Succulents and More™

With cold nights and sunny days, the weather is pretty much back to what you would expect for this time of year. There isn’t much going on right now, so I decided to take a look at what the garden was like in early January last year, the year before, etc. Memories fade, but the blog is here to help me remember. For each year, I’m giving the nighttime low, the daytime high, and the mean low and mean high as per the UC Davis Weather & Climate Station . 2025 Nighttime low: 29° (January 21) Daytime high: 70° (January 10) Mean: low 38°, high 62° Nights below freezing: 7 I could have sworn that aloe flowers were further along a year ago. They were, a little (surprising, considering it was a fairly cold month), but not as much as I had thought. Aloe excelsa , January 2025 Aloe excelsa , January 2026 Aloe speciosa × barberae , January 2025. It didn’t flower at all last year... ...but it will this year Eastern end of the sidewalk bed — January 2025 January 2026 — it looks pretty much th...

Winter is my least favorite season, and I probably complain about the weather more at this time of year than at any other. Bearing that in mind, this past week has been noteworthy: fog, rain, sun, rain, sun, and wind, too. Sometimes in one day. April weather in January, you might say. As a result, this post is a bit all over the place. ☼ Sun... The sun finally came out after a solid three weeks of high fog in December. We even had a couple of days last week when the sun was out most of the day. With the soil saturated and plants sopping wet, we really needed the sun. Sidewalk bed, looking east Front walk UC Davis campus 🌧 Rain... But of course the sun didn’t last. As I’m writing this on January 5, we’re back to rain. With the ground so waterlogged, there are puddles everywhere. View from Stella’s doggie door Piles of leaves creating lakes in the gutters ☼ Sun after 🌧 rain... That was two days ago. Rain, sun, rain. Plus puddles. Flooding on the greenbelt across the street from us ❊ ...