gardening: observing, planning, designing, and editing
By March, every creature, including us, is a bit fed up with winter. When my children were younger, I would send them to school with the reminder that the first one to spot a crocus on their walk would get chocolate, and then we could all celebrate the imminent arrival of spring. They learned to look and where to look, and they got chocolate.
Continue reading “Two Easy Traditional Early Spring Bulbs and One to Avoid”
I write about these every year; these winter flowers keep me going. I think people are always a little surprised by the thought of flowers in winter. Snowdrops are not quite as surprising as witch hazel, but they are both reliable winter bloomers that don’t quite make it to spring most years.
What a dreary, dreary month. It’s…Novemberish. November has Thanksgiving, its saving grace, but it is gloomy, chilly, and daylight disappears noticeably. And here we are, in January, and it’s gloomy, chilly, and daylight has not reappeared because of the heavy cloud cover. And it snowed overnight; heavy, wet snow.
The six weeks from mid-February to the beginning of April are very busy in the yard, but if you are not actively looking for changes, you will probably miss them.
Witch hazel is the first plant to bloom each year, sometime between the end of January and mid-February. It blooms later if early winter is mild than it does if it gets cold early. It seems to need some chill time followed by a few days above freezing in order for the buds to unfurl.
December toyed with us. Temperatures averaged 2.1° F above normal according to the National Weather Service (NWS), and we had just over half the average snowfall. Snow was predicted for Christmas, which we got, but two days before that, we awoke to temperatures below zero. The windows glittered.
Looking over the photos on my phone, I begin to understand why I haven’t written much this winter. I have a lot of photographs of my icy sidewalk as I struggled to keep up with it. Several years ago the city required us to replace our sidewalk, and the inspector who came out insisted we lower it. We did. There has been runoff onto our sidewalk after heavy rain ever since, but it was not a problem until last month’s weird storm. The sidewalk was still extremely warm when it hit; I took the last set of icy-sidewalk photographs on February 21, and by the following day it was melted. Finally. All that fretting scraping and chipping gave me a chance to keep an eye on the witch hazel. Continue reading “Signs of Spring and Hungry Rabbits”
Since I had not quite gotten around to posting this although I finished it three weeks ago, I have added datelines so the narrative makes sense.
February 9. Last week was fairly awful weather-wise—following an unpleasantly damp, cold month with very little snow. We got off easy, considering that Monday morning the weather people were saying “3-5 inches of snow,” and by Tuesday morning, it was more like “11-15 inches of snow.” Continue reading “The Groundhog Day Slush Storm”
December and January were pretty warm, relatively speaking, and I was wondering how it would affect the witch hazel. Last year this plant bloomed on January 15; not this year. My guess is that the plant did not know that it was officially winter. The ground was not frozen at this point.
I passed a neighbor’s yard on my lunchtime walk, and noticed that the Lenten roses were erupting in flower stalks. I knew I had to check my witch hazel.
It’s blooming. Those are not the only flowers, either. At least a quarter of the buds are open. Those little petals roll up like blow ticklers when the temperature drops below freezing; a cold front is breezing in right now.
This is certainly a little early. Earliest? I am not sure. I will have to check.
After 11 inches of snow on November 11, things got quiet weather-wise. Winter did not quite settle in. We got less than two inches of snow in December, and just a dusting on Monday—not enough to stick to the sidewalks. So what happens in the pause, the interregnum, between fall and winter? Continue reading “Interregnum: December, the Fall Into Winter”