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 snow and snowdrops. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Snowdrops And Sentiment”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
No doubt you can tell that it snowed again. The guy I live with says December, January, and February are the dry months here (February averages eleven millimeters of precipitation), but I guess not, this winter.
It’s forty-nine degrees here (9C) right now, with lots of melting. The humidity is twenty-seven percent, so it’s actually quite nice out, though very bright, thanks to the sun on the snow.

The only thing I have for today is some talk about the “bulk snowdrops”, Galanthus elwesii, whence the fairly hysterical title for my post.
If you saw my post “Crocuses And Snowdrops” you’ll remember that the guy I live with bought some “bulk snowdrops”, which you can do through one of the online bulb brokers.
I’ve already talked about the failures associated with the “bulk snowdrops” and the guy I live with said that’s probably enough.
Anyway this is the third time, I think, that this has been tried, even though Homer Simpson’s “Trying is the first step toward failure” echoed in his mind, but, for once, the bulbs were planted with really good roots because he used the right kind of soil to root them in.
Today we went out to fill the bird feeders, and then look at the “bulk snowdrops”. There are other snowdrops in flower but he was interested in his “experimental” ones.
The guy I live with had just watched Jason and the Argonauts, so naturally he pointed to a snowdrop and said “There! And there! And still another! And more!”

This wasn’t terribly interesting to me, and I suspect won’t be to anyone else, but the guy I live with said this result is much better than having two hundred bulbs rot to nothing, and considering that he’s “only spent about a hundred million dollars on now-dead plants”, this was pretty good, especially if the bulbs actually survive for more than a year. (Oh. If you’re wondering about the movie reference, it’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqRjDGAJ5dc
which was a bit too scary for me.)
The guy I live with said the movie should have showed colchicums in flower, but I didn’t understand that.

And that, my dear friends, is absolutely it for today.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me lying on the bed, thinking about things, the way I do.

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 bring you all the latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “Into The Wilderness”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If you think I look super soft and cuddly, that’s because I am.

It’s been an interesting week so far. The weather has been pretty warm, except for one day, and it’s supposed to be about 60 degrees F (say a little less than 16C) tomorrow, but then get really cold and snowy next week. Yes, again.
According to the guy I live with, this winter has been “relentless”.
Some places still have a lot of snow, but others don’t.
The paths in the garden are pretty icy, still, but the ones in the field are even worse.
Lots of people and dogs walk here.
There are places where it’s just mud. This is frozen mud, from a couple of mornings ago. Some of those paw prints are mine.
And this part is less icy, but can still be treacherous. Lots of people walk here; the guy I live with doesn’t know if it’s people going for a walk, or going to the bus stop, or what.
The really big thing that happened this week was on Monday. I had to spend part of the day outside, because I barked too much at the people coming and going, and the front door was open a lot. But there were squirrels to yell at, in the garden.
That’s right; we got a new furnace. (That one white wire is for the old TV antenna, but it isn’t hooked up to anything. I don’t really know what an antenna is.)
And, naturally, the guy I live with said there were “a hundred voices” telling him he could have had this done for less money, that someone’s brother’s cousin’s kid would have done this for half the money, and so on. The guy I live with doesn’t know why people behave this way, but I guess they do. It’s not really very nice.
I know he fretted a lot about the fifty-year-old furnace suddenly going out when it got very cold (that’s what happened to one of our neighbors), so instead of listening to the endless echoes of unsolicited advice and not being able to decide to do anything until they stopped, this is now done.

There are some snowdrops. More than just what I’m showing, but these are sort of interesting, because they’re in the front yard, which hasn’t been watered since 1987.
The picture could be more in focus, I think. These are Galanthus elwesii, “cut off from the main herd”, as the guy I live with would say. They’re self-sown.
And today, something else got done.
The guy I live with threatened (I’m just kidding) to have Opera Day, again, with this:
He said this was really the first opera (1816) where things ended badly. The story doesn’t follow Shakespeare, and at the end, Desdemona gets stabbed, which was so shocking to the audience when it was premiered that on the next night someone cried out to Desdemona, “Watch out, he has a knife!”
They even wrote an alternative happy ending.
We prefer happy endings, really.

But instead, The Simpsons were on TV, and the guy I live with sowed all the seeds that needed to go outside.
He worked on the patio while I supervised.
This is the result of the work. The picture was taken tonight.
The guy I live with said that this should have been done over a month ago, so the pots could be covered with snow, but it was too cold to work outside, and he didn’t have any peat moss or perlite. Apparently there’s like a perlite shortage, but he was able to find some.
A whole bag of paving sand went into the mix, too. Peat moss, sand, and perlite. Then fine gravel on top.
These are mostly penstemons. (I talked about these packets in my post “Some Like It Cool”.) They could have been stratified like the seeds I showed earlier, since the seeds need one or two months of cold, or more, but this works too, and involves less checking on things.
Since these are penstemon seeds, if they don’t germinate this spring, they will next spring.

So, that’s what’s happened in the last several days. Kind of exciting, in a way.

Until next time, then.