Some varieties are earlier maturing than others and maybe that holds true for when they come up. I don't know but that is how it seems since I see a lot of sprouts in some of the later planted rows and none in the rows where I started planting. Another of my casual observation and make me say "Hmmm."
I've located the "lost" clump of tulips I moved last fall and failed to mark because I knew I would remember. They are close to where I thought I put them. 
And I see that I still have more of them in their old location. Should I mark them or depend on my memory? The new location is shadier and therefore cooler than the old so I suppose blooming time will also be twice between the two groups. I had saved the cardboard that came with them from Van Zyverden, the variety is Johann Strauss if anyone wants to look. I do need to mark the location so that I can divide them.
My iris reticulata are blooming now, bravely growing in a sea of last year's dead and yellow brown weed stalks. They always pop up when I'm not expecting them! It's nice to have a little beauty spot. A week or more ago I started moving plants from the far side of that bed and replanting them. Mostly it was old fashioned orange poppies. I hope they do well where I put them. My plan is to remove plants, try to get out as many weeds as possible, rake the area smooth and put down heavy, professional grade landscape cloth that I bought last fall. Right after I got started the weather became more unsettled so I haven't done any more.
A week ago I started more onion seed, this time putting them in 4 inch pots and using a heat mat with clear plastic over the top of the pots. They have started to come up. The ones I started in the low raised bed along the south edge of the greenhouse haven't make a good showing. It's not really warm enough for good onion germination although the salad patch right next to them is doing beautifully and regularly providing us with fresh greens. I also planted some onions in 4 inch pots and kept those on the greenhouse bench without using a heat mat to see the difference. So far the latest planting has had quicker emergence. In another week I will have a clearer idea of the pots with and without heat.
The sweet potato starts have been planted in little pots and look very happy with lots of new leaves. I will use them as fillers in some of my big planters this summer. The surviving old geraniums need to be repotted in new soil and I will add some of the plants I grew from cuttings I took in the fall of 2022. Those have been repotted a couple of times and need more root room again! On our sunny winter days the greenhouse reaches the 80's. The pruned jade plants are making a quick comeback, growing from the old roots. Some of them are coming up from the soil right next to the old trunks. They sprout from those rings on the stems. Apparently rings just below the soil surface get enough light to encourage sprouting. One plant has cracked the ceramic pot but I am leaving it in there. For now the plant has had enough trauma and I have too many other things that need more space, one of them being the half dozen or so tomato plants, most of which have blossoms. With a small fan running 24/7 in the greenhouse I have not needed to play honeybee.
The sweet potato sprouts in the jar of water on my kitchen windowsill have roots! Some of them are half an inch long. I didn't think they would grow this soon. Beside them in it's own container is the base of a celery that I cut off of a grocery store bunch when I was making stew.
Out in the greenhouse I have onions showing more little white roots on the seeds that didn't get well buried, and some of the plants have green stems! One of my tomato cuttings that survived the greenhouse freezing incident a few weeks ago is sporting a cluster of buds! I cut off the frozen parts of the jade plants and potted up some of the fallen green branches that had survived and fallen to the bench in an effort to find a place to put roots down. They now have soil but I already have a couple of pots of pieces that fell last year and don't know what I will do with all of these jade babies!
We had snow again a few nights ago, then the weather warmed up and it was all gone in a couple of days. And then a few nights of 15 to 25 degrees followed by two nights when it didn't freeze at all. The grass in the pasture is looking more green every day. Most years it would still be dormant. It's been a strange winter! I looked for garlic sprouts a few days ago, didn't see any. It's still about a month before they usually poke up from where they have been growing roots all winter, and probably feeding the gophers.
I cleaned up around my horse's hay feeder and took old hay down to the garden. Five heaping wheelbarrow loads of it. Some had been on the ground since last winter. Moving it was one of those jobs I kept putting off. And I hauled a couple of wheelbarrow loads of old potting soil down there too, and it will become part of the garden soil. The garden is wet and my shoes were heavy with gummy soil when I finished. I cleaned my shoes and the soil became part of the flower bed. Recycling!
Daffodils and a few tulips are popping up every day. The first daffodils are about 5 inches high now. I've lost track of where I relocated some tulips that have pointed petals and leaves with a line of short lines going right up the middle of the leaves. Had the name and new location in my head and have lost both now. Still have my head!
Tomorrow I might see something green! I planted them on the 10th and today, the 16th, I saw a few little white roots on seeds that weren't well covered. They might already be going downward. It's amazing that roots know to go down and tops know to come up! I had prepared the soil in the greenhouse bed and had it well watered, made rows about 6 inches apart and sprinkled onion seeds down the rows, pressed them firmly in and then covered them with a light application of potting soil. After that I covered the area with clear plastic. The bed is along the south side of the greenhouse so it gets the sun whenever we have it, making it toasty warm under the plastic. My soil thermometer says it is 60 degrees two inches under the surface.
