January 2017 In The Garden

January is a slow month. It’s so hard to find the desire to go outside, even on sunny days. But I also know there is work to be done, so no being that lazy!

The greenhouse is always nice to visit, on the cold days. While we heat it, we don’t keep it too high (around 52°). Just enough to keep the plants safe and happy. But once the sun comes out, it easily goes to 80° or higher. Often I have to open the door, and maybe a vent, to air it out. I don’t drop the temperature too much though, even as the days go to being a bit longer, the greenhouse is out of the direct sun by a little after 3 pm now, and it chills quickly.

Ladybugs welcome. Nature’s serial killers…..

An Aloe Vera plant should be in all greenhouses! I ended up killing my 3 varieties of it last year, before we had a heated real greenhouse. I recently brought home a new one.

The strawberry experiment hums along, with nearly daily berries for me.

I finally pulled my winter lettuce at the end of the month. It grew well inside. I would consider it a success.

The kale leaves were great for enjoying greens all winter.

The broccoli leaves were tasty, though they suddenly went to bloom at the start of February.

January was typical. A good long cold freeze, with sunny days, then the other half of the month was very windy and wet.

I have learned to watch weather predictions, and make sure to pull water out of the water tanks before freezes happen. The cold, sunny days lead to heat in the greenhouse, which leads to needing water! Rainy, dark days? I can go many days without needing to water in there.

The weather station has been a huge boon for me this year.

Part of the garden, resting in the cold.

Even in the cold though the herbs hang on.

We had a really bad and long windstorm in January, which led to a lot of branches down, and a fence section. We were able to repair it though. It landed on two blueberry bushes. Thankfully we only lost a few branches to the plants.

One big project we started was the demo of our deck out back. It was in bad shape when we bought the land nearly 3 years ago. No one needs a 30 by 30 foot deck either! As the demo goes, we find it was poorly built and is rotting badly. I will be glad when it is all gone. We’ll get it done by Spring. Then we need to figure out what we want to do there. A small deck? More garden beds?

And we have wild rabbits living under our shed. Can’t blame them!

I found my new picking basket for summer – and sealed it up.

And as every year, January is all about seeds and dreaming! February brings lots of work, with seeds to start. But January was all about flipping through catalogs and seed racks!