It’s a beautiful Sunday morning, with an emphasis on sun because that’s what’s important this time of year.  It makes the snow and frost twinkle and the white reflect and it’s fantastically bright unless it’s not.  Recently there’s been plenty of ‘not’ and short grey days do not bring the fantastic as well as the sun does.  Here are two obligatory snow-themed photos.  They were taken on a less-grey moment yesterday since my camera skills can’t handle the brightness of a sun filled snow day.

‘Nuisance snow’ has kept the garden mostly white all December but there have been no larger storms.  That’s a good thing for garden insulation and protection… and a great thing for the snow shoveling back!

During one of the beautifully sunny plus warm days last week I actually picked up a pruner and did some work.  The rambling ‘Wartberg’ rose on the arbor has been getting twiggy and messy and it seemed like a good thing to tackle since I had the ladder out anyway for a gutter inspection.  Just so you know, I don’t think it’s the right time to prune rambling/climbing roses.  Raw cuts in the middle of winter is one thing but there’s also the fact these bloom on old wood, so it’s possible I’m cutting off potential flowers… but I had the ladder, I had the pruners, and I had the itch to do something in the frozen garden, so there you go.

All the trimmings were left where they fell and another dusting of snow showed just how pleased the rabbits were to get at all those tasty rose bits.  Half are gone already and it’s nice to see the bunnies making themselves useful for once!

So it’s been cold and one rose was pruned, so what happened to all the other hours of the day you may ask?  Here’s the long story.  I bought a fish tank.  55 gallons and it’s too heavy for one person to lift even empty, so buying the tank was the easy part and now I needed something strong to put it on.  Enter weeks of thrift store visits looking for solid old cabinets that were big but not too big, ugly but not too ugly, old but not too old.  I finally had a $10 winner and found the help to drag it home and into the basement since the plant room was now going to become a plant/fish room… which seemed obvious once I thought about it.  Days of cleaning, sanding, painting, sealing, polishing and the cabinet looks decent and the drawer pulls look like pulls you would touch again with bare hands.  I set it up.  It was still heavy.  The room still needs work… as in finished walls, so I decided to fill a smaller old fish tank with water rather than the new one since it would be way to heavy to move again if work ever gets started on the walls.  Better to start the fish thing up again on a smaller scale anyway, rather than 55 gallons all at once, so what to do with a big tank fitted with a light and a nice substrate of gravel?

A 55 gallon terrarium.  Fortunately I had a few spare plants on hand to fill things in a little and get it started.

So in my head I imagine that people who come across this blog faithfully keep track of every adventure and meticulously recall things which run through my mind, even if they’re never mentioned.  I’m sure that’s an easily diagnosed condition or something but to address it let me recap this basement talk with a quick summary.  We built an addition to the house.  Two years ago I broke through into the new basement from the old and am slowly turning this unheated, unfinished space into my winter garden with a bunch of cheap LED shoplights.  The winter garden adventure started years ago in the back of the garage and has escalated each year but never as badly as when it moved into this basement space.  I highly recommend it 🙂

The yellow form of baby’s tears (Soleirolia soleirolii) in the tank is a new thing for me.  I’ve seen it in real conservatories as a groundcover or something to cover bare soil in pots and it’s probably a weed in real life so maybe it has just the right hardiness and vigor for me to grow.

So it seems a lot of work was put into a new fishtank only to leave it fish-free, and it might be odd that I’d clean and set up the 30 year old tank which was there the whole time instead but here we are.  It gives the winter garden a nice bubbling water effect.

The fish tank, the one with actual fish, is the new centerpiece of the winter garden.  Goldfish are the fish of choice.

This is a lot of fish talk for a gardening blog, so let’s move on to the plants of the winter garden.  Again, for the casual visitor, this new basement winter garden is home to all the houseplants and overwintering tropicals which needed shelter from the ice and cold outside.  It’s not heated but warm enough for most, and it’s a different group of plants when compared to my second winter garden which exists out in the less-heated-but-also-not-freezing-garage winter garden.  The garage is for real work, seed-starting, and overwintering annuals plus a home for cool-weather blooming things like cyclamen and primula.  I’m sure most people divide their winter gardens in a similar way.

Ferns and ficus, begonias and bromeliads, and pretty much anything else which needed a winter home after spending the summer on a porch or the shaded side yard.

Just like many things here, this new basement winter garden started out innocently enough and then escalated.   Last summer a $6 kiddie pool inspired a fountain and goldfish pond on the back porch, so why not store it in here for the winter?  The fountain fish are wintering in a (third?) fishtank at school, but the fish-free fountain makes a nice addition to the basement.

Scraps of astroturf, leftover tiles and bricks, all found a home in the winter garden.  Even an old dresser mirror came out of the storage room for this.

Other than still not having actual walls, the new winter garden did make some progress this year and it’s finally become the winter conservatory which I’m too cheap and poor to actually have.  I can sit down there sipping tea, basking in the growlights, and even inhaling the fragrance of citrus blooms because my lemon tree is currently in bloom.  The actual plant looks questionable but it does have the strength to put out a bounty of blooms and I appreciate that.

Lemons which might have grown as much as they ever will, followed by blooms for next season’s fruit.

To me the blooms are a hopeful sign for a bounty of growth next summer, assuming the plant makes it through to next summer.  Also hopeful is the condition of my $7 clearance palms which are not yet dying in the far corner of the conservatory.  I’m pretty sure they’re Manilla palms (Adonidia) which are supposed to be trickier indoors, but all I’m hoping for is status quo for the next four months until they go outdoors again.  Hopefully they can drag death out for five months at least.

Some of the palms are thinking about new leaves, but I think three or four have lost their growing points, something which happened prior to me purchasing them, and likely a fatal loss.

This post is becoming much longer than I was planning, which isn’t a surprise considering my record so let me end on two things.  First I want to brag endlessly about the first winter garden harvest, a crop of calamondin oranges off what was probably last summer’s most extravagant purchase.  I think I spent around $34 on it in June, but as it flowered throughout the summer and began to form tiny fruits I decided the expense was worth it.  Even now I can recall the sweet fragrance as I sipped coffee on a humidity soaked morning on the back deck last August.  In spite of the sweet fragrance our sampling of one of the tiny oranges this week determined the flavor to be anything but sweet.  They’re beautiful but sour.  I see they make decent preserves though and perhaps I can con a friend into transforming them into something toast worthy.

A little calamonin on the winter garden bench.  Studies show people are far more impressed by these than anything else I’ve ever grown.

Okay, second thing and I’m done.  We have a new puppy consuming all the time which isn’t spent on fishtanks and flowers and holiday festivities.  ‘Lemon’ has a bunch of energy and a full contact play style which six year old Biscuit does not share, so someone has to either take his place or act as referee while she learns how things roll here at Sorta Suburbia.  Eventually something is bound to give and it’s likely that something will be us, as we bend to her will.

Introducing ‘Lemon’ who arrived here two weeks ago.  For the record no one in this house with a ‘Y’ chromosome was involved in selecting the name.

Puppies, new fish and plants.  I’m well positioned for the new year and I hope you are as well, and although my enthusiasm on the very last day of vacation might not completely reflect my enthusiasm for a return to pre-dawn commutes, the days get longer from here on and that’s a good thing.  Plus! Plantness approaches 🙂

January 12th is the first day of Plantness, and I’m sure you know that but just in case I’ll give a reminder and a summary in the next post.  In the meantime I wish you an excellent week!