First Harvest

 Guys, I made a salad from my indoor garden and it wasn’t tiny, it was lunch!

This is my harvest. You cut the outer leaves of lettuces,
leaving the interior rosette to keep growing.

Update to note: as of right now, my average cost per meal from indoor gardening is $99 per meal. Hopefully this will improve over time. 

Indoors

My Christmas cactus
bloomed when I brought it in
right before Thanksgiving

It's winter, and I can't go anywhere warm. I'm often swept along by trends (though I've avoided sourdough), and so I've upped my indoor garden game. 

I have a number of plants I take out and bring in each year. I had planned to try bringing in, digging up, or taking cuttings of some of the potted plants I had last summer, but never got around to it. 

Just cut back

However, I do have one big success story to report. I've had a tropical hibiscus, bought at Home Depot a number of years ago. I generally keep it inside the fence because it is apparently very tasty (according to the deer). Inside the fence means not quite enough sun. So it's been looking very sad for a few years.

This year, I put the hibiscus pot just outside the fence, snugged up against the porch, and there it got a lot more sun. It did well enough that I was emboldened to cut it way back when I brought it in. At first, it looked like a bunch of sticks with one huge anomalous blossom. But it has filled out from the lower branches, and I hope it will have a nicer shape this year. In the meantime, it brings lots of joy with many blossoms.

Hibiscus

I've also bought some new inside plants. I started by hitting a black Friday Amazon special, totally out of the blue and on impulse, which I was resolved not to do. I got 16 tiny succulents for $15 - what a deal! Now, with the additional purchase of special succulent potting soil and right-sized pots for them, I have 11 surviving succulents on my kitchen windowsill, a slightly less good deal. But I see them and cheer them on every time I use the sink, not such a bad thing.

Succulents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also ventured into modern hydroponics with Aerogarden. I gave my boys one each for Christmas last year, and had reports of good success. My sister-in-law has many (apparently adding more and more is common). So I gave one to my girl for Christmas, and got one for myself as well. Then, I added a second for myself, almost right away.

Later this week, I'm going to have a (small) side salad of lettuce and basil from my kitchen counter garden! How cool is that!

One of my "Cousin It" palms

The other one

Signs of Spring

My girl made street signs for me.
I'm hoping to help decrease wrong deliveries.

We've had a stretch of not-terrible weather - including some actual nice days. At this time of year, a "nice" day is one where it gets up to at least 50 in the sun, there is sun, and little wind. More sun and less wind allows the temperature to sag downwards from 50, as long as I dress for it. 

I've spent a couple of days in the yard, either finishing my fall cleanup or starting the spring cleanup, depending on how self-critical I'm feeling at the moment.  I'm also very focused on house-training Bixby - it's going really well - and we step outside for a few minutes nearly every hour we are home. This time outside allows me to search for and find even the tiniest hints of spring.

It feels like we've had no actual winter  though we did have one short-lived minor snow. These nice days make me long for spring, but it's really too soon.

Daffodil and crocus foliage tips are emerging, as they do every year at this time. My winter-blooming plants have not really come on yet. My witchhazel does have some buds but no blooms. My hellebores were all transplanted last year and I'm seeing some healthy foliage of some of them (and some died) but nothing that looks like the beginning of blooms. My winter jasmine, which hangs over the wall at the corner, has just a few little blooms and may come on stronger soon. 

Daffodil tips by the back entrance

There are several plants with green foliage year round, and these stand out. One gardening tip I heard but didn't act on as well as I would have liked last year is about how to use that to your advantage. Because certain weeds (onion grass, english ivy, vinca) are green when most plants around them are not, you can target them more easily for weeding right now. Because of the mildness of this winter, there are more things green than normal, but the principle still holds. 

This plant, golden groundsel, is NOT supposed
to be blooming yet, but it should be green

I successfully killed a lot of grass in my very back in the fall, and didn't get to planting the new grass. Therefore, there is a big mudpit waiting for me. I'm going to look up about how warm it has to be to plant new grass, and look for a 2-3 day window for taking on the big job.