Thaw Is a Four Letter Word

We've finally managed to pull an honest-to-Christ January thaw out of the ether.  It was damned near fifty degrees today!  The downside?  We's a-gettin' rain, and I mean RAIN.  The local news channels have been trying their best to hammer home the fact that snow, when soaked with rain, increases its weight like eight trillion percent, and if your roof isn't shoveled, well...good luck.  Clear storm drains, chisel out mini channels to divert melt and rain, inflate your emergency rafts, and start hoarding your bread and milk.  Friday will be torrential rains, then Saturday will be the two in this one-two punch with a serious temperature drop and a slick coating of ice on everything. Funny enough, I found a couple different weather journals I'd started and never finished, and this is all very familiar.  Seems every other winter is pretty much like this, so in essence it's just a regular day in our neighborhood.   I grabbed a couple more bags of sand, so I'm good for now.

In the meantime I've been staving off the winter blues by getting in some green therapy.  I brought down my grow light and set it up over the water plants I am desperately trying to keep alive.  I think I will try them in an aquarium next year, but for now it's plastic buckets and half dead plants.  I also started some seeds I harvested from my butterfly weed plant (Asclepias tuberosa), and put my first celery stump in water.  Each year I take the hearts from celery and toss them into cups of water to root.  By spring I'll have six or eight plants ready for the garden.  The stalks never get very thick or as tall as it is when you buy it at the grocery store, but the flavor is fantastic.  I haven't had any bugs really bother it, either, which is nice.  These are some from last spring:

 

Is it cheating?  Yup.  Do I care?  Nope.  
It may not be home grown organic yadda yadda pretentious blah blah, but it's damned good celery and we have a friggin' short growing season - beggars can't be choosers.  

I still haven't settled on a plan with the gardens for this summer.  I built a new raised bed and now I just don't know where to put anything.  Plus my brother gave me some nifty gadgets for cukes and tomatoes that I'm looking forward to using, but they don't fit my current containers or beds so everything needs to be shifted around.  This may be a good thing, because rotation is great for the soil.  
In this picture, you can see the celery in the brick bed on the left.

Historically I've grown cukes in the stock tank to the right, flanked by beefsteak tomatoes in containers, herbs in the small stock tank at the base of the arch, Roma tomatoes in the brick bed nearest the house, which is flanked by tin washtubs in which I grow my sugar snap peas.  I have other containers scattered around the yard for peppers, radish, more herbs, and whatever.  I also like to plop veggies into my perennial beds just because.
Well, I do have nearly four and a half months before I can even plant outside, so plenty of time to decide what will go where.  *rubs hands together gleefully*