Posts tagged as:

winter

January Thaw: A Video

January 25, 2010

What happens when the snow melts in the middle of winter? I made a brief video to show you:

Some roads and a few low bridges have flooded, forcing early school closings and rerouting traffic.
A thaw in January is common, but rain doesn’t always accompany it. Sometimes it is brilliantly sunny, inspiring snowball fights in shirt [...]

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Why Is This Winter So Cold?

January 10, 2010
snow covered trike

Yesterday, the low here was 8F (-13C). That’s not too surprising. But Dee Nash of Red Dirt Ramblings told me her low that same day was 5F (-15C) in Oklahoma. Whoa! What’s going on here? Check out Eric Berger’s explanation in the Houston Chronicle. It turns out a lot of factors have contributed to the [...]

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Did my plant make it through the winter?

May 8, 2009
Read about plants that didn't make it through the winter

Spring: when a gardener wonders which of last year’s new plants made it through the winter. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote down a list of things I had planted last year but hadn’t seen make an appearance yet. Here’s the list, with my current thinking on each (click on each thumbnail to enlarge):
Hedyrotis [...]

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How do I winter over hardy plants in containers?

November 11, 2008

Not too long ago, a reader emailed me and asked,
I bought some hostas and dwarf bleeding hearts to plant. Shortly thereafter I hurt my knee and I can’t go out there and plant them. They are all planted in one gallon plastic pots. How can I safely winter them? If I put them in my [...]

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Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day: February 2008

February 15, 2008

There are snowdrops under this snow

Some of you, I am sure, thought I was being overly pessimistic when I said the snowdrops sprouting in January wouldn’t be blooming in a month. As you can see above, my assessment of how things would go was pretty accurate. As a matter of fact, at this point I [...]

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New Year’s Eve sunrise

January 1, 2008

For those of you who think my snowdrops will shortly be rocketing from the earth and bursting into bloom: fear not. The snow came back. More predicted tomorrow.
Happy New Year.

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Christmas eve sunrise

December 25, 2007

One of the nice things about short winter days is that it’s not too difficult to get up before sunrise. These two photos were taken a bit after seven thirty in the morning. It’s not going to be much of a white Christmas, I’m afraid. Sunday the snow pack was dissolved by rain and highs [...]

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Did my plant die over the winter?

March 20, 2007

That is the question–sorry, Hamlet. And White Flower Farm has some help with the answer: an article on Plants Slow to Break Dormancy. They have a lot of other articles in the Newsletter section of their Garden Help.

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Cabin Fever in Extremis

February 27, 2004

I wrote this essay several years ago after the winter of 1993-1994 and I dig it out to reread every winter in which I feel I’m suffering excessively. Of course, no matter how bad your winter is, someone else can top you, so I don’t promote this as the worst cabin fever anyone ever had, [...]

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Eighteen inches of snow on the ground

January 13, 2003

I don’t have any bare ground for crocus to be poking up through–we have at least 18 inches of snow on the ground. Is it because the crocus are near the heated greenhouse that they are coming up? I hope some time this winter you and Judy both can tell us what size and type [...]

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Garden magazines and other winter occupations

December 2, 2002

Ah, November. A little time to breathe and do something besides the hard physical work of gardening. Like, read seed catalogs and go slightly mad with imagining all the things I’ll grow next year. And read gardening magazines–actually read them, not just flip through them and hope to remember them when there’s [...]

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Decoy weather: Unseasonably mild

November 24, 2002

Decoy weather–an apt term. Somehow, once October is over, it’s hard to call it Indian Summer anymore. I have noticed around here that we consistently have one day in the first week of November that is warm and sunny. I always give the kids the day off from school then and have a general clean [...]

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The first snow

October 29, 2002

We are supposed to get our first snow of the season tonight and tomorrow morning with accumulations of an inch or more in the higher elevations, which is where I am. The first snow always evokes a lot of conflicting feelings in me. I have to face up to the fact that I am not [...]

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