Ugly snow and frigid cold - farewell January 2026

January 2026 has been...what's the word?  Weird?  Cruel?  Unkind? 

I don't know how to describe it, but honestly, I'm glad that today is the end of it.  I'm not at all sad to see January 2026 in the rearview mirror.

As 2025 ended, the temperature was very warm. We had a high of 81° F on December 27th.  I think December 2025 ended up being the warmest December on record.

Earlier in the fall, I had build a tiny, tiny air prune box from some scrap 2"x4" lumber.  But because I sometimes do things without thinking them through, it wasn't long before I was second guessing the little box, and thinking that it wasn't going to be deep enough for the seeds I had planted.

So I decided to take advantage of the warm weather at the end of December to build a more proper air prune box.  This one still isn't very large compared to what real tree growers have, but I think it will be more than adequate for what I want to do.  It has a base and three risers, so it can be up to 14" deep.  It also has actual hardware cloth on the bottom (fastened to the bottom - it's not just sitting on chicken wire). 

Revised air prune box. The first version can be seen in the background by Zelda Scissorhands little house.

The bottom box is screwed to the 2"x4" legs which are tall enough that the three risers can just drop down inside the legs.  Hopefully the box won't be too hard to take apart!  

I filled it with hay/manure that I collected from the field earlier in the month, then topped it with compost.  In hindsight, I wish I had put more compost down inside the box.  I'm worried that the things planted in there are going to run out of nutrients before next fall.  I may end up having to water the box with some compost tea or liquid fertilizer or something.  

In the box are some white oak acorns that I collected from a tree at work; some pecans collected from the tree that blew over just a year or so ago; some Red Haven peach pits from peaches my dad gave us; some Mexican Plum pits I collected down by the creek; some Ozark Witchhazel seeds collected down by the creek; a single hazelnut from the shrub in the back yard; cuttings from the red seedless grape.  Toward the end of February, I may add the Ozark Chinquapin seeds I got in the mail this month.  I'm anxious to see what happens with this experiment.

And while the 28th of December was a nice day to build an air prune box, on the 29th a cold front dropped our temperatures down to more "winter-like" so it wasn't very pleasant to be working outside in the wind.  I decided to go ahead and plant some of my earliest cold-weather crops.  

In the past, I'd tried planting individual onion seeds, one or two into each cell of the CD-60 module trays.  That just never worked for me.  So the approach this year was to "winter sow" them in old creamer containers.  They'll grow on in those containers until I am ready to set them out in the garden - essentially, it will be like growing my own onion sets.  I hope that's how it works out anyway!

The more seasonal cold temperatures at the end of December only lasted a couple of days.  As the new year got under way, we were right back to crazy warm.  We reached 71° F on January 6th. 

I decided to go ahead and plant some more early garden crops on January 3. 

Just a few days after they were planted, the Early Texas Grano onions were already starting to come up.  Within a week, the two containers were filled with the little grass-like onions.  The germination was great!  The Utah Tall Celery germinated very well also.  

But the Red Burganday onions?  Zero.  Not a single seed came up.  Nor did any of the American Flag leek, the Nebuka Bunching Onions, the Lacinato Kale, the chives or the cilantro.  All of those seeds were several years old, and I am pretty sure storing them in a place where they got very hot during the summer was a bad, bad thing.  In other words, I ruined them.  Sigh.

But the Red Russian Kale seeds I had just bought from MIGardener germinated well so at least there's that. 

I waited until mid-January just in case the seeds were just slow coming up, but when there still wasn't any sign of a single seedling, I took the rest of the seeds in those packets an planted every last one of them.  If germination was even 5% the hope was I'd maybe get one or two plants!

Well, I guess it was just not meant to be.  The Lacinato Kale did finally sprout three or four tiny little plants, but nothing from any of the others (yet).

By the 17th of January, it had been so warm that I started to worry that I had missed the window for cold stratifying my seeds.  I did some more winter sowing.  Most of these plants are destined for The Meadow but a few of them will go in the "soft landings" bed I'm trying to add under the big oak tree in the front yard.

Winter sown seeds in yogurt cups.  Others were sown into creamer containers.

