It's a pleasant time to sit by the fire with your seed and nursery catalogs to dream, plan, and order. Try a few new plants this year. If the sun does shine and temperatures rise a bit, there's plenty you can do outside to get a head start on spring. This is the time to prune, weed, fertilize, plant bare-root trees, shrubs, berries, and even some vegetables. As a tempting foretaste of blossoms to come, cut branches of flowering almond, flowering quince, winter jasmine and forsythia to force their flowers indoors.
Roses head the list with fruit, nut, flowering and shade trees a close second.
Cane berries, rooted grape cuttings, wisteria, flowering quince, forsythia and other spring-blooming deciduous shrubs are also available at nurseries. Nursery people will be happy to advise you regarding staking and support for trees and plants of your choice. If you can't do that, have the nursery put a sold tag on it and leave it there. Plant pansies, primroses, violas and Iceland poppies. If the soil is dry enough, set out nursery seedlings of broccoli and cauliflower.