January 2025 Musings
January greetings fellow gardeners and nature enthusiasts,
As I take my cyber pen in hand this morning on the eighth day of our first month of the year, the winds are ferocious and the temps are bone-chilling. Just letting the chickens out and filling a couple of bird feeders this morning, it felt much more like bone-freezing.
And why am I complaining? Hurricane-force Santa Ana winds and eight months with no rainfall in California are fueling horrific fires that are 0% contained, the last I heard. Today, on the 9th, more than 100,000 folks have evacuated. The devastation incomprehensible.
I’m not sure if I feel guilty or extremely lucky and grateful to tuck myself inside a safe, tight house when so many can’t. So much I can’t control, but I can just let January unfold.
Let’s see, the weather for the first couple of days was rather dandy, so I scrambled to turn over part of the mossy, weedy edge to one of my perennial beds. I then limed it heavily, re-edged it, and bark mulched it. Wow, that felt good! I even managed to rake the rest of the back lawn area. Well, ya might not know it now for all the leaf blowback and the twiggy branches strewn all about from Old Man Wind (thanks, man!) The wash went out both days on our expansive clothesline (we call it our solar dryer, and we use all year round). Ahh, the clothes smell absolutely divine!
But now the ground is frozen, the air has too much bite, and these old bones don’t want to be out there. However, let there come an unexpected warm zephyr, and… never mind.
Out the backdoor window at about 8 am, I catch movement through the woods of a large animal, not acting like a deer. “Gene, see if you can spot this creature coming around the west side of the house”. Sure enough, a lone coyote trots by and stops at the approach to the neighbor’s pasture. Then he circles around our lower gardens, crosses the driveway, stops again, decides he doesn’t like the traffic, and retraces his tracks back to a spruce thicket beyond that pasture. “Red fox, you can stay over there, too!”
The lone coyote standing just beyond the laundry line.
Against my previous acclamation not to feed mealworms to bluebirds, I caved. Now we have another specialty feeder, and why will we be going broke soon? A half dozen gorgeous ceruleans are gorging themselves on these yucky, smelly, expensive dried worms. When the dish within is empty, and they haven’t had their fill, a ballsy female lands on my window bracket and stares at me. If that doesn’t work, she flat-wings against the window! I’m not making this up! I also keep the old 3-gallon rubber feed tub half-filled with water. A good-sized rock in the middle gives the bluebirds a nice perch from which to drink. It’s quite amusing to watch the chickadees and juncos turn upside down and vertical to reach the water from the rim of the tub. Silly birds! Water in its liquid state is critical in the winter months. The other fun species to watch are the bluejays. We walk out with a cupful of peanuts-in-the-shell, call “jay, jay, jay”, and they come awhirlin’ in. What wonderful moments when we just observe!
Speaking of which, I always take a few minutes to spend with the chickens in the morning. They love to eat a handful of birdseed from my hand, and I love the feel of their warm necks curled over my hand. These girls are getting older, so on the very cold nights, they have a red brooder light glowing on the side of the coop opposite their roost. Yes, I’m a softie!
Other than that, I’ll be doing a little repotting of succulents and plotting what I’ll be growing in the spring. Now is the time to drool over garden catalogs and make a valiant attempt not to buy too many seeds. What the heck? Do it!
That’s it for now,
Judy