Plants and Skies January 2021 #SkywatchFriday #GardenBloggersBloomDay

This month I am combining two memes, Garden Bloggers Bloom Day and SkywatchFriday, so if you are here for Skywatch Friday, I'll have sky pictures towards the end of the post.  I hope you enjoy the blooms in my zone 5b upstate New York home and yard, because I have so few of them.  

I do have a blooming plant outdoors - joy!  At Christmas time, we had a record snowstorm with some 40 inches of snow.  But it has been melting, and one of my two Lenten Rose plants is exposed in the snow melt.  

 

Fortunately, it's an early bloomer, and, in fact, was trying to bloom before the snow fell.  The snow has protected it ever since and it was blooming under the snow.  I hope, when winter returns in earnest (it's been a bit mild lately) the blooms will survive.  Some years, they don't always.

I bought this primrose plant the day after Christmas.  It's been blooming since, but is on its way out.  I will plant it outside come spring (if it survives) but I don't have a good track record with these supermarket plants.

I took a Persian shield cutting before frost, and I have it in water.  I've not had good luck transplanting them so I am keeping it in the water.  It surprised me yesterday with blooms.

Indoors, I did something that caused most of my Thanksgiving cactus to start to die.  I don't know what I did wrong.  I've grown these for years.  (My one Easter cactus is fine, so far.) I have one that survived whatever I did but it's only had a couple of blooms.  Now, it has a bud that hasn't quite opened yet.

 Well, buds are flowers, right?

I have my two poinsettias from the holiday season.  Still not sure if I want to keep them but they are looking good, so why not?  Here is one of them - the beautiful red and white "leaves" are actually bracts and the flowers, which are mostly dead, are in the center.

 And the other.

My million bells, in a hanging basket, is hanging on.  The bacopa, which was still blooming in December, has about had it. The million bells is blurry because my iPhone SE first generation doesn't do macros well.

Thank you for your patience, skywatchers, and it's time for some sunsets.  These were taken in the past week, on two days where the sun made a brief appearance.  

These were taken in a local park, and we probably won't be able to use its walking trails until a spring cleanup.  Mud from our December flood still is all over them.

Thank you for joining me for Yogi's #SkywatchFriday and Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, hosted by Carol Michel at May Dreams Gardens.  Please visit some of the other fine bloggers who have linked to both posts.