That afternoon when I walked to the mailbox, I was shocked to see a single daffodil bloom in The Flowerbed to Hide the Ugly Stump.  

I'm not going to count this as the "first daffodil" though, because while technically it is the first one, I think it is an outlier, tricked into blooming because it was on the south side of that log.  The others had just begun poking up through the ground so I don't think they'll bloom until February. 

But while January broke some record highs early on, it maybe hadn't been as warm overall as December was.  But I think it was determined to beat out December in the record books - just not for record warm temperatures....

The snow started on Saturday, January 24 and transitioned over to sleet/snow mix on Sunday night.  It was hard, if not impossible, to get an accurate measurement, but we might have ended up with 4" to 5" by the time all was said and done.

It was an ugly snow, not one of the pretty snows like one sees on a Christmas card.  It covered the ground and drifted up against things and just made everything miserable.

I don't think the National Weather Service gave this storm a name, but apparently The Weather Channel named it "Winter Storm Fern."  She happened because a large blast of arctic air (an offshoot from the polar vortex I guess?) surged way down into the southern United States at the same time a river of moisture was flowing in from the Gulf of Mexico and from the southern coast of California.  

We got very lucky here.  The storm started out with snow for us and transitioned over to sleet as the shallow layer of cold are shifted back to the north.  But that shallow layer stayed just far enough to the south that we didn't get any freezing rain (at least not that I know of).

While I say "we got lucky," that doesn't mean everyone in this area did.  There were people here in the county that had damage from the storm, including my dad.  His equipment barn collapsed on top of the tractor, the hay baler and some other machinery.  I think he said there were 28 chicken houses that collapsed in the county too. 

But areas to our south and east were hit particularly hard.  Up to an inch of ice was reported in Mississippi, with ice widespread across several other states.  Millions of people lost power during the frigid cold that came with the storm.

The snow and sleet that fell has been locked in place by the frigid cold temperatures.  It's still covering the ground even now, and it's slick and very treacherous to walk on.  The temperatures plummeted when the cold air surged south on January 24, and we didn't get above freezing again until January 27.  Our low that morning was 3.9° F.

It probably seems pretty foolish, but in the middle of all this cold weather, I thought, "Why not go ahead and plant the rest of the brassicas and the pepper seeds?"  So that's what I did.  

On January 26, I planted eight different types of peppers.

The Poblano pepper seeds were fresh, just purchased from MIGardener this fall.  If I held my mouth just right as I was planting them, they should come up.

The jalapenos were home-saved seeds from last year.  I sure hope if they germinate that they grow  true to type.

The rest of the pepper seeds were from the same packets I planted out of last year that gave me so much germination trouble I couldn't get to germinate.  Planting them from those packets again makes me wonder if I'm just stubborn, or stupid.  Maybe both.

I also planted more brassicas - a mix of old seeds, and some that I bought from Sow True Seed last year.  I planted very heavily in every little pot just in case the seeds had gone bad. 

The spinich was from a seed packet I bought a couple of years ago when the feed store put their expired seeds on clearance.  They were a year old when I bought them, and now they've been badly stored for two more years.  I have had them come up in the past, so I have my fingers crossed that they'll still do something.

I also planted garlic chives (seeds my older sister gave me) and some dill (home-saved seed from 2022).

(The random numbers on the list above correspond with a number written on the side of each little container.  I had cut some labels from milk jugs for the first seeds I planted, but had run out and didn't have an empty jug to make more at the time I planted these.)  

Because I never bought a heat mat, the yogurt cups I used as seed pots all came in the living room to sit on top of the dish receiver and the audio receiver.  Those two units give off quite a bit of heat and so long as I don't try to water anything that sitting up there and spill water into them, I think it's fine to use them to keep the seeds warm.  (Just DO NOT SPILL WATER INTO THEM I keep repeating over and over and over....)

Repurposing an ice cream container, a take-out container, and a cup cake carrier that someone had left at the recycling center to create mini "greenhouses" for my seed pots.

To my surpise, just three days later the first brassica seedling were already germinating: cauliflower, purple sprouting broccoli, green calabrese broccoli and some unidentified brassica in pot #11, which apparently I neglected to write down what it was in my book. 

