Henny Penny Farmette

While schools across the nation are taking snow days because of frigid temperatures, the fruit trees on my Bay Area farmette are showing signs of bud swelling and early blossoming because of a winter heat wave.

Cities around the San Francisco Bay are experiencing early January temperatures of 70-plus degrees Fahrenheit, breaking weather records in some areas. Mother Nature certainly behaves strangely at times.

Desert Gold peaches are ready to eat in May but buds are swelling and showing color now

My five-variety apple tree and the early Desert Gold peach trees are covered with buds that are already showing color. I haven’t as yet gotten around to the winter pruning and spraying with organic oil. Maybe if there’s no wind today, I’ll squeeze that chore in with the others.

I did cut back the Washington navel orange that is infected with Leaf Miner, a pest that’s crossed the United States from Florida. It attacks new leaves, so I’m thinking if I prune and spray now before spring is in full swing, maybe I won’t lose this tree. Curiously, the pest hasn’t widely infected my blood orange trees but there are signs of it in the leaves of our Satsuma seedless tangerines.

The dark line inside a tunnel is the frass (feces) trail of the Leaf Miner

Elsewhere, I’ve done deep digging in the chicken run and added some wood chips and leaf material for compost.

The tea roses have been pruned back to 12 to 18 inches and old canes removed. I’m torn between wanting to add more roses in the beds in front of the bamboo plants on the east/west axis of our property or adding more lavender and sunflowers, favored by the bees.

Tomorrow, I’ll open and inspect my bee hives. I left honey stores this past autumn instead of harvesting. But if the bees have gone through all the honey, then I’ll have to add bee food until we get the first early bulb blooms and wildflowers. The French perfume lavender that the bees love is about the only bloom (bee food) in the garden now.  Luckily, I planted a lot of it.

A stalk of French perfume lavender rises out over the rose-scented pelargonium plant

The farm chores don’t just seem endless, they are. But whether the work is daily, weekly, or seasonal, there’s something deeply rewarding–even magical–about living close to the earth in harmony with cycles of seasons and the rhythms of nature. But I admit, it is a little strange to have such warm weather when winter has only just started.

Bamboo plants make great screens, clipped hedges, or a dramatic foil for plants layered in front of it.

Bamboo plants are favored by environmentalists because they are drought tolerant, can be used for erosion control, are not fussy about soil, make fast-growing hedges or screens, and quickly naturalize.

We grow mainly the clumping type of bamboo because it makes very little horizontal growth and stays tightly clumped. It just gets dense.

The runner type, however, spreads through underground stems that grow out from the rhizome. These are the types of bamboos that reach considerable heights and form groves.

Dividing the plants helps maintain control of these woody-stemmed giant grasses.

Spring is the best time to divide bamboo plants. Although spring is still a few days away, we are dividing the bamboo that thrives along our farmette fences and planting it as a screen on the side of the house where we can see traffic from the road.

Although bamboo has gotten a bad rap for spreading into areas where it isn’t wanted, it can be confined in containers or by inserting metal or concrete barriers into the soil to prevent unwanted invasion by the runner type.

The plant’s evergreen leaves on tall, slender stems look graceful swaying in the breeze and, coupled with its other benefits, make bamboo a good choice for some landscapes.