the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk mostly about snowdrops, since there isn’t much of anything else going on. You may remember me from such posts as “Mostly Iceless”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s certainly not “mostly iceless” here right now, but I think you can tell by the title of my post how things have changed, again.
The weather is nice now, though the guy I live with said the ice on the paths won’t melt until it gets to 100 degrees or more, so he sprinkled a bunch of “paving sand” on the ice, especially next to the shed, out there, so I won’t slip when I run out in back to protect our garden in my usual tough manner.
The sand heats up and helps melt the ice. A little, anyway.

You can see, in this picture, seedlings that were nicked and soaked, like I talked about in my last post. The LED lights make everything look pinkish.
They’re in individual peat pots because members of the pea family (this is Acacia constricta) often don’t like to have their roots fiddled with.

And now for snowdrops. The guy I live with says winters would be very boring without snowdrops, even though we usually have crocuses and other things in flower in January and February. This year, only snowdrops.
The main “flock” is gathering steam, to sort of mix metaphors.
These were planted twenty-two years ago last October. I know I’ve told this story before, but these are Galanthus elwesii ‘Theresa Stone’, acquired from the garden in Corvallis, Oregon, where they were discovered.
There are probably a thousand of these now, but they’re not all ‘Theresa Stone’; most of them are not, in fact.
Snowdrops are pollinated by bees, and the seeds are spread by ants. So the only way all of these snowdrops could be ‘Theresa’ was if the guy I live with hadn’t planted some regular Galanthus elwesii in the shade garden, too. But he did.
The result has been a strain of “insanely vigorous” snowdrops, like these:
This one is in the front yard; I showed a picture of it in my post “A Hundred Voices”. It’s in a very dry spot, where our resident bunny likes to sleep.
The guy I live with said he was going call this ‘Bunny Wallow’ and sell bulbs from this for $200 each.

People actually do pay that much for named varieties of snowdrops, which is fine, I guess, though the resulting seedlings will be something different, unless there are no other snowdrops around.
This book, with its dusty cover
says snowdrop species are probably “self-incompatible’, so the named varieties would no doubt be, too, and the only way you could get another plant of your $200 snowdrop would be by planting another of the exact same one next to it, by digging up the original bulb and replanting offsets, or by “twin-scaling”.

Here’s another named variety of Galanthus elwesii; ‘Daphne’s Scissors’.
You can sort of the the scissors marking on the inner segments. Maybe if the picture were more in focus.
The guy I live with says this isn’t any better than the “bunny wallow” one, but he planted it anyway.  You can see these are increasing, but any seedlings will be scissors-less, because there are all sorts of other snowdrops nearby.
This is Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus. It’s okay to feel sorry for this one. The guy I live with says these bulbs (there are several) will be moved to a sunnier spot later this year. It can flower in late January, here, in the sun. With shade in the summer.
And the last one is Galanthus plicatus subsp. plicatus.
The upward-facing flowers will turn downward in a day or so.

Okay, that’s it for the snowdrops (except to say that the guy I live with is, once again, slightly disappointed–but not surprised–by the performance of the “bulk” snowdrops he got).
At least there’s something in flower here, in this endless winter. It’s supposed to snow again on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I do my best to cheer up the guy I live with.

I’ll leave you with this picture of me, doing some gardening, too.

Until next time, then.