Winter Called...

Call it"January-ness". Call it "cabin fever". Call it whatever you want, "it" is the crazy stirring of plant geeks around the world just waiting for winter to be over with so we can all get on with gardening again. For me, this feeling of helpless waiting usually strikes hardest sometime in mid-January, whenever I notice the first of my spring bulbs poking up through the ground.

Amid the brown, I get excited about the slightest presence of green - "The end of winter is coming! Hallelujah!" Perhaps I do a little happy dance, and then I go outside to stare at the tiny foliage multiple times a week. When I'm desperate enough, those daffodils seem to have grown an extra 1/16th of an inch since the last time I looked.

And then it snows.

Can't see any daffodils now, can you?

Oh well. It is January, after all. Frozen precipitation is to be expected. Besides, snow is a great insulator! Or so I hope... 

If it's not, I need to buy about $30 worth of carnivorous plants to refill my rusty bucket planter. 

I can't deny that I love the winter interest of cascading Japanese Maples. 

And the vegetable garden... really doesn't look too much worse than it did during the growing season. Maybe 2014 will be the year I finally figure it out?

So there you have it. January in my garden. 

February promises to be a more active month. The first warm weekend we have I'll be out removing old foliage from perennials, weeding, and spreading new mulch (hopefully). Until that warm weekend comes, I'll be doing some planning with regard to the daylily seeds that have been sitting in my refrigerator's crisper drawer since September: 

Hopefully all the seeds are viable. I'm kind of excited to see what kind of mutant daylilies I end up with.

Until then!