On the 30th, some of the home-saved jalapeno seeds were germinating.

Anything that germinates gets moved into the bathroom under the grow light.  We've been able to keep the bathroom at a bearable temperature this year (not warm, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least bearable), and that's where the Meyer Lemon and Key Lime tree are spending the winter.  I put some hooks on the wall under the grow light and repurposed an old wire DVD rack to hang from the hooks to hold the small containers up close to the lights.  That has worked out pretty well so far.  

Celery, pricked out into individual modules; three or four tiny Lacinato Kale; Cauliflower (it looks like practially every seed germinated!) and one Liatris aspera (button blazing star) mixed with some Andropogon ternarius (splitbeard bluestem). 

Red Russian Kale (the three pots by the wall) and Savoy Cabbage.

Early Texas Grano onion.

Upright Prairie Coneflower, Ratibida columnifera, pricked out into toilet paper tubes.  These were winter sowed, and came up after just about a week, taking me totally by surprise.  They'll go out in The Meadow this spring.

Sprouts from the store-bought Sweet potato I half buried in some potting soil about a month or a month and a half ago.  I think I started these way, way too early but oh well....

Cilanto, pricked out and put four or five to a pot (another Red Russion Kale at the bottom left.)

One final frustration for the month:  I had ordered an Ayers pear tree from Stark Brothers back in August.  When I placed the order, the expected ship date was March, if I remember right.  Well, mid-January, I got an email from them that said it was supposed to ship the week of January 18.  I don't think they even looked at the weather forecast to see if that was a good time to ship.  It looks like it actually got moving with USPS on the 19th and then spent the next 11 days on a truck, arriving at my house on January 30.  Its roots didn't look very good.  And of course, I can't plant it because the ground is frozen solid, so it's just "heeled in" in a bucket for now. 

So as I sit her typing this post, my feet are so cold that they ache.  I can honestly say to January 2026, "Good riddance.  Your time came and now it's gone."  (Note to self..read this post in August when it's 110° F outside.) 

It's time for us to move on to The Waiting Month.

The garden in Ju...wait...you mean it's January already???

Although I know we grew a garden last year, honestly, it doesn't really seem like it.

Maybe it's because we started a big renovation project on the house in late June which took up almost all of our time for about a month.  By the time the project reached a pausing point, the weather had turned hot and dry.  Then the grasshoppers came.  They ate pretty much everything that was still alive.

But the garden must have been productive with certain things.  For example in my post titled "Now What?" I had a picture of the squashes and cantaloupes that were all ready at the same time.  We ended up with so many cantaloupes ripe at once that I'm sad and embarrassed to say that most of them went to waste.  

So did we grow much of a garden in 2025?  Let me think back on it.

• We harvested garlic, several nice onions, a few yellow squash and a few snow peas this year (I let most of the snow peas go to seed).  I could have harvested lettuce if I had just picked it but I don't thnk I picked a single leaf from any of the plants and eventually they all bolted.
  
  
• We had hundreds of Tommy Toe and San Marzano tomatoes and while I canned several pints of juice and whole/diced tomatoes, most of the tomatoes rotted on the vine.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Cherokee Purple tomatoes were loaded, but we ate very few of them because the skins were tough from being punctured by stink bugs.  I'm guessing that about 99% of them went to waste. 
  
  
• The cucumber vines loved the cattle panel trellis and made an unbelievable number of cucumbers.  Unfortunately, the vines got really thick (again) and I discovered a nest of very aggressive looking red wasps in the vines so I was afraid to pick the cucumbers.  Probably 99% of them went to waste.
  
  
  
  
  
• We made three nice little cabbages, which I harvested and then let ruin in the refrigerator.
  
  
• We made a nice little crop of Kandy Korn (Corn?) and I froze maybe two (maybe three) dozen ears on the cob.  The rest of them ruined in the refrigerator (although in my defense, the ones that ruined were all way less than perfect ears).
  
