Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on what’s been happening in our gardening. You may remember me from such posts as “Below Seasonal Normals”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Once again, it may look dry here, because of the brown warm-season grasses, but it’s really not. The soil is very damp.
People keep saying how dry it is, but the average precipitation for January here is about 0.43 inches (11mm), which is pretty dry, regardless.
We got more snow about ten days ago, very dense snow, and so we received almost half again the average precipitation for January.
What’s weird is all the warm weather. We often get stretches of warm weather in winter, but not nearly as many days as we’ve had since the first of November.
It was 61F (16C) here today.
Just a few years ago we were “below seasonal normals” for weeks on end; this lasted for about four or five winters and was very tiresome, as I know from having to hear about it constantly.

I know it’s been a while since I posted but not much has been happening. The guy I live with has been painting.

It’s been so warm that some of the colchicums are sending up leaves. This is certainly not normal but the leaves went through the last snow and lows around 3F (-16.1C) with no problem.
The guy I live with said maybe this is normal in places with very mild winters.
It is normal, though weird, to see roses and clematis start leafing out at this time of year, but the guy I live with said he’s seen this many, many times, and nothing bad happens.

He’s seen Cyclamen coum in flower this early before, but usually it was only one or two flowers.
And there was a crocus in flower. This is Crocus korolkowii. Not a very good picture.
Most of the activity here has involved snowdrops. Of course.
There were more coming up in the shade garden path and these were dug up and potted today.
I helped, in my usual fashion.
The guy I live with said he got a nice picture of ‘Nothing Special’ in the shade garden.
This needs to be moved to a sunnier spot in the winter. Snowdrops like shade in summer and sun in winter.
And, while in the front yard, he made a movie.
There were a lot of bees.

And, finally, some seeds came in the mail.
These are mostly annuals because the guy I live with decided to stop growing a lot of plants from seeds, as I said in a previous post.
The lily is easy to grow from seed but will take a long time to grow to flowering size.
The guy I live with said it might be nice to try to grow a bunch of sunflowers out by the back fence. His wife’s favorite was ‘Italian White’ but Hudson didn’t offer that.

This is kind of a sad time of year for the guy I live with. Most times are, but the feeling that spring will be here eventually can be a hard thing. He used to get the Hudson catalog, give it to his wife to check things she wanted, and then he would look at it, and order their seeds. He’s been ordering from Hudson for over thirty-five years, every year.

They say we may get some rain later this week. Rain in February here is “just plain weird”, but since a cold wave isn’t expected–yet–the guy I live with said rain would be just fine.
I guess we’ll see.

Until next time, then.