Two weeks of abnormally warm and tropical weather spanning the Christmas holidays have given way to a blustery, cold, wet and somewhat abrupt return to winter. Thunderstorms (in January!) with lots of rain and wind blew through last night, bringing in the change. Happy New Year!
On New Year's Day I finally got around to planting the big bag of daffodil bulbs I found on a clearance rack at Lowe's last month. I knew that a lot of rain was in the immediate forecast, so it seemed like a good time to plant. It is awfully late, though. I think bulbs are best planted in the fall, so they may not bloom for me this year. Or at all. Who knows? They were cheap and there were a lot of them (45) so maybe we'll see a few daffodils. They're planted in clumps around our Crepe Myrtle trees, and they're supposed to be King Alfred types.
In other gardening news, I've come to a sad realization about the garden I'm planning for this year. Last fall we built a large raised bed out of the edging stones left on our property from the last owner. It looks great and I was really looking forward to using it! Well, yesterday we sat down to figure out how many cubic feet of compost and topsoil we would need to fill in the space, and then went online to price said compost and topsoil, and I got a nasty surprise. Even with the best possible deals from landscaping suppliers, it would take upwards of $500 to fill in the space! We still need so many things for our house that I just can't justify spending that kind of money for garden dirt. Sigh. So now I'm rethinking the raised bed thing altogether and may have to settle for a regular ground level garden. Then there's the prospect of having to move all those stones we built the bed with. My back aches just thinking about it!
So that's disappointing, but I remain firm in the conviction that I need a large garden this year. I'll just have to make it happen in a different way for the time being.
Tomorrow, I go back to work. It's been a fantastic break, and I'm a bit sad to see it end, but I'll be glad to get back to normal. "Back to normal" may not be so normal, though, because all of a sudden the new omicron variant of Covid has exploded around here. It's gotten so bad that even without a state mandate, I doubt we'll have enough staff to keep schools open once the holiday exposures really start to show up. I hope I'm wrong about that; time will tell.