  
  
  
  
• And after a late start on my bell peppers, we did end up with some really nice plants that were loaded down by the end of the summer.  I chopped up enough to fill a one gallon freezer bag, and picked many more...which I then let ruin in the refrigerator.  Many more ruined on the plants in late fall.
  
  
  
  
  
• The ground cherry plants were absolutely loaded.  I ate a few of them when I was out working in the garden, and while I found them to have an interesting flavor, I'm not sure yet if I like them.  But I'll probably have more next year because literally hundreds of them dropped off the vines onto the ground below and I never cleaned them up.
  
  
• The blackberries set lots of fruit, but I'm not sure they were pollinated very well because some of them were kind of an unappatizing brownish yellow color in places.  Most of the berries went to waste.  I did pick a few berries, but most of those ruined in the refrigerator.
  
  
• I finally got four Cayenne pepper plants started and by late summer they were absolutely loaded with peppers.  But they ran out of time and never had a chance to get fully ripe, so they all went to waste.
  
  
• I planted some summer cover crops in the south part of the garden because the soil there is still not very good.  (It was a diverse mix with Buckwheat, Sorghum Sudangrass, sunflowers, squash, purple hull peas and okra.)  Most of them did really well in the spring, and I was pleased that the Sorghum Sudangrass even survived into the fall.
  
  
  
  
  
• The nasturtiums were gorgeous last year.  That was actually the first time I've ever had any luck growing them.And the zinnias and petunias were really showing off by mid-summer - and again taking over, which was something I said I wasn't going to allow to happen.
  
  
  
  
  

Looking back at that list there are two things that stand out:

• First, the garden did produce lots of food. 
  
• Second, the food mostly went to waste because of me.  

That means that really the problem isn't poor soil, grasshoppers, the heat, or the drought...it's me!

It also makes me realize that I always focus on the failures.  But boy did I have some big ones in 2025!

• Peppers - I could not for the life of me get my pepper seeds to germinate this year.  I tried and tried and tried.  I tried pre-sprouting the seeds in a plastic baggy with a damp paper towel.  I evenutally got one sprout, but when I planted it in the pot, it never came up.
  
  I wondered if my pepper seeds had gone bad from being stored in a place where they got very hot the summer before.  I bought more seeds and planted again - and still, I couldn't get any plants to come up.
  
  By May I think it was, I had only managed to get three pitiful little bananna pepper plants started.  I bought some TAM Jalapeno and regular Jalapeno plants from the feed store, but I couldn't even get them to grow (although in my defense, the plants had been in their little six-packs for way too long and were probably stunted as a result...that's my story and I'm stickin' to it).
  
  Eventually I ordered more Jupiter Bell Pepper seeds from Walmart and was able to get them to grow (see above).  But I cannot believe that I didn't make one single Jalapeno this year.  I was so excited to make more of the refrigerator Jalapenos, but it was not to be I guess.
  
  
• Okra - Can you believe it???  I could NOT grow Okra this year!!!!  Now that's really pitiful, isn't it!  I managed to eventually get about a dozen plants and I harvested enough for a couple of meals.  But boy, oh boy, I'm hanging my head in shame on this one.  If a person can't grow okra, they're not much of a gardener!
  
  
• Apples/Cherries/Peaches/Blueberries/Grapes - The Gala apple tree started off the year covered with blooms and I was so excited.  But it got infected with Fire Blight and it's pretty much doomed I'm afraid.  The Enterprise tree set a few apples this year, but they got worms in them so they shriveled up and fell off.  The peach tree was loaded with peaches, but every single one of them fell off.  The sour cherry had a few cherries on it, and I ate a few of them (very tart and good), but I think the birds got most of them.  I ate a handful of fresh blueberries, but that was all the plants made.  The grapes disappeared, either eaten by birds, or shriveled up and dropped off.
  
  
• Figs - I planted the fig tree in ground at the south end of the shop.  It actually put on about a dozen figs, but they all fell off and then the grasshoppers ate every leaf on the plant.  It put out new leaves in late fall, and I've put a wire cage full of leaves around it.  Hopefully it will make it through the winter.
  
  
• Raspberries - Died.
  
  
• Jostaberry - Died.
  
