None of this really surprises me, but then obviously I am so far south that our winter cover often stays green all winter anyhow except in the coldest part of the really cold years.

What does surprise me is that y'all aren't all that much colder than us so far this year since all of you are significantly further north.

Oh, and the green bermuda grass in our yard surprises me, though it isn't quite as green now as it was at this time last week. The difference? We've had low temps in the 20s ever since the new year started so the bermuda grass is getting colder now at night than it had been.

I walked through the garden a few minutes ago to see what is still green, and here's what I noticed. All of these are green and healthy-looking, with little to no cold damage: rosemary, flat-leaf parsley, chamomile (new plants that sprouted in November or December), Laura Bush petunias, catmint, verbena bonariensis (both older, mature plants that were in bloom last week and new volunteers that sprouted around the same time that the chamomile did), dianthus (cool-season, so stays green all winter and still is in bloom), autumn sage (was blooming in latest December but not now), hollyhocks, French hollyhocks, comfrey, tansy, silver tansy and fennel. The perennial onions have mostly disappeared and I fear they may have rotted/drowned in our excessively heavy 2015 rainfall, when we received right at 200% of our usual annual rainfall. There's one surviving perennial onion plant and I think I'll dig it up and pot it up and save it so it will hopefully survive whatever rainfall El Nino still throws at us over the next few weeks or months. If I can keep it alive, I can divide and replant it when the weather returns to normal and replenish the perennial onion bed with it. The ornamental alliums, planted in an area outside the fenced front garden, are up and about a foot tall and have only the tiniest hint of cold damage on the tips of the foliage. The daffodils are MIA so far. Blackberry foliage is up, growing and a healthy green too. It is awfully early for that. The fruit trees were trying to bloom in mid- to late-December and I was getting worried they actually would do it, but then our nights turned colder and they have calmed down a bit.

Our fields are full of cool-season weeds, grasses and wildflowers of all kinds, and some of the henbit is almost large enough to start blooming. So far, this is sort of a winter without much wintery weather and I am not complaining.

Things are even better about 80 miles south of us in the DFW metro area. We were there shopping on Monday and I saw Knockout Roses (the pink ones) in full, glorious bloom. The ones closer to the stores had no real cold damage on the foliage or flowers. The ones out in medians with less cover had a lot of cold damage to the leaves, but were covered in undamaged blooms. It always makes me smile to see roses blooming in the middle of winter. It makes spring seem closer.

Down here in extreme SC OK, our coldest overnight low of the winter so far is 22 degrees and we've hit it only 3 times so far---once each in November, December and January. I expect we'll be hitting it more often now that the colder weather seems to be settling in a bit. If it wasn't so wet all the time, it would be a perfect winter.

We have deer here every night and sometimes during the day, along with rabbits, possums, skunks, foxes, coyotes and bobcats. Skunks have been out a lot lately, and sometimes in the daylight hours. Today a bobcat (a really large one) is out hunting in the field (part woodland, part grassland) between our house and our next-door neighbors' house. We saw him out there about an hour ago. I called our cats to come indoors so they wouldn't cross his path, and our chickens must know he is out there because they're hiding under the deck. I wouldn't have let them out to free-range if I'd seen him first. The bobcats generally hunt at night, but in winter it isn't unusual to see them out in broad daylight now and then. I enjoy seeing the wild things out and about as long as they stay outside my garden fences and aren't trying to catch/kill our animals.

This winter, so far, the continued rainfall bothers me more than the little bit of cold weather we're having. Wet ground will be much more of an impediment to planting than whatever cold weather we're still going to face before spring weather arrives.