Yes, I know we have more winter to endure, but my daffodils haven’t gotten the memo.

Are yours blooming too? And are your baby slugs as happy about it as mine are? How about your hyacinths?

Mine down here on the south end are still inching skyward, no blooms yet. But yesterday I saw both bergenia and bleeding heart flowering in a north end garden.

Like the rest of you, I can’t control the crazy weather, so I’m just running with it the best I can. That means a lot of plants leafing out — and blooming! — while I remain ever-hopeful we don’t get a deep freeze that’ll turn my tender hopes to green slime before Easter.

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping busy with tasks that are better accomplished earlier rather than later. One of these has been to establish my climbing rose on some kind of trellis.

The rose in question is a Cecile Brunner, which came with the house when we bought it back in 1997. Over the years, I’ve had limited success because I didn’t know what I was doing. In fact, there was a whole row of these roses across the front of my porch and I dug up all but the largest and gave them away.

Caring for them was a lot like giving birth and leaving the hospital with the realization your newborn is the only baby you’ve ever held, let alone diapered and fed.

I have some modest gingerbread on my front porch, and the oldest canes had been woven up and through it. It looked spectacular, but I was worried the weight of the massive biomass would take down my porch some stormy night.

Let’s face it, I’m not talking about a few canes but rather a Gordian knot supported by a woody, killer cane a good four or five inches around. So I sawed it out of the trim about five years ago and kind of let it fend for itself.

Since then, I’ve realized I needed to do something more than hack away at it or let it lean in the wind. Besides, without proper care it wasn’t producing flowers.

For the uninitiated, Cecile Brunner flowers aren’t large, but they can produce large sprays of fragrant pink blooms. I needed to study up on climbers in order to help it reach its potential.

The first thing I did was remove the oldest and woodiest of the canes all the way down to the ground, any spindly canes, and canes that had been pruned inappropriately and now looked like Medusa.  I’m confident removing old canes will stimulate new, better-producing canes to grow from the base.

Fortunately for me, I have a very long front porch with numerous balusters and my rose sits at one corner.

I installed a series of large, steel hooks every few balusters, alternating them pointing upward and downward, and wove the remaining canes through them.

The more horizontal your canes are, the more laterals they should produce. As those laterals get longer, I’ll prune each back to four or five buds. Then, as more main canes emerge from the base of the rose, I’ll train them along the balusters as well.

This configuration should evenly distribute the weight of the rose across the railing.

And because of how the canes lay in the hooks instead of being tied to or wrapped around a frame, they should be easy to remove if I have to “disassemble” my trellis system to paint the railings or do repairs.

Wish me luck, and I’ll keep you posted on how it all plays out this summer.