Not much to say on the garden front. The weather’s been wildly fluctuating. The bulbs on the porch can’t decide if they want to come up or wait a little longer (I hope they do the latter).
I’m daydreaming with seed catalogues and taking care of the plants we have indoors. And I enjoy watching the mountains from the front and back windows, and being up so close to the clouds. The evergreen wreath from the front door is still fresh, so, once again, we stripped the ornaments and hung it on the livingroom door.
Rainy and getting colder; expected to switch over to snow
Celtic Tree Month of Birch
Happy New Year! May all your various gardens, physical and emotional, thrive this year.
The weather has been wacky, with temperatures fluctuating up and down. Hard on the body, not to mention the psyche.
I cut back a lot of the plants that died back or needed attention. The maidenhair fern needed a lot of work; it usually does, and I always forget. I also repotted it, as it had grown out of its previous pot, and it’s now much happier.
I’m slowly nursing the peace lily back to life. I’m cutting away dead sections, and letting the new green shoots grow, then cutting away more.
Out on the porch, more and more bulbs are poking little green shoots up. Although they didn’t come up fully by Christmas (thank goodness), they will probably be in good shape for Valentine’s Day.
The lilac dropped all its old leaves and has new shoots. I’m so excited for this plant, and might get another slip or two of lilac this year. It’s my favorite. It broke my heart to give away the lilacs I had nurtured for years on the Cape.
The peppermint and spearmint are still growing, and I will nurture them along as long as possible.
I made my seed chart for the year, comparing/contrasting the seed prices for the same or similar seeds across companies. Johnny’s Seeds in Maine (who I really like) are nearly double the price in some cases than some of the others, such as Botanical Interests. Since I have a limited seed budget, price has to factor in to my purchases.
I will start putting in orders this month, and maybe do a couple of orders in February. I’m not starting any vegetables this year; with the Farmers’ Market and lack of space I have, there’s no need. I’ll focus on flowers and herbs.
I still have to update the plant journal in the binder and move the pages from the annuals to the multi-year binder.
How are your plans coming for the next growing season?
Sorry for the missed weeks. Without a working computer at home that could access the internet, I was limited in what I could do, and my time working on the library’s computers were also limited.
I hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend, and are looking forward to the new year.
Some people hate the “Betweenmas” week. I fluctuate – at times I love it, at times I get impatient.
I’m going through the seed catalogues as they come in, dreaming overly ambitious dreams for next year’s growing season. I make a chart (yes, I know I could use Excel, but I hate Excel) with the seed company, the seeds I want, the price. This way, I can compare/contrast prices and varieties.
Then, I have to winnow it down for space and budget. I have limited space in the enclosed front porch and on the back balcony, and I have zealous squirrels out on the balcony.
The tomato plant that was doing so well around Thanksgiving gave up. I couldn’t give it the light and warmth it needed to generate tomatoes by Christmas. Also, no bees around for pollination had something to do with it.
Some of the bulbs are poking tiny green heads up, so we might have early tulips, hyacinths, and miniature daffodils. If that’s the case, we will enjoy them while we have them.
But our other plants are doing well. The night-blooming jasmine is gigantic. The peace lily is slowly coming back to health. The other plants are fine, and we’re coaxing them along. The snapdragon is supposedly an annual, but no one told it, so it’s growing along, which is great. I would love it if it would be hearty enough to bloom this year.
At this point, I’m not planning to plant vegetables. I’m going to focus on flowers and herbs. I want to add some more medicinal herbs into the mix.
I have the big binder for the past year’s notes, and I will move a bunch of 2022 notes over, and then set up the smaller binder for this year’s planting and tracking.
This is one of my favorite times of the growing year: sitting with the catalogues, spinning big dreams. It also gives me a chance to plan gardens for my fiction. The catalogues give me ideas, and instead of throwing them out, I put them in a file and refer to them when I need to create gardens in fiction.
Planning fantasy gardens can be even more fun than planning real ones!
