdrops.
And he noticed the sternbergias were flowering more than yesterday. He was very happy about that. There are even more flowers to come. The guy I live with said he read articles about cactus growing on limestone where it was surmised that rainfall altered the pH at the roots and that triggered flowering, and maybe that’s what happened here. Though our soil isn’t alkaline, our tap water is, slightly, and maybe the bulbs wanted rain rather than watering.
You can see that there are three groups of bulbs here, and if you remember my last post about these there was a clump of grass growing between two of them.
The guy I live with sort of gently wrenched it out with his widger; it was a lot of work, probably because widgers aren’t made to do that.

The grass is Melica ciliata, which is a very attractive grass, but it has a tendency to reseed everywhere, as the guy I live with noticed when he stepped back onto the path and looked at the raised bed the sternbergias are growing in.
I could tell how annoyed he was. He said you can’t just pull it up; it resists.
So he got his old hori hori, and worked at a clump for a while, and then all of a sudden I could swear that an illuminated lightbulb appeared over his head, and he went into the shed and came back with this:
Despite its name this is an excellent little Japanese tool. You just stick it into the ground and just rip out the weeds.

It took him almost no time at all to clear this raised bed of all the grass.
This part of the raised bed is supposed to be mostly empty like this, at this time of year.
He says it’s “avant-garde minimalism”.
There are other areas that are deliberately left empty like this.

But then, after he put the ripped-up grass in the compost pile, he walked around and saw this:
And this:
And this, among all the fallen-over cowpen daisies:
He went inside to his laptop, to the Hida Tool website and discovered there was another model, with more teeth than the Mont Blanc, which he ordered. A Kusitori Ichiban. The guy I live with told me “ichiban” means “Number One” in Japanese.
It was twenty-three dollars with shipping.

He then went back to the grass and said “In the words of Homer J. Simpson, “the world is a blender full of sharks, set on extra teeth”, and I just ordered extra teeth.”
The grass didn’t look scared or anything, but I knew the guy I live with meant business.

It started to rain and he didn’t want to get wet, so he went inside, and that was that.
And that’s what happened today.

Until next time, then.