Spring is in the air?????

We have had some unusually warm weather here in Ohio.  Granted we've had a few days of freezing temperatures, but overall the winter has thus far been very mild.  Yesterday, the temperature was pushing 60 and there was a hint of spring in the air...even though it's only been winter officially for a few weeks.  Unfortunately my plants are getting a little confused.
I found some garlic sprouts in my garden yesterday!  I planted the garlic in the fall along with my other flower bulbs.  I've never grown garlic before so we'll see how this goes.  I actually planted it on a whim.  My local grocery store had garlic on sale so I bought a bunch of garlic heads, broke them up into individual cloves and planted the cloves.  Now I'm sure a master gardener would tell you that things planted on a whim rarely turn out well but, hey, we're not master gardeners here.  I'm not sure if these sprouted ones will die (once it frosts again) and come back again in the spring.

I was also distressed to find one of my Hellebores (Lenten Roses) starting to bud!  Yikes!  If you are not familiar with them, Hellebores are a flowering perennial that do well in the shade.  We have mostly shade in the front of our house so it was a challenge to find pretty shade-loving plants.  Hellebores are beautiful and are relatively maintenance-free so I decided to plant two of them in front of my house.  Normally, they bloom around March.  I'm not sure if this early blooming bodes well for spring....Surely Mother Nature has some more wild winter weather in store for us.  Typically, around here we get our big snows in January and February.  Oh well, guess we'll have to wait and see what happens!

On another note...just because its January, doesn't mean you can't be thinking about spring!  I'm actually starting to plan out my vegetable garden.  I plan on using the square foot gardening method (again) with successive planting.  That means some of my cool weather crops (lettuce, cucumbers etc.) can be planted as early as late March!  It's a good time to check out vegetable gardening books from your local library...come summer they are hard to come by!  Once I get my  garden plans finalized I'll be sharing them with you!