January update

 

Mid January in central Ontario, snowy and  cold.  But yesterday and today are sunny, which makes a huge difference to how one feels and what one wants to do. Taking a walk is pleasant (if it isn't windy) and people were out sledding, skating, cross-country skiing, and ski-dooing.  This is what you do here in winter, and the sound of snowmobiles is pretty constant.  Oh and ice-fishing.  Several huts are out on the lake and people can drive out to them, amazing that the lake has frozen this quickly. It was water a week before Christmas and now the ice must be a foot thick.

Here are the snowbanks from early January, already two feet high.

And the front yard, crisscrossed by my boots and by the deer that come here in the early hours of the morning.  What they eat in winter is a mystery to me. They must be starving.

My amaryllis fell over in the night, as the blooms got too heavy for the stalks.  There are six blooms on it now, gorgeous red and two feet tall. I have velcro-ed it to a vase full of marbles to keep them upright.

And so anxious to get going on spring planting, I jumped the gun and started some winter sowing. I know I should wait another month, but I just can't.  So I sowed two containers with red hollyhocks, one container with pansies and another with snap-dragons. The challenge is to find enough containers, I have resorted to taking them from people's blue bins on re-cycling day.  

January Gardening

Not too much happens in central Ontario in mid- January, it's too cold to do anything.

But I did grow an amaryllis plant that I bought at Home Hardware sometime in November.

And look how it turned out!  two stalks, one has 3 flowers on it, the other is also producing 3 flowers and there are 2 shorter stalks coming from the bottom. Incredible amount of flowers from a single bulb.  I had grown white amaryllis before and found the smell quite unpleasant. These red blooms have no smell. The stalks are a good 22-24 inches tall. 

And while there isn't much to do, it is time to check on the dahlia tubers stored in the basement. On the advice of a neighbour who grows wonderful dahlias, I brushed these off and dried them for a few days, then stored them in plastic grocery bags loosely tied up.  She told me to check them after Christmas and open the bags so that they don't get too damp. 

I opened them today and found mold on quite a few. So a google search found a site where a woman said she save 700 tubers from mold by dunking them in a solution of bleach and water, drying them off, and then re-storing them in peat moss.  I have no peat moss, so I did dip them into a bleach solution and then air-dried them on a towel. Once dry, I wrapped them individually in newspaper (loosely) and put them back into the cardboard boxes and back into the basement storeroom.  

                                          

I figure I have nothing to lose by doing this and I would actually lose them if I did nothing. I will check them again in a month to see what's up.  On some of the larger tubers, I noticed there are already sprouts coming up from the roots. Exciting!  I have 13 dahlias stored this way, and I just ordered another dozen dahlias from The Dahlia Expert.  It's going to be a summer of flowers!