In the Garden

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Starting off onion seeds and leeks now.
Caranten leeks and Bianca Di Maggio onions.
Have to finish cleaning up the brush pile.
Ugh.A mess of dead multi flora rose canes and tree limbs.Waiting for a good day to burn.Wish I had a chipper.
Witch hazel blooming, such a light sweet fragrance.
Finished the goose fence, they started getting on the front porch.Their free reign is over now and they stay in the field.Hopefully, they are sneaky and good at finding a hole in the fence.
I want to redo the garden pool in front yard and I don’t need them in it.
I hope to get a hardy lotus for it.

My garden boasts a seasonal harvest of ice chunks, hard-packed snow, dried mud, rotting oak leaves, and trace amounts of dog urine.

I envy you guys.

Was attacked and savaged by an old overgrown gooseberry.

^ Yes, definitely.

We have had two weekends of frost. The sweet potatoes are toast. The bananas are scorched; I don't know if the stalk of bananas currently growing will mature or not.

The Pickering mango has all stages of early development, from early flower buds pushing, to flowering, to tiny fruit. I ran the sprinkler over it all night. Never tried that before. But so far, five days out from the frost, they all still look good.

The sub- zero temp from last month has caused the Nandina to drop all its leaves and the black stem bamboo leaves are all dead.Maybe killed back to the ground.
Maybe a good lilac year, they enjoy a good freeze.The double white ones are gorgeous in a good year and the fragrance is wonderful.

^ I looked up Nandina - it seems to be a divine bamboo or a lemon-lime tree?

My tropical bamboos were damaged more by the hurricanes than the frost. I think we got down only as far as 33. I hope yours come back in the spring.

I really do miss the scent of lilacs. As a child we made special trips to the Morton Arboretum when the lilacs were blooming. The collection must have been hundreds.

It’s also called heavenly bamboo ,but it’s not a bamboo.It’s considered good luck to plant one by the doorway.They have red berries in the fall and usually keep their leaves all winter.
I hope the black bamboo survived.It was just getting old enough for the canes to turn black.
The camellias did better than I expected, only the young leaves got bitten back.
No hurricanes here ,but a few years back there was a tornado a mile or so away.
There was a crazy lightning storm that night to the north and I was watching it on the back porch.One of the most intense electrical storms I’ve ever seen.The frogs and insects were making their usual sounds and then it just got eerily quiet and still.They all stopped at once, like a switch was flipped off.Then I heard the tornado and carried my bottle of wine and pipe inside and prepared to go airborne.My Catahoula dog went outside to bark at the tornado.Crazy dog.Luckily it passed me by.It blew away part of the Buddhist temple, a few old barns ( one beautiful part rock one), damaged homes , took out the post office and part of a church.No one was hurt thankfully.Phone and electricity was out for days.
People think tornados don’t hit hilly terrain and they are safe in a valley.
Wrong.They go wherever they want.

You didn't happen to see me roaming around in your gardens, did you?

I plant peas in the spring, the edible kind.
Fragrant sweet peas don’t do well here, it gets too hot.

Baby onions and leeks are up.Also some cyclamens!

It's the middle of winter...?

I've been building some cheat swales, to prevent my soil from sliding into the creek when it rains.
I piled up logs according to the topographic map in my head, then added smaller branches.
Next I'm going to start digging out a trench in front of it and cover the logs with the soil from the trench.
Next step is adding some kind of mulch and eventually planting.
It's a long process.

Thanks, I wish you could see it.