How are your various gardens, both internal and external, growing?
Happy New Year, my friends. Peace, rich soil, and abundant harvest to you.
The weather has been all over the place lately, especially temperature-wise. After a few cold days, it warmed up again. It’s supposed to be fairly mild through the weekend, then dip again early next week. Originally, the prediction was for a White Christmas; now that looks doubtful. We’ll see.
I thought life revolved around the weather on Cape Cod, but it’s even more so here. It’s rather fascinating.
I’m slowly nursing the peace lily back to health. I’d hate to lose it, after 11 years and so much growth. The jasmine is now gigantic, and needs water nearly every day. My lemon plant, grown from organic lemon seeds from a lemon from the market last year, will need a bigger pot in spring.
The seed catalogues are starting to arrive, which means dreaming of what we want to grow next year. We’ll skip vegetables, since we have access to the Farmer’s Market, and it’s hard to grow them on the balcony and porch. We’ll focus on herbs and flowers. I have to go through the binder with the sheets on this year’s seeds and make decisions on which to continue with and which didn’t work, before moving those sheets to the big, multi-year binder.
I know I want to grow zinnias next year. We didn’t grow them this year, and I missed them. I want to grow more Black-Eyed Susan Vine, because that did well. The morning glories worked, but the moonflowers did not. Cooking herbs (rosemary, sage, oregano, basil, etc.) I’ll buy at the garden center, rather than start from seed, but I might do some Medicinals from scratch.
Planning is one of my favorites.
And yes, before you ask, the tomato plants are still growing, although we don’t have enough sun to keep them happy. I’m considering getting a grow light.
The decorating is going slowly. Toward the end of next week, I will get in some more greens, and integrate them with the artificial greens we have. I didn’t want to get them too early, for fear they’d dry out.
How is your garden doing? What are your plans for next year?
Phew! It feels like ages since we got together, even though we only skipped last Thursday for American Thanksgiving. I hope you had a good one. Ours was lovely and quiet, filled with good food and good books.
I started the decorating over the weekend, but haven’t gotten very far, and there are boxes scattered everywhere. I hope to get another big push done this weekend, especially when it comes to getting the big tree in the stand, and start that decorating. We are learning how things fit in the space. Last year, we just kind of slapped everything up, in our first year here, to get it up. This year, we are taking more time to figure out what we want, and so there’s more box chaos early.
Tessa, the big black cat does not like it. She likes things tidy. Charlotte and Willa think it’s fun.
We will get there. I have to stop berating myself for not getting it all done in a single day. After all, I’ve accumulated a lot more decorations since the single-day-decorating years, and I have to get the writing and other paid work done before I can decorate. On weekdays, I’m often too tired.
But I got the wreath from Whitney’s Farm, and it’s decorated and on the front door. It looks kind of pretty. Remember last year’s wreath? It was fresh until June, and after the holidays, we hung the green wreath on the living room door.
Door wreath. Photo by Devon Ellington
I’m hoping, once everything is decorated and just before Solstice, I can get some fresh greens and scatter them amongst the decorations here and there. I’m worried if I get them now, they’ll dry out too early.
The photo above is of the Advent Table. We’ve kept it simple this year. The wreath used is artificial, not real. The candleholders for the four Advent candles have been in our family ever since I can remember, and the silver-plated tree in the center was a find at an antique store in Saybrook, CT, when we were moving from NY to the Cape. The bells attached to the top came to us on a gift probably back in the 1960s or 70s. The top cloth on the table is a gift from friends in Germany; again, we’ve had it for ages. The cloth underneath (barely visible) is one I made back when I was living in NYC. Everything has a story and a memory attached, whether it’s on this table, or anywhere else. As we decorate, we tell the family stories and keep our history alive. We combine old and new traditions, as works for us.
The fake fireplace (we don’t have a real one in this house) is a work in process. The artificial garland we use had blue poinsettias. In the back, you can see that I’ve put a seasonal ribbon on my broom.
