Horti-culture ~ January 2012

via Val's Musings

My favorite winter gardening activity is planning. There are so many fantastic mail order and bare root nurseries online, that you can pretty much have the whole garden finished in your head before the clouds part. In the northwest, there is a great nursery outside of Olympia that has a crazy sale every year where you can get trees for ridiculous prices. Like $1-$5. The sale usually happens around Memorial day, but you can check their website to keep tabs on when it is this year.{ Lawyers Nursery } Looking through magazines and blogs about gardening and even resorting to [what my parents did to torture me as a small child} driving around neighborhoods with yards I liked and taking some pictures to research later has helped me figure out what plants I like and what I don't.

via wikipedia commons

The challenge here in Portland for me will be keeping it respectable. I usually just tear up the lawn and start planting giant ornamental grasses everywhere, but I got into trouble with a few terribly invasive plants I put in our old yard without knowing...so now I am a fogey and I research  everything. My current plant list includes two climbing roses{Josephs Coat and a Van Fleet, Hydrangeas and boxwoods. It is not finished.

via Cynthia's Blog

via Katy Elliott

Things to do in January:

If you have a garden bed, and your soil is not frozen or totally soggy, this is a good time to take out your pitchfork and turn them over a bit. This way, birds can eat up all the creepy insect eggs and the soil will be less likely to get really hard. If you only have indoor plants, make sure they are warm enough! You can also take a damp cloth and wipe down all the dust from the leaves. This will help them breathe! Winter months are a perfect time to plant fruit trees, as well as do your heavy pruning on other dormant plants. {Wait for a sunny day, and get outside! This may be easier said than done.} Another good thing to do if you have a shovel, pitchfork or even trowels is to clean them well with a wire brush and oil them. This prevents them from getting all rusty, and they look nicer, which makes using them more fun.

Grow Veg has an online garden planner {thanks Garden Punk for pointing me in their direction!} with a free trial or $25 a year.

Native plant Nurseries for Washington

Native plant Nurseries for Oregon

Here is a great list of tips for January gardening.

Watching the snow fall, Alice

Container Gardens	Weeds	Care Free Cacti
Winter Damage	Terrariums	January 2012