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 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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, here today to bring you a partly didactic post, with some weather talk, too. You may remember me from such posts as “The Caterpillars”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see how sunny and nice it was; a little over sixty degrees F (about 16C).
There isn’t anything in this part of the garden except for the huge cotoneaster (Cotoneaster multiflorus), which is so big you can see that the branches are pushing against the fence on the left. (The pieces of wood under the gate are to keep bunnies from coming into the garden. They still get in, but I’d prefer not to talk about that.)

Because it’s been so cold, for so long, there isn’t anything in flower here except for snowdrops. Which is perfectly okay, according to the guy I live with.
This is Galanthus elwesii ‘Theresa Stone’.
This is a seedling of ‘Theresa Stone’; there must be a thousand of these in the shade garden.
This is a super rare one, not in the shade garden, Galanthus koenenianus.
And there’s mud. Lots and lots of mud.
This is the path under the arbor. That big piece of wood was for something, but it’s warped now, and may just stay there like it has for years. Letting things stay in place for years is kind of what the guy I live with does. It’s a mystery to me. Maybe he’s a weirdo.
He did say he might put some rock or something here, under the arbor, because when the snow melts in the main garden, the water trickles down here and makes an incredible mess. The mud must be six inches deep.

So, as I said, it was a little over sixty today. It might be worthwhile to think about this for a few seconds. Sixty.
By tomorrow night, it will be zero, with snow. Zero. Minus 17.7C. That’s quite a drop in temperature, as I’m sure you’ll agree.
Talk about a relentless winter.

But the guy I live with has stuff to do. I mean besides making me listen to opera all the time. (Yesterday it was Il Signor Bruschino, and Ariadne auf Naxos, if you were desperate to know. Today he went to the store, so it was quiet here for a while, except for the music on the internet radio he bought for me to listen to while he’s away.)

The “stuff” sometimes involves germinating seeds, and that’s the other thing I’m going to talk about today.
Namely, how to deal with various members of the pea family (Fabaceae).
The guy I live with says you can sow seeds in autumn or early winter, and hope that cold weather will help germinate the seeds, or you can nick them and have them germinate in a couple of days.

I’m going to show you how he does that, though it was impossible to show the actual action of nicking the seeds, because the guy I live with doesn’t have an extra arm to hold the camera, and I don’t know how to do that.
These are seeds of Caesalpinia (Hoffmanseggia) repens. It doesn’t matter how old the seeds are.
All these seeds require is some way for water to get to the endosperm, and nicking the seed coat is “counsel of perfection”. (The guy I live with used to read a lot of English gardening books.)
The seed coat is nicked with a very sharp knife, at the point indicated by the pencil.
Just a little flicking motion with the knife is all that’s necessary with most seeds.
He uses a watchmaker’s loupe to be able to see what he’s doing.
All the time very much aware that there’s a sharp blade close to his eyes.

The seeds are placed in a dish with hot water overnight, and then put in a damp coffee filter or paper towel, and placed in a plastic bag, in one of the propagators in the upstairs bedroom (with bottom heat); the seeds germinate in a day or so and are potted in peat pots when the seeds have formed roots. The peat pots can be planted directly into the garden.
The guy I live with says this could also be done wearing reading glasses, with the seeds and knife at a safe distance, or without glasses for people who can see what they’re doing without magnification.
Most of the seedlings will be given away. I know that sounds strange, but I’m used to things like this.

That’s all I have for today. It’s okay if you want to think of us at this time tomorrow night, when the snow is falling, the winds are howling, and there are no degrees at all. We do have a new furnace, after all, which was inspected by the furnace inspector just today. I barked at him in my usual ferocious manner, and then showed him where the furnace was, downstairs.

Until next time, then.