A Week in the Snow

January 6 - January 12, 2025

Weekly journal of a Midwest gardener…

Monday, January 6, 2025

Snow is good. Snow is expected. We haven’t had snow like the current snow for quite a few years. What does it mean? In practical terms, snow insulates the garden and adds nitrogen to the soil. In impractical terms, snow shuts things down and changes plans. And yes, let’s pause and mourn the demise of the snow days of my youth, which have been replaced with e-learning days for kids today. They are missing out!¹

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Ah, the smell of old books! I pulled two old books from 1901 and 1902 off my shelf to write about another Lost Lady of Garden Writing.² I am impressed by how much this writer knew without having the internet to look things up. That’s true of most of the old authors I research. How did they know so much?

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

The sun came out today, making the snow sparkle and giving clear definition to shadows across the lawn. I went out and about to the usual places to run some errands.³ Later, I enjoyed more homegrown microgreens—cilantro on a taco salad. I also finished reading The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice by Simon Parkin.⁴

Thursday, January 9, 2025

More sunshine, another library book, lunch out, and final touches on a rather late Christmas gift for my family members. What more could you want from a day in January? ⁵

Friday, January 10, 2025

More snow. Enough with the snow. Indoors, ignoring the snow, I spent way too much time on Canva making sample book covers for a book that doesn’t exist… yet. Maybe one day!⁶ I also shoveled snow twice—so I didn’t totally ignore the snow—trying to keep up and not let it get too deep and overwhelming. So far, I’m keeping up with it.

Saturday, January 11, 2025

I shoveled the driveway again in the morning. Hopefully, that’s the last time for the foreseeable future. It was warm enough that the driveway was down to bare pavement soon after I shoveled off the snow. Later, all cleaned up, I headed down to Franklin for a surprise birthday party… candle making and pizza.⁷ Yes, the birthday girl, my sister, was surprised.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

I’ve got sunshine, and the rest of the line is “on a cloudy day” (as we all know), but I literally have sunshine.⁸ It’s lovely. Today, I tossed out the last faded waxed amaryllis and in its place, I have a potted white amaryllis bulb with two plump flower buds. I’m also watching the lily of the valley pips I potted up last Sunday. Nothing seems to be happening so far, but it’s only been a week.

That’s a Week!

Snow can really take a bite out of week, with all the shoveling. Plus, there’s the concept of the snow day forever ingrained in my mind since we had snow days off from school. A snow day isn’t a day to accomplish something. It’s a day to take off to read, sit, watch documentaries, etc. That’s what I’m claiming as my excuse for not sorting seeds or prepping containers for winter sowing, something I wanted to get done this past week. Next week…

Quotable

A quote….

“The beauty of winter is that it makes you appreciate spring.”

―L.M. Montgomery

Have a great week!

Where Else to Find Me…

My home base is my website. My main blog is still May Dreams Gardens. You can put my books on your bookshelves. And listen to me on the weekly podcast, The Gardenangelists. Or check out Lost Ladies of Garden Writing, another interest. Follow me on Instagram to read letters to my garden. (Tiny note that some links to books and Amazon are affiliate links.)

1. I cleared my driveway, sidewalks, and that big mound the snow plow leaves at the end of the drive using a combination of my gas-powered snow blower, my wheeled snow shovel, and my regular snow shovel. After all that, I didn’t do much else, though I did enjoy microgreens on my lunchtime salad.

2. I’m pleased to introduce you to Alice Morse Earle, more of a historian than a gardener, but her garden books are top-notch for the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century. So sad she died several years after falling into the ocean in a ship accident.

3. At Aldi, one whole side of the “Aldi Finds” aisle was completely empty! Now I want to go back to see what they’ve restocked it with. I think it’s too early for gardening finds, but one never knows. Anyway, those empty shelves waiting for new finds call to me to go back.

4. The Forbidden Garden is about an impossible choice for botanists during WWII when their city, Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, was held under siege by the German army for several years during World War II. What was their impossible choice? While they and everyone else in the city were starving due to lack of food, they were also guarding and trying to maintain the right temperatures in a building stocked with grain seeds and potatoes collected over twenty years—some rare, some irreplaceable, some maybe containing genetics that would improve crops for future generations. It is not light reading but is a history worth knowing.

5. The library book is T. R. Otsuka: Japanese Landscape Artist in the American Midwest by Beth Cody. I discovered the Japanese garden designer, T. R. Otsuka, when I was doing research for a Lost Lady of Garden Writing, Zila Robbins, who was a teacher in Indianapolis and wrote several articles about Indianapolis gardens. Then I found that someone had recently (2023) written a book about T. R. Otsuka, so I asked the library to add it to their collection. They did, and now I’m reading that library book.

6. If you want to look at the cover concepts for the book that doesn’t exist, here’s a link. Which one would you grab off the shelf?

7. I sort of tricked another sister and my niece, who I drove with, to get to Franklin a wee bit early so we could make a quick tour through Wild Geese Bookshop before going to Woven Co. Candles, as one does when one goes to Franklin!

8. Okay, I had sunshine. It disappeared behind some clouds shortly after I finished this newsletter so I had to come back and fess up that the sunshine only lasted a little bit!