Yesterday I bought some bare root plants for the big perennial bed that has been badly neglected. I have some of that woven landscape cloth and will plant in openings I make in it, next to the rail fence. I bought a Forsythia, a snowball bush and a hydrangea. The deer won't bother the Forsythia but I am taking a gamble on the other two. I also bought an orange trumpet vine for the trellis next to the gate. Maybe the deer won't like that either.
We've been having a variety of weather, sun and warmth, snow or rain and cold wind. I work outside or in the greenhouse, or some days just look out of my windows and wish for a nicer day. Some years we would still have a couple of feet of snow so I sure can't complain. It's been a mild winter. The storms coming into California and western Washington and Oregon haven't been bad here.
Yesterday we took a little road trip that included breakfast in one of our favorite cafes, and along the way we were treated to a snowy landscape that looked like something you'd see on a Christmas card. In a little valley we saw a bald eagle perched in a tree near a nest that they use every year, and a lot of wild turkeys picking up seeds from the hay where cattle had been fed the day before. On our way home we saw a herd of about 200 elk lounging in a pasture in the sun like a bunch of lazy cattle. No elk have visited us this winter.
Today I finally dumped big pots of dead geranium plants, soil and all, and hauled them down to the garden. It took two wheelbarrow loads. Some of these plants were old, they'd been trimmed and retrimmed for several years, and some should have been recycled before now. I added them with their spent soil to the rows where I had put raked up wasted hay from around Patch's feeder. The last hay we got has a lot of heavy stems. It's mostly grass with a little alfalfa and apparently was baled late in the season. It will break down in the garden once it gets chopped up and mixed with the soil. Meanwhile, it sits there and looks ugly. No problem, I can't see it unless I go down there.
Last year I started the onion seeds early in January, too early I think because they were kind of stunted when I set them out into the garden rows last April. So this year I have purposely delayed. Yes, these will be seeds, not sets. Sets are already entering their second season when you see them in the stores. Onions want to go to seed in their second year so their ability to store well over the winter is not good. My grown from seed onions are still storing well. Onion sets are ok if you will be eating them all before they sacrifice their bodies to make seeds. After throwing out mushy onions with green tops within weeks of harvesting and some while still in the garden, I switched to starting them from seed. Each type does have it's purpose.
Yesterday we cleaned up a few pounds of garlic to sell. I think the bulbs stored much better than when we cleaned them all soon after taking them down from the shed where their tops go from green to dry in about 3 weeks time. This year the tops were cut off and the bulbs were stored with dirty wrappers on them. Apparently that helped. I need to remember that!
On our way home from delivering garlic we picked up about 10 big bags of leaves. They were outside and have plenty of moisture both inside and outside of the bags. They were sitting in snow and had been rained on so we got pretty wet handling them. After we got home we transferred them 3 at a time from the bed of the pickup to the box on the Kawasaki mule and took them down the hill to add to my sizable collection just outside the garden fence. I hope they are as free of candy wrappers and etc. as what I get at the apartment complex. Sometimes leaves that are raked and bagged in people's yards also include non-garden items. One particularly nasty one a few years ago had an old partly burned chair cushion and the contents of a very full and stinky ash tray. UGH! Occasionally there has been a glove or a mitten, small dog toy or kid toys, but no actual garbage except for that cushion. No food, plastic bottles, cans, etc. The most common thing to find in a bag of leaves is the box the bags came in, right in the bottom!
The big herd of antelope have begun traveling up to our area again. They winter at a lower elevation near the Snake River. We haven't seen any since last fall. None have come to our land yet but we saw a couple of hundred a few miles away.
Today I looked again at the cottonwood tree and there is no doubt, it IS leafing out weeks and weeks earlier than normal. And in the yard instead of one little clump of daffodil tops poking up through the soil and leaf debris under the forsythia bush on the west side of the house, today there are several. Yesterday's warmer than normal day, even warmer than normal in an abnormally warm winter must have inspired them. It also inspired us. We were away for most of the day because we took advantage of the weather and clear roads to go about 90 miles southeast to Ontario, Oregon for some business and a good Italian lunch. There is nothing like eating in a place where they make their own sauces from scratch!
We also visited our favorite nursery where I bought some seeds. Stores in our town have yet to put out their racks of seed packages but the nursery/seed cleaning business, well they always have seeds! Some of the ones I bought were grown in the intermountain west so should be acclimated. Those were packaged with a different local company name. What might grow wonderfully in the deep south or mid west doesn't necessarily grow well here. And besides, it's nice to keep things local as much as possible. A fact I recently learned is that plant performance is affected by altitude as well as the things we usually hear about. This came from a farmer who raises many varieties of corn for a big seed company.
