Monthly Archives: January 2023

First Flowers of 2023

Despite the icy weather we had weeks ago, the snowdrops are already blooming in the memory garden.

Meanwhile, the early signs of spring in the house took the form of some fun miniature narcissus, N. bulbocodium ‘White Petticoat’ in the forcing pot I brought inside. The growth is a bit awkward due to the lack of light but the flowers are charming.

Given all signs pointing to spring, I focused on organizing my seed inventory today. Leon has been helping to clean out a deceased friend’s house and he found a perfect little seed storage unit. I went through all the packets and organized them by start date. There are a LOT of seeds. I am really excited to get started, though!

Photo Dump–January

With our new dog, there have been lots of walks around the neighborhood and I have seen things that I thought were beautiful and worth a photo. I also took pictures of flowers here at the house and of the bare, but cleaned-up garden so I can compare in May when all the growth has happened and the flowers are out.

The Gardening New Year

I found some unexpected time to do some gardening today and the weather was perfect, more like April than January.

My first chore was to move the bulbs I potted for forcing back outside to the shelves along the greenhouse. I moved them into the greenhouse during a very cold spell we had two weeks ago with temperatures around 18 degrees. My past experience with potted bulbs is that very cold temps and deeply frozen soil ruin them. The “Little Heater That Could” managed to keep the greenhouse temps above freezing through the cold spell and the bulb pots seem fine and ready to start forcing. There is still some rat activity in the greenhouse so it was important to move those pots before the bulbs were devoured.

A mix of iris and crocus–hoping they have had time to get strong roots and will bloom on the windowsill in the next week or two.

One of my 2023 resolutions is to tackle all the English ivy in my yard. I started today by peeling some off the Douglas fir. It will be a lengthy battle but it felt wonderful to get started on day one of the year.

Public Enemy Number One — looks innocent enough but wants to take over the planet.
I peeled about half of the ivy down from the Douglas fir and cut the vines. I will take it all the way down to the ground next time and start pulling up all the vines that are spread all over the garden.
You can see all the vines snaking up the tree. They are really brittle so they break off when you pull them.
Hundreds of tentacles!
My ivy-fighting teammate.

There are signs of life already despite the cold temperatures. Here are some Muscari bulbs springing up in winter.

Bursting through the leaf cover, grape hyacinths will lift blue spikes in April.

Some other fun growth I spotted were the fungi loving all the wet, cold weather.

Enemy Number Two is this camellia shrub that needs to find its way to another dimension. I’ll be inviting it to not live here in 2023.
The brambles and their trellises need some work–I’ll get them organized before spring.
This is somewhat shocking–the Calibrachoa plants in the driveway pots do not seem to have been impacted by the deep freeze at all!
They are still putting out buds, too–we may have January flowers!