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 up to date on, well, really almost nothing. You may remember me from such posts as “Strange Encounters”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Not much has been going on here. The snow is mostly gone from the garden, but the guy I live with said they’re saying it might snow tomorrow night. He said that would be fine. 

There’s at least one crocus still flowering, and some snowdrops, too.
This is Crocus niveus.
Mostly, though, there’s been a lot of sweeping and raking and things like that. And filling the bird feeders. 
The guy I live with said he was going out tomorrow to get more bird seed. They eat a lot of seed. 

Speaking of birds, we haven’t seen any owls, though we hear them pretty often, at night. The guy I live with said that two people near the south end of the field, where the owls liked to be in the last several years, have installed blindingly bright spotlights that now keep the owls away from that part of the field.
The spotlights are illegal, but some people think they can do whatever they want, no matter how it affects the owls, or other people, for that matter. 
But it is nice to hear the owls hooting at night. 

A couple of months ago the guy I live with went kind of crazy ordering seeds. 
Half of these are bulb seeds, calochortus and fritillaria, and the rest are things like penstemons. 
He decided that the garden should have a bunch of penstemons again, like there were back in the last century when he and his wife were working on a book on them, and maybe also to make the hummingbirds even happier. 

The only thing is that he doesn’t have any peat moss or perlite, for the seed pots, so he’ll have to get those pretty soon, but he also has no plant labels. He said he can’t get the plastic kind he’s used for decades. No one has them for sale. 
He ordered a bunch of popsicle sticks earlier this year, but when he used those, the sticks turned black after being watered a lot and the names became illegible.
So his next idea, which I thought was absurd, was to get one of those burning tools like people had for hobbies, sixty years ago, and burn the plant names onto the labels. 
I guess we’ll see. 
He did get sand. Coarse paving sand; not what they call “play sand”, which is too fine. 

So that’s it. Really, this post was just to say that we’re still here, and not much is happening, other than some complaining about not being able to get plant labels. And the spotlights. Lots of complaining there.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me in my own “personal nest”. I started making these extra-cozy nests when the guy I live with put another afghan on the couch for me.

Until next time, then. 

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on all the exciting happenings around here. You may remember me from such posts as “Mist, Drizzle, And Ice”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I have this idea that I don’t need to tell anyone that it snowed again.

The guy I live with is very happy with the snow, which is kind of weird, if you ask me, because ordinarily he would be very put out by the snow and cold weather, complaining about how it’s affecting the autumn-flowering snowdrops and some other bulbs, but he explained that after last year, and all the extreme fire danger warnings, snow is infinitely preferable to dry weather and the apparently futile hope that we might return to typical autumns featuring rain and drizzle.
He did have to shovel the snow, which he said was good exercise.

Yesterday, it looked like this, to the southwest.
And like this, to the east.
I went on my walks, as usual. It wasn’t very cold at the time.
But there wasn’t any gardening, unless you count filling the bird feeders.

The guy I live with spent some time cleaning the “depression glass” on the shelves that divide the living room from the kitchen. His wife tore out the hideous divider that was there, and built the shelves; the glass was something she bought at antique stores.
He said it’s much nicer to have sparkling glass at this time of year, instead of dusty stuff that looks pretty forlorn. (That’s her picture, there, too; I’ve pointed this out before, I know.) And there are a few porcelain animal figurines, too.

The next cleaning project is a fairly daunting one.
You can see how dirty the glass is. The last time, the guy I live with piled pillows on the kitchen table and then unbolted the glass from the metal fixture. He’s afraid of breaking it; it was something his wife found in a lamp store in Boulder and really wanted it. It’s very heavy.
There was an orb weaver spider living in the lamp this summer, weaving the usual intricate webs every day.

And then there’s holiday stuff. The guy I live with left me alone yesterday, to go out with his friend, and bought some candles (tapers), which are our main holiday decoration. They went to a special store to get candles that didn’t smell like petroleum products.
Today, he baked a couple of loaves of Moravian coffee cake, to give to his neighbors.
And that’s really all I have for today.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, all lit up, on my walk this evening, when it was 19 degrees F (-7.2C). We’re both pretty tough and the cold didn’t bother us. I had to wear my boots, though.

Until next time, then.