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 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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you our latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “More Boring Stuff”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It was forty-five degrees today. (That’s 7.2 Celsius.) Pretty toasty in the sun, and let me tell you, the sun here is very warm, because we’re closer to it than most people are.
The snow is melting, slowly.

This is what it looked like night before last, at about midnight, when it was Tinkle Time. It was cold.
We’ve had an issue with rabbits getting into the garden, and the guy I live with was pretty upset with me when instead of going outside for the last time at night, to tinkle, in the freezing cold, I spent a long time chasing a rabbit around the back yard. (I didn’t catch it, but it was good exercise.)

It’s going to get warmer and warmer, but then maybe snow a little at the beginning of next week.

It was so nice today that the guy I live with raised the plastic sheets that were covering the snowdrops planted in pots.
Very stylish-looking, isn’t it? The guy I live with thought he might start a blog called Elegant Garden Design, but I wasn’t really sure about that idea.
The plastic was just to help keep the soil from freezing when it got very cold, because that slows down the snowdrops, and he mainly wants them to increase.
The soil is frozen solid where that two-by-four is; the wood is so he can kneel down to look at the snowdrops. I worry every time he kneels in the garden, because he might not be able to get up. (The other pieces of wood are there so he can lift the plastic without having to kneel down, or were to keep the plastic from blowing away.)
But see the little white dots? This is what they are.
And in the front yard, there are snowdrops that have escaped from the main flock in the shade garden:
The guy I live with said that some plants use glucose to create heat so they can push through the snow. This is called thermogenesis.
There’s still not enough energy in the zillion snowdrops in the shade garden to be able to get through the snow, but maybe some warmer temperatures will help with that.
I don’t know why that cage is still there. It was to protect some colchicums several months ago.

Crocuses can do thermogenesis, too, but this poor thing got frozen first. This is Crocus laevigatus. It’s normal for it to flower in late December.
There still could be some more flowers, but the guy I live with says probably not, which is okay.

Someone is coming out this weekend to give a quote on a new furnace (another form of thermogenesis, maybe), and now that it’s become nicer, the guy I live with said he’s “firm in his resolve” not to let the nice weather make him think we don’t need a new furnace. The thing is fifty years old, with some corrosion and all sorts of weird wiring.
And I’ll get to watch all of this.

So that’s our news, I’ll leave you with a picture of me in what I think you’ll agree is a pretty relaxed mode.

Until next time, then.