Today was the perfect day to get some outdoor chores done. I started in the orchard garden cleaning up the raspberry canes, pruning off the dead canes, and cutting the living canes down to 3-4 feet.

I cut back the iochroma, as well, and the Sophora japonica suckers. Then, I tackled the camellia, taking it back far enough to reset the berry trellises that were falling over from the camellia pressure. I cleaned up all the berry canes. It does not look like we will get too many blackberries this year on the thornless canes but there are many tayberry canes and I am hoping they make up for the blackberries. The black raspberries look pretty weak this year, too. I will get some organic berry food and give them a boost.

Moving across to the driveway bed, I propped one of the columnar apple trees up away from the sculpture it was leaning against. There is a bunch more pruning to do–maybe next weekend.

My big priority today was to clean up the road next to the memory bed and the sidewalk on the other side of it. It was so much work getting the fir needles and random dirt scraped up! It looks so infinitely better, though. I will revisit it again after a few dry days and sweep up the rest of the debris. Much progress was made today.

There are some beautiful flowers around the garden and greenhouse, so here are some photos.

Snowdrops were the only flowers in January here at the house. February, though, brought crocus and forsythia blooms. Crocus in flower are so photogenic that I go a little wild with the pictures, but I will add them here, anyway, since they are such a joy at a tough time of year.

Leon purchased a metal shed through Wayfair that required assembly. We tackled it this weekend. As always, the instructions were almost useless! But we persevered and got the thing 80% complete. It will be housed just outside the greenhouse and will hold garden tools and supplies.

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!

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.