the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Hot, Dry, And Windy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose:
I know it looks pretty dry here, and it sort of is, but a few days ago we had some more snow.
It still didn’t freeze, and this was only a quarter inch of water, but we’re still grateful for that. The guy I live with said we might get some more snow later this week, but it will definitely freeze then, even if we don’t get snow.

There are still crocuses in flower, here and there in the garden. These are Crocus speciosus, and they were sown by ants, who like the seeds, which are coated with something nutritious for them. This process, as I’ve no doubt said before, is called myrmecochory. Seed dispersal by ants. It happens with snowdrops, too.
This is the white form, but this was grown from a purchased corm. They’re easy to find in catalogues.
The guy I live with really enjoys walking around the garden and seeing these in flower, They appear in some unexpected places, like in the middle of paths.

At this time of year, the guy I live with starts thinking about snowdrops. The autumn-flowering kinds are up, later than usual because it’s been so dry, but here is Galanthus bursanus, flowering right on time.
This is new at the zoo, but should do well here, since it comes from a part of Turkey with very dry summers.
The guy I live with went into the shade garden and rummaged through the leaves, and found these. He posted this picture on Facebook, too.
These are up so early the guy I live with wondered what the point was. They won’t be in flower until the end of February.
These are Galanthus elwesii ‘Theresa Stone’; the snowdrops you see in the blog’s header.

The guy I live with didn’t tell the other story about these, and maybe I’ve told it before on this blog, since there are so, so many posts.
He and his wife went to Oregon, back in 2000. He was going to go alone, but his wife’s favorite purebred border collie Pooka had just died, and he didn’t want her to be by herself, so he bought her a plane ticket. Flurry, the other purebred border collie, stayed at my doctor’s office, like I have, too.
That’s where he got the snowdrops. A month later he and his wife got another purebred border collie, Slipper.

But every time he sees those snowdrops in flower he can’t help but think of the fact that his wife is gone now, as are all the other purebred border collies who lived here before me.

He still likes snowdrops, though. A while back, he got a bag of what people call “bulk” snowdrops. Galanthus elwesii again.
These of course come without roots, and trying get bulbs to grow roots by planting them out in the garden doesn’t work very well when it’s so dry. Even the sprinkler won’t get water down that far into the soil.

I made some other posts about these bulk snowdrops earlier, but didn’t say that most of the first batch came up and then never appeared again (probably because they only flowered, and never grew roots), and then when he got a second batch and tried to root the bulbs in pots filled with purchased potting soil, in the upstairs bedroom, the potting soil got so wet it turned to mush, and so did the snowdrops.

So this time (and he said this would be the last time he experimented with snowdrops arriving so late in the year) he planted the snowdrops in big pots filled with a super-gritty and porous mix, hoping the bulbs would root, and at the same time not rot from lack of oxygen in the mix.
About ten days later, after watering almost every day, he dug into the pots and found these:
There was an awful lot of strutting around in triumph, if you ask me.
The snowdrops were then planted into the garden, and watered again.

Oh, I’m also supposed to say that the guy I live with’s email is seriously messed up. Notifications from WordPress come through the email, so sometimes we might not see the comments for days. We’re not being rude; it’s just some technological glitch.

That’s what I have for today. My evening walks have been in the dark, lately, so I get to wear my lighted collar and make other dogs jealous, which they are.
The guy I live with explained Daylight Savings Time to me, but I still think he’s forgetting my dinnertime every afternoon.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me wearing my collar, walking along the canal road.

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 help you catch up on everything that’s been going on here. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Light, Some Dark”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m patrolling the garden and you can barely see the tip of my magnificent tail.
As you can see, the flagstone is damp, but before going into that, I want to show some pictures taken over the last few days, just because.
This is a picture of the sky, taken a couple of days ago, with the Russian hawthorn (Crataegus ambigua).This is the only hawthorn that doesn’t get rust in our garden, if you needed to know that.

The canal, on our walk. Those are chokecherries, with maybe Rosa arkansana on the opposite bank.
It won’t be long before the water in the canal stops flowing, because it’s getting colder.
I think on the same walk, but going the other way, the guy I live with said I missed something which he thought I would find interesting. I certainly would have, and wish he’d pointed it out, but he didn’t. You might have to embiggen this picture to see it.Yesterday, they were talking about snow for today, so the guy I live with took some pictures of the crocuses here.  The guy I live with had just gotten his Covid bivalent shot and was feeling pretty crummy, but managed to do at least this.
And it did snow. It snowed for most of the day today.
The guy I live with was pretty happy about this, and relieved too. He said it could have snowed even more. It was kind of snow mixed with rain, or rain mixed with snow.
It definitely smelled interesting outside.
It is supposed to freeze tonight; the guy I live with says that’s perfectly fine. This has been a bit of an exhausting gardening year for him.
This will be the last night for Salvia darcyi. (I know these aren’t all that in focus.)
And probably for Salvia greggii too.
On the other hand, the first snowdrops are appearing, though the flowers are being gnawed on by grasshoppers.
This is Galanthus peshmenii:
They’re in a pot plunged into the soil so that the bulbs can be more easily retrieved, for sharing with the botanic gardens.

Well, that’s it. It snowed, everything is damp and chilly, which feels delightful if totally unusual, and it smells nice outside, for once.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me doing a very important thing: barking at a hawk.

Until next time, then.