New Year's Day Cyclamen

Our age is showing.... we celebrated New Year's Eve with our two cats and the TV! We did make it to the magic time to welcome in  2020!  But we did celebrate 2020 with a "Happy Hour" on New Year's Day at the home of friends at 2 PM! It lasted four hours of Happy Snacking, etc.!  Yes, we may not be party night owls but we know how to party in the daylight!
                                       
To my delight I received a belated birthday gift of a new plant!  I love cyclamens, often buying several in AZ for the porch!  They seem to just keep on blooming and so many varieties and colors!  They love the shade and need moisture to keep the blooms popping up!  This year I have coveting some new varieties in the garden centers that have a beautiful variation in the leaves!  Yep, my friend Barb  noticed them also and decided I needed one!  

The tag on it says "Metis Victoria" variety!  

We took the Christmas decor down this week so now I have this on the end table by "my chair" so I can enjoy it up close!  

House plants bring winter gardening fun!

My little kitchen table garden bed has grown by leaps and bounds with gifts from some friends and plants I just couldn't pass up!  

It has been a real joy during the day to dine at the kitchen table and enjoying these lovely miniature plants!  Some of them will grow up and need larger planters for sure.  And watering them every 2-3 days is a bit more attention then I'd like to provide so I may also be moving some of them into a miniature garden setting in a larger container also.  Something to do in January when winter boredom sets in!

Also being Denny had such nice success with his $5 amarylis from Walmart, I sent him back to pick up 5 more with plans to plant them in one larger pot for a bigger display and easier to cope with moving them outdoors to rejuvinate the bulbs this summer for next winter enjoyment.  A gardening project for him during January while they are growing and getting ready to blossom!

Are you considering getting more involved with house plants this winter?
You might want to check out the below link to check on the five easy house plants to care for:

CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION ON HOUSE PLANTS:  5-easy-houseplants

Happy Holidays!

May your holidays be filled with those

simple joys that mean the most to you!

I am doing a Happy Dance!

Thank you, Jennifer!  Next door we've had a huge old maple tree ever since we moved in here 35 years ago.  You can't believe the amount of maple seeds that buried much of my garden beds every spring!  And also collected on our roof and plugged up our gutters!  To make a long story short, due to portions of the tree coming down during storms, it has become a safety hazard so is on its last step in removal!  It is 18 degrees out there today and those tree guys are working hard to finish taking it down!  Brrrrrr!  But I am so very happy!  The end of 35 years of removing maple tree seeds every spring!

I am  looking forward to my first spring without tons of maple seeds to remove!  And how they loved to bury themselves in the base of my hostas, which required removal by hand to reach each one!  And then later the number of trees that start growing was  also quite the crop and sometimes growing entwined in perennial plants!  That was a real challenge to remove because you don't see them until they are quite big which requires the whole plant to be dug up to get the roots of the tree that have become tangled in the plant roots!

I am sure the cost of the four tree removal events for this monster has been at least $7,000 over the last 10 years.  The yard is totally fenced in so earlier this year required a huge crane to take down and remove major portions of it.

Amarylis time!

Denny enjoys planting amaryllis every year.  We used to keep them over and get them reblooming in the winter.  Once upon a time we had about a dozen to enjoy this way.  They love being packed into a large pot together and are so easy then to deal with outdoors in the summer while they gather energy again for winter joy!  That was before our AZ snowbird lifestyle.  

But this year I think the collection has started again now that we are MN snowbirds again!  He collected four of them this year.  One is a white one, and I don't recall we ever had one of those!  It was only $5 at Walmart and what a bargain.  Two stalks of flowers with a total of 9 blooms!  This year we kept them out of direct sunlight when they were in bloom and are amazed at how long those blooms are lasting!  Some got so tall that Denny went outdoors to borrow a few lily supports to use with them this year!  

Winter Porch Pot lit!

Yep, I lit up my porch pot and hanging basket, thanks to Denny's creative holiday lighting set up outside!

Love the effect in the porch pot!  It was a tip I learned in a class in Nov.!  Instead of sprinkling a string of lights throughout the pot, I took a string of 100 mini lights and gathered up groups of 15 lights in a bunch and used a rubber band to hold them together, then moved on about 6-8 more lights in the string and gathered another bunch of 15, etc.  Then when the pot was arranged, I just dropped those lights down here and there in the pot, which provided a different lighting effect.  I really like it!

The hanging basket I just did the usual, sprinkle the light string all over.  I think next year I'll do the gathering trick in the hanging basket also.   I so enjoy the hanging basket as it is visible through the window in the living room!

December's winter porch pot!

Got it done!  I was looking for a white lantern that could be lit but settled for a big fat red cardinal that leaped into my cart!  And then a smaller one flew into my cart so that became my theme outdoors for this winter!  

I'll get a picture of the big pot with the lights on and share how I did it in a few days!