  
• Pink Champagne Current - Almost Died.  Currently on life support.
  
  
  
  
  
• Green Beans/Green Peas - I managed to get about two messes of beans and two messes of peas this year, but something wasn't to their liking and they just didn't grow very much. 
  
  
• Lima Beans/Kidney Beans/Pinto Beans/Scarlet Runner Beans - What can I say about my beans...abysmal? Disaster?  Very poor germination and essentialy zero harvest from the ones that did grow.  The Scarlet Runner beans at least did try.  They made lots of pretty red flowers that the hummingbirds really liked, but I guess it got too hot for them and they never set any beans.
  
  
• Peanuts - Last year we grew a few peanuts so I decided to give that another try.  Unfortunately, things didn't work out so well this year.  The vines suffered a lot because of the drought and I didn't water them like I did last year.  When we finally did get some rain, they put on lots of peanuts, but they didn't have time to ripen before frost.
  
  
• Tomatillos - More seeds that I couldn't get to germinate this year.  I ordered more seeds and finally did get a few plants, but the drought hit right after I set them out and they never amounted to anything.  Funny enough, we did end up with one volunteer plant that came up at the end of a row.  However, it came on so late, that it didn't have time to make anything to harvest.
  
  
• Potatoes -  I only harvested enough potatoes for a couple of meals.  I was very disappointed about that.
  
  
• Pumpkins - I planted some pumpkin plants in the compost bays again this year, and they went wild.  I was so excited, thinking I was going to get a bunch of pumpkins!
  
  
  
  
  But just as they were getting ripe, two disasters.  First, the groundhog (I think) found them, and started clawing and knawing trying to eat the ripening pumpkins.  But even worse, the squash vine borers got into the base of the stem and the vines started to die.
  
  After I started finding pumpkins on the ground (pulled off the vine by the groundhog), I went ahead and harvested them.
  
  
  
  
  Unfortunately, only one of them had any pumpkin seeds mature enough to roast, and the rest of them weren't mature enough to cook.  They all ended up in the compost pile.  (Note the Cherokee Purple tomatoes on the left...speckled up with stink bug punctures.  I think those all ended up in the compost as well.)

• Broccoli/Cauliflower - I harvested enough broccoli for a few meals and it was pretty good.  But most of it bolted very early so I just left it for the insects.

And speaking of insects - last year was the most terrifying and depressing year ever.  There were so few butterflies, even compared to 2024, when it felt like there were so few.

I kept looking for the Variegated Fritillary butterfly caterpillars in the garden - last year they were all over the Viola sp. growing in the walking rows.  This year, the plants were there, but there were no caterpillars.  I left the Cudweed for the American Lady butterflies, but it was very late spring before I ever saw any sign of them on the plants.

My youngest daughter mentioned the Harambe theory when I was chatting with her this morning. When I told her I had never heard of it, she explained to me that Harambe was a male western lowland gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo.  In May 2016, a child fell into his enclosure and Harambe was shot and killed to save the child (even though apparently the gorilla wasn't showing any aggression to the child?).  She then explained that the theory is that killing Harambe, "...split our timeline down the wrong way and that's why the world has gone to **** since then."

We just had our warmest December on record.  It was 78.8° F on December 27th.

It was also our driest December on record.  The County Judge issued a burn ban effective 8 am this morning.

So while I don't know if the killing of Harambe split time and sent us on a wrong path, I think we are on the wrong path, and we have put ourselves there - we've created a death spiral for life on earth as we know it.  

It's like life exists in a giant bathtub full of water, and we humans have pulled the stopper.  The water started gowing down, but the tub was so full and we were in boats on the top so we didn't even notice.  As the water level got lower and some species got sucked down the drain, we told ourselves those really didn't matter - there was still plenty of water so there was nothing to worry about.  But as the water level has gotten lower and lower, the suction at the drain is getting stronger and stronger, and most people are still just blissfully floating on top in their boat.  My fear is that we're approaching the point now where if we don't take drastic action we're going to lose the life that sustains us all and nothing will be able to break free of the vortex of water swirling around the drain.  

Maybe we've already passed that point.  

Wow.  Happy New Year, right???