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.

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.

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

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

We had freezing or near-freezing temperatures in early November and I expected all the tree leaves would have changed color then. Many waited, though, until this past week and there are still some spectacularly showy trees around the neighborhood.

Brother Tim and I renewed our family autumn arboretum walk tradition last weekend. We had a glorious, sunny day and there was a lot to see and many seeds followed us home.

I planted all the seeds that followed me home in pots this weekend to scarify them and see what comes up in the next year or two.

Many of my tonsai starts came from similar annual trips. And this rose, with which I have a love/hate relationship, came from an arboretum seed decades ago.

This is a robust and maleficent marauder, seeding around my garden and likely others, but it has beautiful, cheerful hips in the fall.

After an arid summer and early autumn, the rain came yesterday and is forecasted to stay for about ten more days, at least! The air is finally cleared of the anxiety-inducing smoke from the local wildfires and the plants are all voicing deep sighs of relief.

Today was a fun day spent in the greenhouse between bouts of computer work. There are some fun things blooming or preparing to bloom in there.

There is a lot of general cleanup to do in there and lots of propagation, too. I took cuttings of salvia, fuchsia, and pelargoniums–lots and lots of pelargoniums! The frustration with pelargoniums is that they have excellent cutting material now, in the fall, but it isn’t really a great time to propagate them. The success rate on the cuttings can be really low. I’m hoping if I take better care of them in the next six weeks or so, they will do better than in years past.

Foliage colors have been sad this year, more brown than bright. But my tonsai trees have some brilliance despite their diminutive sizes.

With the travel to London and Lodi in May/June, I haven’t spent enough time in the garden and indeed no time writing about it. I’ll drop a bunch of photos here, though, as there is a lot going on that is lovely and new in the yard this year.

After repotting the rest of the Tonsai plants and updating the blog inventory, there are now 88 tonsai starts logged! Each one has so much potential to become a wonderful little tree.

I have big plans for the garden space to the south of the greenhouse but I haven’t had the time or money to implement them yet. That area was covered with weeds and looked pretty sad.

My weekend travel plans were interrupted by a covid exposure so I hunkered down and started cleaning up the area. I got about 2/3 of it done.

Below are some flower/plant photos from the garden/greenhouse this week.