Even though we don’t celebrate the traditional Christmas anymore (Solstice is my big holiday), the tradition of the Advent table and lighting the candles is a big deal. Each Sunday, after dusk, we light a candle. On the first of Advent, we light one; on the second, we light two, and so forth and so on. On Christmas Eve, we light all of them, plus the center (it’s often a bayberry candle; this year it’s the votives in the silver tree) and burn them all the way down.
I still have to get bayberry tapers. Tapers, in general, are difficult to find around here. I’m hoping to pick them up on my errands this weekend, if the weather clears up.
If you haven’t yet planted your bulbs, today is a planting day, by the astrological calendar. Better get them in. Ours are planted and on the front porch. There’s one little shoot, which started peeking out, probably a narcissus.
I’m still trying to nurse the peace lily back to health.
The Celtic Tree Month of Elder began last Friday. Elder is the thirteenth lunation, and is connected to death and regenerative magic. It’s bad luck to cut from an elder tree without permission (and even worse luck to cut one down). Elderberry syrup is a popular medicinal for the winter, helpful in promoting healing from coughs and colds.
Here we go, into the busy holiday season. I hope you take some time to enjoy the greenery, the lights, and the joy.
We’re finally getting some winter weather. The storms are coming in from the Midwest, hitting us, and then warming up before they hit Boston.
We had our first snow Tuesday night going into Wednesday. They told us to expect up to 5 inches, so that’s for what we prepared. It snowed steadily in the evening and into the night, but then changed over to freezing rain around 3 or 4 in the morning. It was kind of yucky all day yesterday.
Fortunately, on the garden front, we were okay.
Last Sunday was a planting day, and it was finally cold enough to plant the bulbs. I have three long, narrow trough-type pots, in which I put the different colored tulips, some of the hyacinths, and a handful of miniature narcissus.
Scheeper’s shorted me on the tulips. Each bag was supposed to hold 12 tulips and only had 10, which means they shorted me a half a dozen tulips. And no, the packets are not by weight, but number of bulbs. Another strike against them, along with all the order kerflamma.
Next year, should I want more bulbs, I’ll get them from Color Blends again. Their bulbs are high quality, and they’re lovely to deal with. The only reason I used Scheeper’s this year is because Color Blends sells bulbs in packs of 25, and that’s a lot. But when you buy 25 bulbs from them, the packages actually have 25.
There were still left over hyacinth and narcissus bulbs left over after I planted the troughs, so I have one large round pot with a mix, and one smaller round pot with the rest of the narcissus.
Some of the bulbs looked like they were already sprouting, because it’s been so warm. We may have flowers for Christmas; if we do, we’ll enjoy them.
We did a bunch of rearranging plants, between what’s still on the porch and what needs to be inside for the winter.
On Tuesday morning, I dashed out to get a tarp. We brought in the rest of the plants and decorations, and some of the furniture from the back balcony. The bistro chairs and bench stay out all winter, albeit without their cushions. We tarped them this year, to protect them, and moved the bench directly under the kitchen window, where we can keep an eye on it.
I have some paint touch-ups to do on the decorations over the winter, especially on the windchimes, which need a new coat of copper rustoleum.
Instead of putting the green shelf unit out on the porch, we’re putting it in the kitchen this year, in front of the window, with some small plants on top, and storing decorations and tools underneath. We won’t have 4 around the table again until spring, as far as we know, so we can take up that space.
We’ve got most of the pots emptied and cleaned; there are still a few more to do. I brought in the lemon balm, and will cut it back shortly to dry it, so I can use it all winter.
The tomatoes are still growing, happy as can be.
We might have lost our giant peace lily, after eleven years, which would be a shame. I think I left it out too long. Even though the days were warm, the nights were too cold. I’m hoping to gently nurse it back to health over the next few weeks.
The snapdragons didn’t bloom this year, but the foliage turned pretty colors, so hopefully, it will survive again for next year. And, maybe bloom.
