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 a gloomy post. You maybe remember me from such gloom-related posts as “Sunless Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If the garden looks a little different, that’s because it is. We spent most of the day before yesterday cutting down all the dead grasses and stuff. Well not all of them, but most of them. (I say “we” because I supervised.)
The garden really smelled bad, with all the rotting grasses trapped under the snow, and suddenly exposed to air.

There are still snowdrops. The guy I live with thinks he didn’t plant this one.
There are a lot more than just this one, but it looked kind of sad, all by itself.

The weather forecast calling for “freezing drizzle” or a “wintry mix” (the guy I live with said “The kind of weather they have in Toronto”) but of course nothing like that happened. It didn’t even snow. It was just cold, dry, and overcast.
If that sounds icky, it’s because it is.

This patch of snow has been here since before Christmas.
The guy I live with said “Maybe it’s always been there, and we never noticed.”

Here’s a view from the upstairs bedroom window.
Total gloom.
In case you’re wondering, this constant cold and gloom isn’t normal at all, for us.
https://red.msudenver.edu/2018/the-truth-about-winter-in-denver/
Reading this now makes the guy I live with pretty disgusted.

So we had Opera Day again today, because of the gloom, and the guy I live with was feeling lonely, the way he does, but today it was worse.
Some work was done, despite this. He fiddled with the flats upstairs, some. You can see one empty flat on the right of the middle flat.
There’s a dishpan full of pots, with his homemade soil-less mix.
These are for more seeds to be nicked and soaked. In this case, Ipomoea leptophylla. The pots will go into the empty flat after the seeds have germinated.

He sowed seeds of another “ip” plant, Ipomopsis longiflora, into the sandpile today, even despite all the gloom.

That’s basically it for today. I’ll leave with with a series of totally gloomy pictures from my evening walk. The guy I live with said it should have been misty or drizzling (regular drizzle, not freezing drizzle) for the complete effect, but no, it was just chilly, and super gloomy, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

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 talk about pots. You may remember me from such posts as “The Drop-In”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically pensive pose.
All the coverings for the couch, including the blankets, were washed today, so they’re pleasant to recline on.

The day began strangely. The forecast called for sun and wind, but we got this instead. This is a view to the southwest:
This is looking northeast:
It snowed for about ten minutes, and then the sun came out.

The guy I live with then decided he couldn’t take it any more, and went out into the garden and cut down a whole bunch of grasses and other things. A lot of longer stems were stuck in the ice, which made him very irritated (I could tell), but on the other hand he enjoyed the work, and I had a good time supervising.
The path on the north side was mostly cleared of dead horehound stems and so on.
I know you’ll be extremely jealous of the makeshift greenhouse. A lot of people are. A stylish garden accoutrement like this adds a certain something to this view.
The guy I live with said people are also jealous of the rustic craftmanship of the fence you can see there. He installed it (if “installed” is the right word) because he claimed I kept going into that garden to chase squirrels.
He said he might write an article on how to make your garden look so rustic. I would have used the word “ramshackle” but the guy I live with said no.

What he really wants, fence-wise, is this “vintage” steel fencing that’s become very hard to find. I mean hard to find exactly what he wants. Steel, no extra hoops at the bottom, not too tall, and not coated in green plastic.
There used to be an antique store a few miles from here, and he was thinking of going there, because that’s where you’d find rolls of “vintage” fencing like this; he and his wife went there fairly often, but the place is gone now. Like so many things.
He’ll keep looking.
Anyway, that’s the fence story.

Now about the pots.
The guy I live with said you can tell how rough this winter has been by the effect it’s had on the pots out in the garden, especially the unglazed pots. (I know some people call them “containers”, but they’re pots.) There are a lot of pots in the garden, mostly filled with hens and chicks. (Sempervivums.)
These Mexican clay pots have been in the garden for a long time, but now they’re trashed. They’re easily and inexpensively replaced, though.
What happened here, I think, was that the pots got wet when it rained last December, and then the temperature dropped, and they never recovered from that. They could have been brushed on the inside with Thompson’s Water Seal, or something similar, before being planted in, but the guy I live with said he forgot to do that.

Glazed pots last much longer, in general.
This one fell apart last winter, I think. Maybe the glaze wasn’t very well made, and that makes all the difference.
Sometimes these can be mended with a concrete-repairing glue (looks like Elmer’s glue, but isn’t), the pot held in place with a strap, but this one didn’t stay glued. The holes in the sides wouldn’t be much of an issue except all the glazing flaked away there, so the walls are very thin.

This trough broke in half, last century, and was mended with that glue. It might be coming apart again.
There’s probably a kind of glue that could be squirted into the crack with a caulking gun, though the trough might be well-enough balanced on the cinder blocks as to stay together for a while.

The moral of all of this is to purchase quality glazed pots, if you want them to endure winter after winter, at least here.
This pot, of high quality, has been outdoors in Denver for sixty years. Sixty years. Not always in our yard, of course. It belonged to the guy I live with’s grandmother.
Some years ago there was a rough winter with a lot of ice, and the pot cracked.
It came as a shock to the guy I live with, considering how much it had been through. (The crack is on the other side, in this picture.)
And sixty years is a good return on a pot investment.

These are also very high-quality pots that the guy I live with hopes will last for a long time. They’ve been outside for about ten years now. You can see how thick the walls on the pots are. And the glaze is thick, too. They’re very heavy for their size.
So that’s our pots post. I hope you found it moderately interesting.

I’ll wind this up with a picture of me and the pots. And the unyielding ice behind me, which has been sprinkled with sand, for safety’s sake. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen ice this thick in the garden for so long.

Until next time, then.