Pretty soon, we’ll need to decide what to plant for next year. I have to go through the garden journal notes I kept and decide what to plant again (we know we want more black-eyed Susan vine), what to skip (dahlias, they’re too much of a diva for me to deal with), and what to add to the mix.
I’m also going to look at seed companies. If it turns out that we didn’t have success with seeds from a particular company, I won’t order from them again.
I didn’t order anything from Johnny’s, up in Maine, last year, and that was definitely a mistake. And I want to buy more seeds from the Botanical Garden down in Sturbridge, because they were good.
I didn’t plant zinnias this year, either, and I missed them. I also want to get some indoor houseplants over the winter, such as another philodendron. I miss having philodendron.
How’s your garden going to bed this year? Or, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, how it is shaping up?
Weird weather, all over the place. It was unseasonably warm last weekend. The weather was beautiful on Saturday, so we trekked up into Vermont and over to New York. Being in this upper corner of MA, we can joke about traveling to three states in one day!
Sunday and Monday it rained. Tuesday and yesterday, it was much colder, and pretty windy.
I finally planted more cat grass for the cats (Willa is very disappointed in me). It should be ready by the weekend, and then I’ll plant another pot, so that’s ready by the time they finish this one.
Either Saturday or Sunday, we’ll plant the tulip, hyacinth, and daffodil bulbs, finally. I need to clear some annuals from the front porch, and bring in the last plants from the back, and finally take everything in from the back balcony. I’ve enjoyed having extra sunny and warm days, but it’s time.
Yesterday, a bird came to roost on the rail of the balcony, as soon as it got dark. It was still there when I got up this morning, and I wondered if it was hurt, or if I should take food or water out to it. But once the sun came off, it flew away (leaving a big mess on the balcony that I have to clean up). At first I thought it was a pigeon, but it wasn’t. I have to get out the bird book and figure out what it was.
I can’t believe it’s going to be Thanksgiving soon, and then Christmas. This year went fast!
The wreath we got for the front door (and later kept inside, on the living room door) stayed green until June. We got it from Whitney’s Farm in Cheshire, so you can bet that’s where we’ll get it again this year!
I have the needles I stripped from the wreath in June, and I’ll get an orange and put some cloves in it and make a nice scent for the potpourri dish at the top of the stairs. What we have in there now has faded, and I don’t like the store-bought, overly perfumy stuff.
We have to start thinking about what we want to plant next year, already, so that I can order seeds in January. More herbs, I think, and medicinal plants. And zinnias. I didn’t plant any zinnias this year, and I missed them.
I have to go through the garden journal I kept (not this one, the one where I paste in the seed packets and take notes), to do an assessment. That will factor into the decisions.
The tomato plants are growing like crazy on the porch. Christmas tomatoes this year!
We’re in for an unseasonably warm streak, at least through the weekend. That’s good news for our heating bill, and, I think, for most of the plants still out back and on the porch.
The chrysanthemums are blooming beautifully, and so are some of the marigolds. The tomatoes are thriving. I’m telling you, this will be the year of the Christmas tomatoes.
But I’m not sure what to do about planting the bulbs for spring. If it’s too warm when I plant them, will they behave like forced bulbs and come up early? I’m trying to find out that information, so I can plant them properly. Today and tomorrow are planting days, and then not again until next week.
It’s the Celtic Tree Month of Reed right now. Reed is about adaptability and bending without breaking. Definitely good skills to have during the holiday season, and with Mars retrograde. The plant is also associated with health, music, and learning one’s destiny.
Most of the leaves have turned by now, here I the mountains, and fallen. The evergreens are stoic, waiting for snows to decorate them for the winter months, although who knows when that will happen? Some predictions are that we will have snow the first week of December; others than this will be an unusually mild winter.
All we can do is ride it out.
I’m looking forward to burrowing down in blankets and pillows and not being out and about more than necessary for the winter!
Gratitude and Growth: A Garden Journal 